File: robinsonpeter06-oh-ellerslieschoolprogram_M.mp3
Speakers:
PR – Peter Robinson
KP – Curator Ken Perlman
PR: I got the job as music teacher here in Ellerslie.
KP- I believe that you have started up a fiddle in the schools program?
PR: That started within the first year. Dr. Thomas Hall was the superintendant at the time, and it was just after consolidation of the small schools. His goal was to have a complete music program, a complete music school – If you put all the music teachers together. So he hired a keyboard player, and he hired someone for strings, and someone for keyboards, someone for voice, so that we could call on each other for expertise, and make it a more rounded program. Like we had a choir for all of the teachers. All of the music teachers went together and formed a choir. He was quite a music fan. So it was a little bit of him and a little bit of me. He hired me for the strings experience, like for the unit. So I talked him into buying a dozen fiddles within that first year, so I started with 12 kids. And then over the years fiddles have gotten so expensive, so we just added more instruments as we went. And sometimes it extends up through - My school only goes to grade 6, but then the students come back to me once a week, just as a hobby pretty well, and they can do that through grade 12, coming back once a week.
KP: So they can come back to Ellerslie Grade School, and you have a special session for the older people?
PR: Yeah, that's one day a week, just because they're interested and it maintains the music. One group of kids continued to play. They went away to university and when they came back in April, we picked it up again in May and June, July, with them. I usually start out with tunes they already know, just so you can tell that you're playing it right. And we start off with exercises, like finger exercises. Then we do familiar tunes. Then I teach them how to read [music]. It depends on the interests of the students. Like if their father was a fiddler, we'll do fiddle. We do the Music Festival in the Spring; and I play over the tunes from each category that are selected by the Festival Committee. Mostly it's classical for that, though but we did add another traditional section that they could do. It was individual, and then because I had a group they added – Like an age group, a beginning fiddle group. So I could take all my Grade 4's, learn the same tune and put them in the Festival. So we do a combination of both violin and fiddle.
KP: OK, so in some of these concerts you're performing jigs and reels. Can you give me an example of some of the tunes that the kids have played?
PR: Smash the Windows, Irish Washerwoman: traditional. The waltzes, we would do the Tennessee Waltz, Smile a While – A Don Messer tune. We would do St. Anne=s Reel.
