Steve Kovacev

Mr. Kovacev has spent a lifetime with the Tambura ... over 50 years. In the middle 1930's, Steve Kovacev performed with the Marsovian Troubadors, a semi-professional group of musicians centered in Kenosda, Wisconsin, and led by Mr. Stanley Jambrek. Later he also performed wtih the famed Elias Serenaders, a group that toured the United States from one end to the other on the vaudeville circuit. After the War years, Steve joined the Duquesne University Tamburitzans as both tambura player and dancer in 1947. As a tambura player, he played every one of the tambura instruments at one time or another. One year he even played the little-known instrument, the 'celo-berde'. In 1952, Mr. Kovacev became the Assistant Director of the Duquesne University Tamburitzans. From that time to the present, he has arranged music for the tambura. A short time later he became the Treasurer of the Tamburitzan organization. In 1954, along with Walter W. Kolar, he helped to establish the Duquesne University Tamburitzans School of Music, a movement which has spread all across the U.S. with groups known as the 'Junior Tamburitzans'. He was chosen to be the Director of the annual Tamburitza Federation Festival in 1974. That same year he began to produce a long list of Duquesne University Tamburitzans long-play phonograph recordings, about 40 in all. With the Tamburitzans, Steve Kovacev has traveled to every state in the U.S. and 35 countries around the world, always spreading the word about the tambura. Working closely with Walter W. Kolar, Mr. Kovacev has created the Tamburitzan Cultural Center in Pittsburgh and has helped plan the new Tamburitzan National Folk Arts Center concept. In 1970, Mr. Kovacev helped to establish DUTIFA, the Duquesne University Tamburitzans Institute of Folk Arts within which he has been teaching the Tambura, on a university level and for academic credit, for the past 14 years. He is the only person in the United States to teach the tambura this long for academic credit and he is still actively teaching at Duquesne University. Mr. Kovacev is presently an Assistant Professor at Duquesne University and continues to lend guidance to his first love - the Duquesne University Tamburitzans.