FOREWORD
It gives me much pleasure to make Paul Rolland’s monumental and visionary “The Teaching Of Action In String Playing” film series available to the string community in DVD format. During his lifetime, Professor Rolland did a great deal to revolutionize string teaching in the United States. His published articles and books, his profound success as a teacher, his organizational and motivational skills in conjunction with ASTA, the AST journal for which he was the founding editor, The International String Workshop that he founded, and his many seminars and clinics throughout the United States and abroad, all bear testimony to a man driven to improve the quality of string teaching everywhere. His crowning achievement in that quest, “The Teaching Of Action In String Playing” film series and book, was the result of years of research and testing by the Illinois String Research Project which he designed and directed. Many artists and teachers of note have endorsed Paul Rolland’s work, including Elude Menuhin, Max Rostal, Josef Gingold, Eduard Melkus, Victor Aitay, George Perlman, Paul Doktor, William Primrose, and Roman Totenberg.
Users of this film series will find the DVD tremendously useful in their musical pursuits. Since the development of the book and films in the 1970s, a great many teachers around the world have reported that it had a great and positive impact on the effectiveness of their teaching. Paul Rolland’s work shown herein is of timeless value. Now, thirty years after his untimely death in 1978, the DVD version of the films will carry his legacy forward into the twenty first century for the benefit of future string players and teachers.
It has been said that Paul Rolland, more than any other person, knew and understood the human body as a violin playing machine. I believe it. As a child, I often watched my father work out his ideas on string playing and string pedagogy as he stood in front of a mirror and studied in detail the use of the muscles in the act of playing the violin. His approach was quite scientific and led to an effective sequencing of motion skills necessary for good playing. It also led to the development of teaching games and teaching techniques that he and his colleagues used to convey these skills to young players. Many of these are shown in the film series. It is no accident that the children of the Project classes shown in these films developed into such skilled players in “less than two and a half years of class instruction, demonstrating freedom and ease of playing through the use of good motion patterns, and freedom from excessive tension.”
Peter Rolland, Ph.D., Director, Rolland String Research Associates
July, 2008
Please direct inquiries to: peterrolland@paulrolland.net