Tom Rolston, 78, violinist brought the Suzuki method for string instruction to Canada
Hoodoo
Violinist opened doors for other musicians
Under Rolston, the Banff Centre became a place where artists could
flourish without toxic competitiveness
TAMARA BERNSTEIN
Special to The Globe and Mail
July 3, 2010
http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20100703.OBROLSTONATL//TPStory/Obituaries
Tom Rolston, the Canadian violinist who brought the Suzuki method for
string instruction to this country, was a visionary, a free spirit who
opened doors and made the impossible possible for generations of musicians.
It would be hard to find a classical music concert performed by a
Canadian which does not owe something to his unique, benevolent influence.
"My Dad changed people's lives," said his daughter, internationally
renowned cellist Shauna Rolston. "He provided structures in which they
could grow, and just get on with it, whether that meant becoming a star
or becoming the musical mover and shaker in a small community. Both of
those were equally important to him: there was no hierarchy of success
to him."
Rolston, who transformed the Banff Centre's music programs from a summer
camp into an international mecca for both emerging and established
artists, died of cancer at his Vancouver home on May 29. He was 78.
"With Tom it didn't matter where you were from, what you'd done, or
whether you had the perfect musical pedigree, says Canadian violinist
Erika Raum. "He'd look at you fresh, without prejudice, and appreciate
you for what you are. It made you feel so free; so unself-conscious. "
Rolston's philosophy as an administrator was simple:
"No is never an acceptable answer in the arts," he once told his
daughter. "Sometimes you have to say 'maybe,' but never 'no,' because
you never know what you'd be shutting down."
Thomas Edmund Rolston was born in Vancouver on Oct. 31, 1931. His father
had come to Canada from Ireland at the age of 23, "with nothing but a
violin," according to the family, and worked initially as a plasterer.
His mother was born in Rotterdam into a family of Dutch Jews who
immigrated to Canada when she was six.
By the time Tom was 4 or 5, he and his sister Patricia were playing and
singing in Orange Halls and winning prizes on amateur nights, where
applause meters determined the victor. During the Second World War they
played at events promoting Victory Bonds.
Douglas Stewart gave Tom his classical violin training during his
Vancouver childhood. Further studies followed at the Mannes College of
Music in New York, then from 1950-1953 at the Royal Academy of Music in
London. While still a student, he frequently played in the London
Philharmonic.
In London, he met and began playing chamber music with a fellow student,
the Glaswegian pianist Isobel Moore. They married in 1954, after Tom
proposed to her with the pitch, "Stick with me and you'll go places!"
Over the next half century, he made good on his word. In 1956 the
Rolstons took second prize as a duo in the prestigious Munich
International Competition. In 1958, they moved to Edmonton, where Tom
became concertmaster and associate conductor of the Edmonton Symphony
Orchestra, and a professor at the University of Alberta's fledgling
music department.
Attracted by Shinichi Suzuki's new method of string instruction for
preschool children, he visited Suzuki in Japan, and invited him to send
one of his recent graduates to Edmonton to teach.
"I was very young when I came to Canada, and I didn't know much about
anything," Yasuko Tanake Eastman recalled from her Victoria home. "Tom
gave me free lessons every week. But he never interfered with our
teaching. He said, 'Well, you girls know how to teach the Suzuki method,
so you do whatever you think is right.'"
In 1965, Rolston began teaching at the summer school of the then Banff
School of Fine Arts. Six years later, David S. R. Leighton, the new
director of the centre, appointed him head of the its music division.
It was a turning point, not just for Rolston, but for the arts in
Canada. The year was 1971: Peter Lougheed had just swept to power in
Alberta and was committed to returning the wealth generated by Alberta's
natural resources to Albertans. His wife Jeanne was a staunch supporter
of the arts and a former student of the Banff Centre. Leighton had a
vision for a world class, year-round artists' colony at the Banff
Centre, and Alberta was prepared to back it.
The two men agreed that the music program should blaze the trail for
year-round arts programs at the centre. But Rolston had no interest in
the standard university or conservatory template.
"Tom believed that the individual is responsible for his or her learning
[after completing basic training]," said Jorie Adams, the senior
administrator for the centre's music programs throughout the Rolston
era. "That's the opposite of the university model, which is top down:
the professor is king, and teaches the students what he thinks they need
to know."
The core of the new music residency programs was, "You come to us with a
goal, and tell us what you want to achieve in the next five years, and
we will figure out how we can help you. That educational philosophy
became the Banff Centre's calling card," Adams said.
By the time the fall-winter program got off the ground in 1979, the
Rolstons had gathered an astounding faculty to the centre's music
programs. (Isobel Moore Rolston was head of the piano chamber music
department; later she became director of the year-round music residencies.)
"Tom was a talent scout not just for emerging artists but also for the
best teachers of the time," said violinist Barry Shiffman, current head
of music and sound at the Banff Centre. Canadians could stay on home
soil and work with international legends like pianist Menachem Pressler
and cellist Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi.
Students flocked to Banff from around the world, but whenever there were
two more-or-less equal applicants, Adams says, Rolston would always take
the Canadian. The St. Lawrence Quartet, the Gryphon Trio, pianist Jon
Kimura Parker, and cellist Winona Zelenka are a few of many Canadians
with strong Banff roots.
"I would not be doing anything I'm doing now if I hadn't gone to Banff
in those years," said Geoff Nuttall, founding first violinist of the St.
Lawrence Quartet, artist in residence at Stanford University, and
director of chamber music at the Spoleto USA Festival.
"We didn't really appreciate Banff until we went to other famous summer
schools and said, 'Hey, there's nobody good here; everybody's boring.'"
The Rolstons' faculty were musician's musicians - not glitzy superstars.
"Tom had a disdain for the music business," Adams says. "He didn't want
to grease the machine of the whole New York music establishment." That,
and the Rolstons' quasi-parental support for young musicians, set the
tone for Banff as a place where artists could flourish, without toxic
competitiveness.
Shiffman first attended Banff as a child in the Gifted Youth program.
"We knew Tom was the boss, but he had those smiley eyes. He'd look at
you and there was a real light - you felt safe; there was this
encouraging, positive spirit around him. He'd always find an opportunity
to develop something in you," he says. "If you were a hot shot
violinist, he might assign you to play and direct one of Vivaldi's Four
Seasons, so that you'd have to see a bigger picture than just your own
part, and articulate your ideas to a bunch of older musicians."
Cellist Janos Starker, who taught at Banff for more than a dozen years,
agrees. "There are places which are very good and very fine teachers,
but very few places through history that have what is called an
institutional spirit. And during my years [1975-1991] at Banff, there
was that spirit - people all working for the same goals, but with
individual approaches. And that was the Rolstons' doing.
"It doesn't exist at Juilliard, at the Paris conservatories, at the
Berlin Hochschule - they all have fine teachers ... but it's a
proprietary spirit; there is no unified approach as to how to educate
young people."
As the Banff Centre took more of his time, Rolston's own performing
tapered off. But when needed, Raum recalls, "he would pick up the
violin, and out would come the most relaxed, sweetest, most expressive
playing you ever heard. He had this natural, easy, uncomplicated sound."
As a coach, Rolston would often give you "a single image that was right
on the money," Shiffman recalls. "One time the St. Lawrence Quartet
played some Mozart for him. It was in our early years, and I'm sure our
performance was over-the-top extroverted. Tom said only that it was very
beautiful, but to remember that for every painting, there is the
right-sized frame."
Canadian pianist Bernadene Blaha remembers touring as a trio with
Rolston and his daughter Shauna.
"It was five minutes to curtain and we couldn't find Tom - he was out in
the audience talking to people, showing his violin to little kids.
"People were just smitten by his friendliness - and he was as interested
to know about them as they were to him."
No account of Rolston's life would be complete without mention of his
red Vespa. In the 1950s, it carried the newly wed Tom and Isobel through
Britain and France; years later, Rolston and his red, vintage helmet
became an iconic part of Banff's human landscape.
When the Rolstons retired from Banff in 2004, Tom hung all his watches
on a wall and announced that it was "the end of time" and that
henceforth he would live by the rhythms of the sun. In November, 2009,
he learned that the end of his own time was approaching, when he was
diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Before his death, he asked that his
family scatter his ashes in the Pacific Ocean, joining those of his mother.
The countless people who mourn his passing may find comfort in the words
Rolston spoke to his family every night for as long as Shauna can
remember. "If I die tonight," he'd say, "I just want you to know that
I'm the happiest man in the world."
Rolston leaves his wife Isobel, his daughter Shauna, his sister Patricia
and his extended family.
--
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