Track 4 String Teachers

I have been training string teachers in the fiddling arts for over 40 years. I even met my wife Gail, who is a string teacher in the public schools in Mesa, Arizona, in one of my classes on fiddling for string teachers at the University of Arizona. My father Paul Rolland made very important contributions to the field of string pedagogy and acquired worldwide fame as a teacher of string teachers. Perhaps I wanted to follow in his footsteps in some measure, even though I was a mathematician and fiddler, not a classical musician. You can understand why having this component of the Rolland Fiddle Camp is important to me.

Classically trained string teachers face a number of challenges, which we will address at camp.

· Young string players enjoy and relate well to fiddle music. It motivates them to participate with enthusiasm in the learning process.

· Fiddle music is a good recruitment tool for classroom teachers.

· The current "Alternative Strings" movement has grown in strength to the point where teachers need to be able to include fiddling in their curriculum to meet state and national standards.

· Classically trained players tend to have deeply ingrained bowing and vibrato habits that lie outside of true fiddling style. As a result, they have a hard time capturing the real sound of fiddling in their playing. At Rolland Fiddle Camp they will learn how to capture the true sound of fiddling in their playing, as well as effective ways to share their enthusiasm with their students and motivate them to further study and participation in the genre.

Like all students at camp, string teachers will learn fiddle tunes. Like all students at camp, they will have access to their choice of afternoon workshops and will play in the camp folk orchestra. During the morning core group lesson time, Lynne Denig and I will work with the string teachers, each in our own way. I will help them with:

· Becoming familiar with and understanding stylistic issues in fiddling. I'll demonstrate, and we'll play and discuss recorded audio and video playing samples from master fiddlers;

· Bowing dynamics to convey the right lilt, accents;

· The use of drones and slides and how to convey these elements to students;

· Chord embellishments, double stops, drones and slides and how to convey these elements to students;

· Getting the right sound for fiddle music from their bass players (pizzicato "slap bass" style)!

I'll also show teachers the set of left hand exercise patterns that I teach my students to lay a good foundation for advanced fiddling skills.

I will show teachers the class method for teaching fiddling that has been very successful for me over the years. It is described in my article "The Power of Unison" published in AMERICAN STRING TEACHER in the spring 2011 issue. Teachers will "learn by doing".

Lynne Denig will also provide string teachers at camp with training in Paul Rolland's pedagogical approach. You will find this information absolutely invaluable; Paul Rolland's teaching principles will make you a more effective string teacher. Lynne was one of his last graduate students at the University of Illinois before he died, and thoroughly understands his principles, teaching techniques and "tricks" and has been applying and teaching them in the decades since his death in 1978. Lynne also is the current director of the Paul Rolland Workshop held annually at George Mason University, and in April 2011 she taught at a Paul Rolland Workshop in Hamburg Germany.