WMAS NEWS UPDATE
May 28, 2025
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Dear WMAS members and friends!
Our May meeting, on the 18th, was small but filled with music. The Capitol Hill Accordion Orchestra Society (CHAOS), our greeters, played an extended set of favorites, and Peter DiGiovanni led a play-along afterwards.
NEXT MEETING
The annual WMAS member concert will be Sunday, June 22, at 4 pm at Sleepy Hollow Church. Please let Peter know if you’d like to play, and please invite your family and friends to come and hear you. There’s no charge for this concert.
TAMBURITZANS IN CONCERT
The Tamburitzans will be performing at the Richard J. Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale on Wednesday, June 4, at 7:30 pm. Cody McSherry plays multiple instruments during the performance, and he is graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in June, so this will be his last appearance with the Tamburitzans. For more information and tickets: https://www.thetamburitzans.org/events/tickets/161290000.
NEXT ZOOM MEETING/MEET DUANE QUENZEL
Peter will host a Zoom WMAS meeting at 4 pm on June 8.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85454867271?pwd=DjwCRneDX0W9mrrnhhbC235G2BaixU.1
Meeting ID: 854 5486 7271
Passcode: 195382
It’s been fun to get to know new people on these Zooms. One stalwart is Duane Quenzel, from Horsham, Pennsylvania, and we thought maybe you’d like to hear a little of his story, pulled from some of his emails with WMAS Secretary/Treasurer Mara Cherkasky. He’s an excellent musician, by the way, and he always plays a few pieces for us during the Zooms.
In late December 2022, Duane wrote: When you’ve watched me play on Zoom, you were watching an accordionist who hadn’t played in over 50 years. Boy, am I rusty from what I once was back in the late 1960s when I performed Chopin with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
I studied accordion under Mrs. Jean Smallwood of Melody Music Studios in Wheaton, Maryland, starting at age three in 1954. She had just come back to the U.S. from Brazil, where she was the top pedagogue accordionist for all South America and Latin America. I was her first student in the U.S. I remember competing each year with Lou Coppola’s and Merv Conn’s students at the Rockville Civic Center.
To go back to the beginning, I was born in Takoma Park and lived in Wheaton from 1952 to 1963. I remember when my father would drive down Rock Creek Parkway to the National Zoo, where we would ford the creek with Dad’s car. Also going to Glen Echo amusement park to go swimming in the Olympic-size pool, and ride the rollercoaster, carousel, and spooky fun house in big three-person chairs on wheels on tracks. Also, having ice cream on Sundays at Gifford’s, across Georgia Avenue from the Silver Spring train station for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that ran to Rockville, Maryland. Today, it’s Amtrak! Back then, in the 1950s, the passenger trains were pulled by steam engines.
There was no beltway around Washington or Baltimore; it was all farms and woods. Wheaton Plaza was a corn field on Viers Mill Road. We lived on Arcola Avenue and looked out from the front of our home at the radio station tower antennas of WTOP, which was on University Boulevard. Between us and the radio station was a dairy farm (Thompson’s Dairy). It later became part of High’s. Behind our house, they had just started to build Wheaton Regional Park in 1963.
That year we moved to Pennsylvania, 20 miles north of Philadelphia. Frank Moliterre, my second accordion teacher (from 1963 to 1967), lived in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and taught me jazz and Big Band Swing-era music of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. He played duets with Frank Marocco at many Long Island and Jersey Shore night clubs, and was the accordionist both at the Latin Casino night club in New Jersey and at Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes. He played one of the original Cordovox accordions with Lesley speaker amplifier. It sounded quite similar to a Hammond B-3 organ.
When I asked him about teaching me to play classical music, he said, “Kid, that’s not my shtick!“ So he wrote a letter of audition to Myron Floren, who chose to teach me because he had a brother named Duane. From 1967 to 1970, I studied converter freebass accordion with Myron Floren at a private studio in Manhattan. They were three-hour lessons once a month, and the music was strictly classical.
Then I went to Vietnam as a special forces paramedic, and when I came back my parents had sold all of my accordions to afford to send my older brother to college. That’s when I started my 50-year sabbatical from the accordion. I got back to playing in the fall of 2019: Stradella and converter freebass wooden Victoria accordions.
In between, I was in the Pharmaceutical field for 42 years. I also ran emergency medical services as a volunteer paramedic for 45 years. The medivac ambulances I ran with were Sky Flight Care with Brandywine Hospital in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and the medivac helicopter service Penn Star, out of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
##
Hope to see you at the Zoom meeting on June 8 and in person on June 22!
Check out the WMAS website: www.washingtonaccordions.org
Our May meeting, on the 18th, was small but filled with music. The Capitol Hill Accordion Orchestra Society (CHAOS), our greeters, played an extended set of favorites, and Peter DiGiovanni led a play-along afterwards.
NEXT MEETING
The annual WMAS member concert will be Sunday, June 22, at 4 pm at Sleepy Hollow Church. Please let Peter know if you’d like to play, and please invite your family and friends to come and hear you. There’s no charge for this concert.
TAMBURITZANS IN CONCERT
The Tamburitzans will be performing at the Richard J. Ernst Community Cultural Center in Annandale on Wednesday, June 4, at 7:30 pm. Cody McSherry plays multiple instruments during the performance, and he is graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in June, so this will be his last appearance with the Tamburitzans. For more information and tickets: https://www.thetamburitzans.org/events/tickets/161290000.
NEXT ZOOM MEETING/MEET DUANE QUENZEL
Peter will host a Zoom WMAS meeting at 4 pm on June 8.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85454867271?pwd=DjwCRneDX0W9mrrnhhbC235G2BaixU.1
Meeting ID: 854 5486 7271
Passcode: 195382
It’s been fun to get to know new people on these Zooms. One stalwart is Duane Quenzel, from Horsham, Pennsylvania, and we thought maybe you’d like to hear a little of his story, pulled from some of his emails with WMAS Secretary/Treasurer Mara Cherkasky. He’s an excellent musician, by the way, and he always plays a few pieces for us during the Zooms.
In late December 2022, Duane wrote: When you’ve watched me play on Zoom, you were watching an accordionist who hadn’t played in over 50 years. Boy, am I rusty from what I once was back in the late 1960s when I performed Chopin with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.
I studied accordion under Mrs. Jean Smallwood of Melody Music Studios in Wheaton, Maryland, starting at age three in 1954. She had just come back to the U.S. from Brazil, where she was the top pedagogue accordionist for all South America and Latin America. I was her first student in the U.S. I remember competing each year with Lou Coppola’s and Merv Conn’s students at the Rockville Civic Center.
To go back to the beginning, I was born in Takoma Park and lived in Wheaton from 1952 to 1963. I remember when my father would drive down Rock Creek Parkway to the National Zoo, where we would ford the creek with Dad’s car. Also going to Glen Echo amusement park to go swimming in the Olympic-size pool, and ride the rollercoaster, carousel, and spooky fun house in big three-person chairs on wheels on tracks. Also, having ice cream on Sundays at Gifford’s, across Georgia Avenue from the Silver Spring train station for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad that ran to Rockville, Maryland. Today, it’s Amtrak! Back then, in the 1950s, the passenger trains were pulled by steam engines.
There was no beltway around Washington or Baltimore; it was all farms and woods. Wheaton Plaza was a corn field on Viers Mill Road. We lived on Arcola Avenue and looked out from the front of our home at the radio station tower antennas of WTOP, which was on University Boulevard. Between us and the radio station was a dairy farm (Thompson’s Dairy). It later became part of High’s. Behind our house, they had just started to build Wheaton Regional Park in 1963.
That year we moved to Pennsylvania, 20 miles north of Philadelphia. Frank Moliterre, my second accordion teacher (from 1963 to 1967), lived in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, and taught me jazz and Big Band Swing-era music of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. He played duets with Frank Marocco at many Long Island and Jersey Shore night clubs, and was the accordionist both at the Latin Casino night club in New Jersey and at Radio City Music Hall with the Rockettes. He played one of the original Cordovox accordions with Lesley speaker amplifier. It sounded quite similar to a Hammond B-3 organ.
When I asked him about teaching me to play classical music, he said, “Kid, that’s not my shtick!“ So he wrote a letter of audition to Myron Floren, who chose to teach me because he had a brother named Duane. From 1967 to 1970, I studied converter freebass accordion with Myron Floren at a private studio in Manhattan. They were three-hour lessons once a month, and the music was strictly classical.
Then I went to Vietnam as a special forces paramedic, and when I came back my parents had sold all of my accordions to afford to send my older brother to college. That’s when I started my 50-year sabbatical from the accordion. I got back to playing in the fall of 2019: Stradella and converter freebass wooden Victoria accordions.
In between, I was in the Pharmaceutical field for 42 years. I also ran emergency medical services as a volunteer paramedic for 45 years. The medivac ambulances I ran with were Sky Flight Care with Brandywine Hospital in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and the medivac helicopter service Penn Star, out of the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
##
Hope to see you at the Zoom meeting on June 8 and in person on June 22!
Check out the WMAS website: www.washingtonaccordions.org