Oliver Schroer
Encyclopedia
Oliver Schroer was a Canadian
fiddle
r, composer, and music producer.
in rural Grey County
. He attended Grey Highlands Secondary School
in Flesherton
, where he played French horn in the school band. He also took private violin lessons. He graduated in 1974, having earned several academic awards.
Schroer was dissatisfied with university life, and began to busk
in the Toronto
system subway with his guitar. After several years, he picked up his violin again, but to play fiddle rather than classical music. Eventually, he began to record, and in 1993 released his first album, Jigz Up, which was nominated for a Juno Award
in the Best Roots or Traditional Album category.
. Altogether, he produced or performed on over 100 albums of new traditional, acoustic, and popular music, and wrote more than 1,000 pieces of music. He recorded with artists such as Jimmy Webb
and Barry Mann
, Canadian singers James Keelaghan
, Loreena McKennitt
and Sylvia Tyson
, acoustic guitar mavens Jesse Cook
and Don Ross, East Coast rockers Great Big Sea
, and West Coast rockers Spirit of the West
.
Toronto critic Robert Everett-Green described his style as a "fusion of Ontario
fiddling traditions with the kind of architectural, string-crossing music of Bach
's solo violin
works." Schroer's music also frequently employs violin harmonic
and double stop
techniques to create distinctly modern sounds.
Schroer taught and mentored intensively in Smithers, British Columbia
, in the Canadian Pacific Northwest over the last seven years of his life. He wrote a tune for each of the young people he taught – 59 in total – and recorded the tunes with Emilyn Stam, a young pianist from Smithers. His album Smithers is a thank-you album recorded for Smithers.
As a music educator, Schroer developed The Twisted String, a series of squads of young fiddlers and other musicians. Schroer composed the music for these groups.
His album Camino was recorded in churches along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim trail. Schroer walked 1,000 km of the trail in 2004 with his wife and two friends, carrying a portable recording studio. To save weight, he did not bring a violin case. He carried his instrument wrapped in a sleeping bag in his backpack, "like my own precious relic, carefully packed in its reliquary of socks and underwear." The album features solo playing, occasionally against a background of local sounds such as church bells, birds, and monastic voices.
In 2007, Schroer was diagnosed with leukemia
, which proved to be untreatable. A tribute concert for Schroer was held on February 19, 2008 at Hugh's Room
in Toronto. It featured the Twisted String Project, seventeen kids, aged 9 through 18, led by two of Oliver's students. They raised the money through private donations to fly to Toronto from the B.C. coast, just so they could take part in the concerts. CBC Radio 2 recorded the concert, which aired on Canada Live
on April 7, 2008.
Schroer's last concert was performed on June 5, 2008. In a letter to his fans on April 30 when he first announced his intention to do this concert, he called it "Oliver’s Last Concert on his Tour of this Planet". He asked that his sold-out audience clap, not cry, and apologized for not being his normal glad-handing self; the risk of infection from personal contact would have been much too great. The subsequent Globe and Mail review called Schroer "an investigative fiddler".
During his final illness, Schroer said of his compositions, "I used to write a lot of jig
s, reels
and waltz
es - as a matter of fact I still do. But over the years new kinds of melodies emerged - more rarefied, harder to pin down. There were prayers, incantations, whimsies, melismas, mysteriosos, heisenbergs, fractal reels, forest blues, blessings.... They are not so much entertainment tunes, but music that expresses other important things about my relationship to life. This music is, dare I say, more spiritual."
Schroer composed his final piece of music, Poise, on July 2, 2008. He died the following morning as a result of his leukemia. His last words were, "Well, I guess no excursions today."
Three months after his death, Schroer's CD Hymns and Hers was nominated for four Canadian Folk Music Awards
:
Hymns and Hers subsequently won two Canadian Folk Music Awards on November 23, 2008, in the categories of "Pushing the Boundaries" and "Solo Instrumentalist".
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
fiddle
Fiddle
The term fiddle may refer to any bowed string musical instrument, most often the violin. It is also a colloquial term for the instrument used by players in all genres, including classical music...
r, composer, and music producer.
Early life
Oliver Schroer grew up in Vandeleur, Ontario, a small crossroads near MarkdaleMarkdale, Ontario
Markdale is a community in the Municipality of Grey Highlands, in Grey County, Ontario, Canada.Markdale was first settled in 1846 and originally called East Glenelg, after a nearby township. In 1864, it was renamed Cornabus after the Islay, Scotland hometown of then-postmaster Donald MacDuffie...
in rural Grey County
Grey County, Ontario
Grey County is a county and census division of the Canadian province of Ontario. The county seat is in Owen Sound. The population was 92,411 in 2006. It is located in the subregion of Southern Ontario named Southwestern Ontario...
. He attended Grey Highlands Secondary School
Grey Highlands Secondary School
Grey Highlands Secondary School is a Grade 9-12 high school located in Flesherton, Ontario, in rural Grey County. It was built in 1967 as part of a province-wide upgrade of educational facilities. Unlike typical rural high schools of the time that were designed only to graduate matriculation...
in Flesherton
Flesherton, Ontario
Flesherton is a community in the Municipality of Grey Highlands, in Grey County, Ontario, Canada, located at the junction of Highway 10 and Grey County Road 4...
, where he played French horn in the school band. He also took private violin lessons. He graduated in 1974, having earned several academic awards.
Schroer was dissatisfied with university life, and began to busk
Busk
A busk is the rigid element of a corset placed at the centre front.In stays, the corsets worn between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the busk was intended to keep the front of the corset straight and upright. It was made of wood, ivory, or bone slipped into a pocket and tied in place with...
in the Toronto
Toronto
Toronto is the provincial capital of Ontario and the largest city in Canada. It is located in Southern Ontario on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. A relatively modern city, Toronto's history dates back to the late-18th century, when its land was first purchased by the British monarchy from...
system subway with his guitar. After several years, he picked up his violin again, but to play fiddle rather than classical music. Eventually, he began to record, and in 1993 released his first album, Jigz Up, which was nominated for a Juno Award
Juno Award
The Juno Awards are presented annually to Canadian musical artists and bands to acknowledge their artistic and technical achievements in all aspects of music...
in the Best Roots or Traditional Album category.
Recording career
Schroer was a prolific composer, recording ten CDs in 14 years. He performed in Europe and North America in clubs, cathedrals, and New York's Lincoln CenterLincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is a complex of buildings in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of New York City's Upper West Side. Reynold Levy has been its president since 2002.-History and facilities:...
. Altogether, he produced or performed on over 100 albums of new traditional, acoustic, and popular music, and wrote more than 1,000 pieces of music. He recorded with artists such as Jimmy Webb
Jimmy Webb
Jimmy Webb is an American songwriter, composer, and singer. He wrote numerous platinum selling classics, including "Up, Up and Away", "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", "Wichita Lineman", "Galveston", "The Worst That Could Happen", "All I Know", and "MacArthur Park"...
and Barry Mann
Barry Mann
Barry Mann is an American songwriter, and part of a successful songwriting partnership with his wife, Cynthia Weil.-Career:...
, Canadian singers James Keelaghan
James Keelaghan
James Keelaghan is a Juno award-winning Canadian folk singer-songwriter. Born in Calgary, Alberta and now based in Winnipeg, many of his songs, such as "Kiri's Piano", about the internment of Japanese Canadians, and "October 70", about the FLQ crisis, are inspired by events and figures in Canadian...
, Loreena McKennitt
Loreena McKennitt
Loreena Isabel Irene McKennitt, CM, OM, is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist and pianist who writes, records and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. McKennitt is known for her refined, clear soprano vocals...
and Sylvia Tyson
Sylvia Tyson
Sylvia Tyson, CM , is a musician, performer, singer-songwriter and broadcaster. From 1959 to 1974, she was half of the popular folk duo Ian & Sylvia with Ian Tyson....
, acoustic guitar mavens Jesse Cook
Jesse Cook
Jesse Cook is a Toronto-based guitarist, born in Paris to Canadian parents. Like other guitarists of his style of music, he incorporates funky jazz, latin & world music into his playing. Cook is also well known for the energy of his live shows. He has contributed to the Afro Celt Sound System album...
and Don Ross, East Coast rockers Great Big Sea
Great Big Sea
Great Big Sea is a Canadian folk-rock band from Newfoundland and Labrador, best known for performing energetic rock interpretations of traditional Newfoundland folk songs including sea shanties, which draw from the island's 500-year-old Irish, English, and French heritage...
, and West Coast rockers Spirit of the West
Spirit of the West
Spirit of the West are a Canadian folk rock band, who were popular on the Canadian folk music scene in the 1980s before evolving a blend of hard rock, Britpop, and Celtic folk influences which made them one of Canada's most successful alternative rock acts in the 1990s.-Early years:The band began...
.
Toronto critic Robert Everett-Green described his style as a "fusion of Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
fiddling traditions with the kind of architectural, string-crossing music of Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
's solo violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
works." Schroer's music also frequently employs violin harmonic
Harmonic
A harmonic of a wave is a component frequency of the signal that is an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency, i.e. if the fundamental frequency is f, the harmonics have frequencies 2f, 3f, 4f, . . . etc. The harmonics have the property that they are all periodic at the fundamental...
and double stop
Double stop
A double stop, in music terminology, is the act of playing two notes simultaneously on a melodic percussion instrument or stringed instrument...
techniques to create distinctly modern sounds.
Schroer taught and mentored intensively in Smithers, British Columbia
Smithers, British Columbia
Smithers is a town located in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, approximately halfway between Prince George and Prince Rupert. Smithers is located in the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako....
, in the Canadian Pacific Northwest over the last seven years of his life. He wrote a tune for each of the young people he taught – 59 in total – and recorded the tunes with Emilyn Stam, a young pianist from Smithers. His album Smithers is a thank-you album recorded for Smithers.
As a music educator, Schroer developed The Twisted String, a series of squads of young fiddlers and other musicians. Schroer composed the music for these groups.
His album Camino was recorded in churches along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim trail. Schroer walked 1,000 km of the trail in 2004 with his wife and two friends, carrying a portable recording studio. To save weight, he did not bring a violin case. He carried his instrument wrapped in a sleeping bag in his backpack, "like my own precious relic, carefully packed in its reliquary of socks and underwear." The album features solo playing, occasionally against a background of local sounds such as church bells, birds, and monastic voices.
In 2007, Schroer was diagnosed with leukemia
Leukemia
Leukemia or leukaemia is a type of cancer of the blood or bone marrow characterized by an abnormal increase of immature white blood cells called "blasts". Leukemia is a broad term covering a spectrum of diseases...
, which proved to be untreatable. A tribute concert for Schroer was held on February 19, 2008 at Hugh's Room
Hugh's Room
Hugh's Room is a restaurant and folk music venue in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Located on Dundas Street in the city's Roncesvalles neighbourhood. Primarily a folk club, Hugh's Room also sometimes books jazz, blues, classical and comedy artists as well....
in Toronto. It featured the Twisted String Project, seventeen kids, aged 9 through 18, led by two of Oliver's students. They raised the money through private donations to fly to Toronto from the B.C. coast, just so they could take part in the concerts. CBC Radio 2 recorded the concert, which aired on Canada Live
Canada Live
Canada Live is a Canadian radio program, which debuted on March 19, 2007 on CBC Radio 2, which airs concert performances in a variety of musical genres from locations across Canada. The program airs weekdays on Radio 2; one episode per week is repeated on CBC Radio One on Friday afternoons.The...
on April 7, 2008.
Schroer's last concert was performed on June 5, 2008. In a letter to his fans on April 30 when he first announced his intention to do this concert, he called it "Oliver’s Last Concert on his Tour of this Planet". He asked that his sold-out audience clap, not cry, and apologized for not being his normal glad-handing self; the risk of infection from personal contact would have been much too great. The subsequent Globe and Mail review called Schroer "an investigative fiddler".
During his final illness, Schroer said of his compositions, "I used to write a lot of jig
Jig
The Jig is a form of lively folk dance, as well as the accompanying dance tune, originating in England in the 16th century and today most associated with Irish dance music and Scottish country dance music...
s, reels
Reel (dance)
The reel is a folk dance type as well as the accompanying dance tune type. In Scottish country dancing, the reel is one of the four traditional dances, the others being the jig, the strathspey and the waltz, and is also the name of a dance figure ....
and waltz
Waltz
The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...
es - as a matter of fact I still do. But over the years new kinds of melodies emerged - more rarefied, harder to pin down. There were prayers, incantations, whimsies, melismas, mysteriosos, heisenbergs, fractal reels, forest blues, blessings.... They are not so much entertainment tunes, but music that expresses other important things about my relationship to life. This music is, dare I say, more spiritual."
Schroer composed his final piece of music, Poise, on July 2, 2008. He died the following morning as a result of his leukemia. His last words were, "Well, I guess no excursions today."
Three months after his death, Schroer's CD Hymns and Hers was nominated for four Canadian Folk Music Awards
Canadian Folk Music Awards
The Canadian Folk Music Awards are an annual music awards ceremony, presenting awards in a variety of categories for achievements in both traditional and contemporary folk music, and other roots music genres, by Canadian musicians...
:
- Pushing the Boundaries
- Contemporary Album of the Year
- Solo Instrumentalist
- Producer
Hymns and Hers subsequently won two Canadian Folk Music Awards on November 23, 2008, in the categories of "Pushing the Boundaries" and "Solo Instrumentalist".
Discography
- Jigzup (1993), Big Dog Music - Nominated for a Juno AwardJuno AwardThe Juno Awards are presented annually to Canadian musical artists and bands to acknowledge their artistic and technical achievements in all aspects of music...
in the Best Roots or Traditional Album category - Whirled (1994), Big Dog Music
- Stewed Tomatoes (1996), Big Dog Music
- Celtica (1998), Avalon
- O2 (Double CD, 1999), Big Dog Music
- Restless Urban Primitive (2001), Big Dog Music
- A Million Stars (2004), Big Dog Music
- Camino (2006), Big Dog Music
- Celtic Devotion (2006), Avalon Records
- Hymns and Hers (2007), Big Dog Music
- Smithers (Double CD, 2007), Big Dog Music
- Freedom Row (2010), Borealis