George Alexander Kochevitsky
(1903 - August 10, 1993) was a concert pianist and music teacher. The author
of two books on pianism, Kochevitsky continued to write and act as a
consultant for performing artists until his health began to fail several
months before his death. On December 10, 1955, seven men, apparently all friends from The League, met at
Samuel D. Morford’s Greenwich Village apartment on East 8th Street to begin forming the New York Area Council of Mattachine.
Tony Segura and Morford were joined by Joe McCarthy (died 1986), the third in the group’s leadership triumvirate, who was a Fordham University graduate in mathematics and ran a machinery export business downtown. The others were George Kochevitsky; Malcolm Thurburn, a Scottish artist/writer, who was in his late 60s; Sven Nivens (a pseudonym), a Swedish linguist, who worked for an international firm; and
Albert Ross Puryear, a young hustler and prison parolee.
Kochevitsky was born in Velikiye Luki in Russia and studied piano in Moscow
and St. Petersburg. Later, he taught in schools and colleges around what had
by then become Leningrad, but was arrested in 1933 and sent to Siberia for
three years as a political prisoner. Kochevitsky made his way to Poland and
Germany at the end of World War II. He reached New York in 1949 and started
teaching the piano privately in his Manhattan study. His contributions to the
periodical Bach led to an honorary membership in the Riemenschneider Bach
Institute at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where the journal is
published three times a year in conjunction with the American Bach Society. He
also wrote "The Art of Piano Playing: A Scientific Approach" (1967), which
explored the function of the central nervous system in piano technique and
performance, and "On Playing Bach: Performing Bach's Keyboard Music" (1991).
George Kochevitsky died on August 10, 1993, at his home. He was 90, and
lived in Manhattan.
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