Teachers

He has won numerous fiddle contests at the state and national level, and judged many contests including three times at the national fiddling championships at Weiser, Idaho. He also has trained many fiddle champions, professional performers and teachers.  In addition to gigging in many different genres (old-time fiddle, cowboy, bluegrass, traditional country, Celtic, etc), he does school workshops and residencies, teaches at fiddle camps and maintains a private teaching studio. In multiple international tours he has performed in Canada, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Scotland, England, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Hungary.

He has operated a small violin shop and string instrument rental service since 1983.  He has honed his skill as an arranger through 35 years of teaching fiddling classes, and Northeastern Music Publications, Inc. has published his folio of traditional fiddle tunes and cowboy songs arranged for school orchestra. 

In 2009 he produced and released the DVD of Paul Rolland's film series "The Teaching of Action in String Playing" (www.paulrolland.net).  In April-May of 2010 he did a teaching and performance tour of Germany, Belgium, England and Scotland.  In Trossingen, Germany he was the featured clinician at a German Classroom String Teacher's conference and gave four workshops on American fiddling and how to incorporate it into the classroom.  At the ESTA conference in Brugge, Belgium he presented a lecture/demonstration on Paul Rolland string pedagogy and also on American fiddling. 

 
From December 21, 2011 to January 6, 2012 he performed with the Rolland Family Band in their appearances with the American Festival Orchestra in a series of 10 concerts in China, and taught the appreciative Chinese audiences to say "Howdy!" and "Yeee-haw!!"

As a fiddle teacher he emphasizes freedom and ease of playing with good motion patterns and a relaxed balanced efficient technique, learning traditional tunes, making the fiddle talk, playing musically and expressively, understanding style, diagnosing and analyzing technical problems, double stops, chord knowledge and understanding fiddle harmony. 

His approach to improvising is to try to play in complete musical phrases to the melody, with liberal use of double stops, preferring fewer really good notes with a strong rhythmic basis to a multitude of random hot licks. In all that he does, he tries to express and pass on his heartfelt joy of making music.

Matt Rolland is an accomplished fiddle, guitar, and mandolin player.  He began fiddling at the age of 4, entering fiddle contests throughout the western United States and attending fiddle camps throughout his youth.  Through these camps, such as the Mark O’Connor camp in California, he was able to study with Darol Anger, Daniel Carwile, Charlie Walden, and Mark O’ Connor among others.  A natural performer, he began performing at a young age with the Rolland family band where he was nicknamed “Boots” for the theatrical clogging he developed and performed during shows.

Matt has garnered fiddling and mandolin awards at the local, state, and national levels.  He is a two-time Arizona State Grand Fiddling Champion and has placed 7^th in the Junior Division at the National Fiddling Championship in Weiser, Idaho.  He has twice placed in the top three in the Four Corner’s mandolin championship.  These contest years are captured in Fingerprints, an album of contest fiddle music that he recorded in 2001 with his brother, Michael.  In 2005 he won the national awards for musicianship and best traditional fiddler in The American String Teacher's Association "Alternative Strings" competition and was a featured performer at their national convention in Reno, Nevada.

In addition to being an accomplished contest fiddler, Matt has received accolades as an old-time fiddler and bandleader.  In his third year at the University of Arizona, he started and led a folk-Irish band called The Hermit Tree (www.thehermittree.com) that performed regularly in the Tucson area.  In 2008, they recorded a full-length album of original Americana music that has been distributed for television and commercial use.  His old-time Appalachian band, Run Boy Run (www.runboyrunband.com), is the 2009 Pickin’ in the Pines band contest winner in Flagstaff, Arizona and was a featured performer at the 2010 festival.  In the same year, Matt performed regularly as the fiddler for the young country sensation, Casey Lee Smith.  During April & May of 2010, Matt toured with his father in Western Europe, presenting at two conferences for string teachers, performing at the Moniaive Folk Festival, across Scotland, and in northern England. Following the tour, he was a scholarship recipient to study old-time fiddle at the Augusta Heritage Center Old-time Week in West Virginia. In June 2011 his band Run Boy Run won the prestigious Telluride Bluegrass Festival band competition, and later released their first CD.  They perform throughout the west at festivals and special occasions. In November 2012 they will record their second CD.  They are planning a two month 2013 summer tour following Rolland Fiddle Camp

  Mike has performed/recorded with bluegrass and jazz mandolin icon David Grisman and jazz violin legend Johnny Frigo.  For more information, audio, sheet music, video, and interactive media visit www.fiddlermike.com.

 Dan Levenson: old-time clawhammer banjo and Southern Appalachian fiddling
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Dan Levenson is a modern day troubadour in the truest sense of the word.  A full time musician, Dan travels the country with banjo and fiddle singing songs and telling stories of the road. He has been touring inter-nationally some 16 years now. In that time he has become a well known artist of old time clawhammer banjo and a southern Appalachian style fiddler.  Dan has traveled inside and outside the country playing and teaching for many years. He teaches the full range of levels from the outright beginner to performance level at workshops, festivals, and camps, and has students all across the country as well as around the world.

Dan Levenson has been voted one of the country’s top ten clawhammer banjo players by Banjo Newsletter readers. He is well known as the banjo player for the Boiled Buzzard Stringband. Bluegrass Unlimited calls his playing “melodic, meticulous and uncluttered.”  Fiddler Magazine’s Bob Buckingham describes him as “an accomplished fiddler and ... one of the best clawhammer banjo players in the country.”

He is the originator, owner and presenter of Meet the Banjo™, a 3 hour hands-on workshop where he brings the banjos! This class teaches history of the instrument and introduces both bluegrass and clawhammer styles. His beginner’s video/DVD series and class is entitled Clawhammer from Scratch: A Guide for the Clawless is the first new old time clawhammer banjo instruction manual in over 20 years and is a Mel Bay Publication as is his prior tab book Buzzard Banjo Clawhammer Style.  Check out his full website at www.clawdan.com.

Gail Rolland's

Eden is the first of the siblings to win a state fiddling championship title.  Eden and Peter Rolland especially enjoy playing and performing twin fiddles and have won several contests in that specialty.  Most recently they demonstrated their twin fiddling skill for the Chinese audiences during the family's 16 day tour of China with the American Festival Orchestra.  As a youngster, Eden pursued gymnastics, rising to the rank of Level 10 gymnast.  A straight "A" student throughout school, she graduated from Arizona State University with a major in political science.  She has worked in the political arena since then, most of the time as a legislative research analyst.  As an adult she applied her athletic abilities to dance and has attended intensive dance training conferences.  Until recently, she performed semi-professionally both as a dancer and as a fiddler with a contra-dance band called "Rocket Science".  In the fall of 2012 she entered law school at Colorado University in Boulder.  At Rolland Fiddle Camp she teaches the moves and is the caller for the evening contra-dances on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. 

Grace is blessed with a truly great singing voice.  Her singing classes are a popular highlight of Rolland Fiddle Camp.  As a young girl she sang around the house pretty much non-stop.  From December 21, 2011 to January 6, 2012 she was the featured vocalist with the Rolland Family Band in their appearances with the American Festival Orchestra in a series of 10 concerts in China.  She received the enthusiastic applause from stunned Chinese audiences (approximately 15,000 by tours end) who had never seen anyone play a dynamic rhythm cello and sing at the same time.  She has been singing professionally since she entered high school.  She is a classically trained cellist and played in regional and state honor orchestras in high school and in an Arizona State University orchestra   In recent years she has expanded her cello playing into the more improvisational-friendly genres of folk and pop music.  She has become an active musical collaborator on voice and cello with a variety of musicians in the Tempe-Phoenix area.  She formed and performed with the award-winning folk trio, “Dorian Well”, an Appalachian-folk bluegrass band known for its enchanting three-part female vocal harmony, which became the vocal core of “Run Boy Run”, winner of the 2011 Telluride Bluegrass Festival band competion (www.runboyrunband.com) and a very active touring performance group.   A multi-instrumentalist, Grace also plays mandolin, guitar, keyboard, and Appalachian dulcimer.  In the summer or 2010 she attended for the second time the Shasta String Summit, led by Tristan and Tashina Clarridge, and had the joy of learning from and making music alongside world-renowned professionals.

She graduated in the spring of 2011 from Arizona State University with a major in Theatre and a minor in both Philosophy and Women and Gender Studies. Her extensive training in movement and ensemble work for the theatre has honed her sensitivities for physical movement and form, encouraging a “feeling of ease” and kinesthetic response in performance that translates musically as a keen sensitivity for musical harmony and phrasing.  Since graduation she has been a music teacher with the Phoenix Conservatory of Music.

Grace will teach singing and vocal harmony at camp and will also help run the evening dance sessions.

Lynne is the co-creator of Frisch and Denig Custom-fitted Chinrests (www.chinrests.com), ASTA’s Certificate Advancement Program (www.astaweb.com), The Youth Orchestras of Fairfax, and the Music Advancement Program, a string program for previously-marginalized children in South Africa. 

Awards include: The Virginia String Teachers Outstanding and Distinguished Service Award and the American String Teachers Citation for Leadership and Merit.

Note that fiddle players are not the only ones with good licks!          go to the top of the page