COFFEY o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-04-02 published
CUTLER,
Nancy (née
VEGH)
A resident of Newbury passed away Tuesday, April 1, 2008 at Four
Counties Health Services, Newbury at the age of 65. She was born
in Windsor daughter of the late Elias and Rose
VEGH.
Beloved wife
of Stan CUTLER, loving mother of Sheryl
FARRELL
(Mark) of Bothwell,
Angella COFFEY
(Girard) of Bothwell, Nancy
LAMARSH (Frank) of
Chatham, Joe
CUTLER
(Tracy) of Glencoe, Dan
CUTLER (Rachel) of
London, Stan
CUTLER Jr. "Buck" (Linda) of Newbury and Tony
CUTLER
(Marie) of Wallaceburg, fondly remembered by 19 grandchildren
and 15 great-grandchildren, dear sister of Gloria
WINIA
(Elmer)
of Newbury and Rose
SEWEDAK
(John) of Leamington and special
aunt of Donna
KAISER.
Predeceased by daughter Carolyn Joy, sisters
Dolly and Lillian and brother Elias. The
CUTLER family will receive
Friends at the Badder and Robinson Funeral Home, 211 Elm Street, Bothwell
on Thursday from 2-4 and 7-9 p.m. The funeral service will be held
from the chapel of the funeral home on Friday, April 4, 2008
at 1: 00 p.m. with Rev. Steve
FILYER officiating. Interment in
Bothwell Cemetery. Donations may be made at the funeral home
by cheque to Four Counties Health Services, Canadian Cancer Society
or charity of your choice. Online donations and condolences may
be left at www.badderfuneralhome.com. "A tree will be planted
in memory of Nancy
CUTLER in the Badder and Robinson Memorial Forest,
Mosa Twp."
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COFFIN o@ca.on.middlesex_county.london.london_free_press 2008-03-24 published
BEAUDET,
Jeanne
Marie
At Twin Lakes Terrace on Saturday, March 22, 2008. Jeanne died
peacefully with family by her side at the age of 86. Beloved
wife of the late Henri
BEAUDET (2003.) Loving mother of the late
Therese "
Terry" (1996)
KERRIGAN,
Annette and her husband Gerry
COFFIN,
London and Maurice
BEAUDET, Sarnia.
Proud grandmother
of Yvonne BEAUDET, Michelle
BANCROFT, Marc
BANCROFT, Nicole
ARCHER
and Eric KERRIGAN; and great-grandmother of Jamie
DAUGHTREY,
Camille, Lucy and Ada
BANCROFT and Allison
ARCHER. Dear sister
of Hélène MORET,
Germaine and her husband Paul
DAUSEREAU and
Maurice and his wife
Eliette
MULLER all of Manitoba. Jeanne is
also survived by son-in-law James
KERRIGAN.
Jeanne was a member
of the Saint Thomas Aquinas Church Choir and the Dames Auxiliares
for over fifty years. The family would like to extend their thanks
to all of the staff at Twin Lakes Terrace for their loving care.
Visitation will be held at the McKenzie and Blundy Funeral Home and
Cremation Centre, 431 N. Christina Street, Sarnia on Monday, March 24th
from 7-9 p.m. Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated by
Fr. Terence
RUNSTEDLER at Saint Thomas Aquinas Church on Tuesday,
March 25th at 11 a.m. Cremation to follow with a private family
interment at Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery. Due to severe family
allergies, please do not send lilies in flower arrangements.
As an expression of sympathy, Friends who wish may send memorial
donations to the Canadian Cancer Society, 714 Lite Street, Pt. Edward
N7V 1A6 or the Heart and Stroke Foundation, 774 London Rd., Sarnia
N7T 4Y1. Messages of condolence and memories may be left at www.mckenzieblundy.com
A tree will be planted in memory of Jeanne
BEAUDET in the McKenzie and
Blundy Memorial Forest. Dedication service Sunday, September 21st,
2008 at 2: 00 p.m. at the Wawanosh Wetlands Conservation Area.
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COFFMAN o@ca.on.york_county.toronto.globe_and_mail 2008-07-19 published
Fiddler was a prolific composer and performer with a style all
his own
Hateful of the violin as a child, he defied calls to conform
and chose to blend such traditions as country, jazz, folk, South
Asian and Scandinavian. 'I don't write music,' he said in 1999.
'I catch it as it goes by'
By Gay ABBATE,
Page
A12
Oliver SCHROER arrived home from high school one day to find
his mother vacuuming while listening to Pink Floyd music. "Hey
Mom, how can I rebel if you keep listening to my records?" he
asked. But rebel he did. The gifted Canadian fiddler and composer
refused to be bound by what he considered the restrictions of
classical instruction and, most importantly, by the limits of
any one musical genre. Through his rebellion, he took contemporary
fiddling music to a whole new level. "He opened up a whole new
range of possibilities," said musician Anne
LINDSAY, who played
second fiddle in Mr.
SCHROER's band, Stewed Tomatoes.
To Grit Laskin, co-founder of the Canadian Folk Music Awards,
Mr. SCHROER was the ultimate musician. "His playing style of
music was unique. It was his own style and physically what he
did with his bow technique and the kind of rhythms and structure
in the music he wrote - there was nobody else like him."
The Globe's music critic, Robert
EVERETT-
GREEN, referred to Mr.
SCHROER's
style as a "fusion of Ontario's fiddling traditions with the
kind of architectural, string-crossing music of Bach's solo violin
works."
For his part, Mr.
SCHROER considered the violin more than a musical
wooden box. "I think of my violin as a vibration generator, a
drum, a sex partner, a confidant," he wrote. "We dance, we tell
each other secrets, we pray. We make music."
A prodigious composer and music producer, as well as a master
of the acoustic violin, Mr.
SCHROER received eight Juno nominations
during his 25-year career. He wrote more than 1,000 musical pieces,
recorded nine CDs of his own compositions and produced 30 CDs
for other artists. He also performed on more than 100 albums
of new traditional, acoustic and popular music by other musicians.
He recorded with such artists as composers Jimmy Webb and Barry
Mann, singers James Keelaghan and Sylvia Tyson, acoustic guitarists
Jesse Cook and Don Ross, and the groups Great Big Sea and Spirit
of the Wind.
His most recent collaboration was with his childhood friend,
the classical guitarist Liona
BOYD. In late April, he played
on two tracks of her new CD, to be released this fall. "He was
an inspired musician," said Ms.
BOYD. "
Music reflects the soul
of a person. You could tell he was a deep, sensitive person."
Mr. SCHROER was very iconoclastic and a global person from a
cultural point of view, said his brother André
SCHROER.
Oliver
SCHROER defied calls to conform, choosing to blend many musical
traditions, including country, jazz, folk, South Asian and Scandinavian.
"He was a very complex individual who in one way skewed authority
and bombast but still had one foot in traditions."
Mr. SCHROER took little credit for his unique music. In his view,
he merely kept his ears open to the wind. "I don't write music,"
he told The Globe and Mail in 1999. "I catch it as it goes by.
It's all floating by for the taking."
Oliver SCHROER was born the third of four children of Hendryk
and Irene SCHROER,
German immigrants who had arrived in Canada
in 1954. When Oliver was 10, his father, who worked in sales
and management, decided to uproot his young family to the countryside.
They settled in Markdale, Ontario, a village located in the Beaver
Valley about 30 kilometres south of Georgian Bay and about 150 kilometres
north of Toronto. It was while growing up in Markdale that he
first met Ms.
BOYD, who lived nearby with her family.
By then Oliver was already a budding musician, having played
the recorder since he was 6. When he was 8, his parents switched
him to the violin, which he did not enjoy playing and took every
opportunity to get out of practising, including making a tape
of the scales and exercises. "When my mother told me to go upstairs
and practice, I would go into my room and play the tape," he
wrote last year, after finally admitting his pretense to his
mother.
Meanwhile, his parents were not musicians but they had an appreciation
for classical music and resolved to expose their children to
it. For a time, the only window to popular culture the children
had was a weekly dose of The Wonderful World of Disney on television.
Oliver's first intimate contact with popular music was when he
was 12 and a friend of his older brother brought over a copy
of the Beatles album, Abbey Road. His 16th birthday brought significant
changes that would further expand his musical horizon: his father
gave him a guitar, acknowledging his son was not interested in
the violin. Later, Oliver went to Quebec on a student-exchange
program and was exposed to the music of Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull
and James Taylor - all of which he greedily soaked up. The guitar
was his instrument of choice even after he enrolled in philosophy
at the University of Toronto. There, he discovered the jazz music
of Chick Corea and Lenny Breau.
It took 10 years for him to graduate from university. He never
really settled to his studies and instead took time off for other
pursuits. He bounced through a series of office jobs and played
for a time with a country swing group called the Treverston Band.
His first gig in 1982 earned him $30.
His violin, meanwhile, remained neglected on a shelf until the
night a girlfriend persuaded him to learn square dancing. He
took along his violin and was surprised to find a fiddler and
guitarist playing for the class. The musicians introduced him
to Irish and French-Canadian fiddling. He didn't learn much about
square dancing because he spent most of his time jamming with
the band. It was the beginning of his love affair with an instrument
he had previously loathed.
He abandoned the guitar and took up the violin - this time an
acoustic violin he painted blue - with one of the musicians he
had met at the square-dancing class. One night, while playing
in Eastern Ontario, he had a revelation that music was to be
his life's work - not the law or academia as he had expected.
"I hadn't ever had that thought before in that same way. This
time it was for real," he once wrote. "If I could just do that,
I would be so satisfied."
In 1987, he and a friend formed a jazz group called Eye Music.
The quartet met with some success and was invited to play at
the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland the following year.
In the early nineties he formed Stewed Tomatoes, which played
across Canada and in venues ranging from small pubs to New York's
Lincoln Centre. For a time, the group served as the house band
on Stewart McLean's Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio program,
The Vinyl Café.
In 1993, Mr.
SCHROER established his credentials on the Canadian
music scene with his first album, Jigzup. It was won rave reviews
and earned him his first Juno nomination.
His best known solo albums are Camino and Hymns and Hers. The
music for Camino was recorded in churches during a 2004 hike
of the 1,000-kilometre-long Camino de Santiago, an ancient pilgrimage
route which meanders through the Pyrenees mountain region of
France and Spain. For two months, he and friend Peter
COFFMAN
stopped at any church or chapel along the way that seemed acoustically
promising. Mr.
SCHROER would unpack his portable recording studio,
take out the violin he carried wrapped in his sleeping bag and
begin playing. For his part, Mr.
COFFMAN recorded the adventure
through photography. His pictures form a 28-page booklet that
accompanies the album. Often while recording, Mr.
SCHROER would
have unforeseen accompaniment, such as the sound of children
playing or people laughing. At one location in France, while
playing The Lord's Prayer, the church clock started chiming.
"I couldn't believe the fortune of that happening," Mr.
SCHROER
told the Globe in 2006.
Hymns and Hers followed Camino and shares some of the same deep
emotion, although the sound is very different. Recorded after
Mr. SCHROER was diagnosed with leukemia in early 2007, the album
is a collection of introspective ensemble pieces, "Hymns and
Hers is one of the most stunning records I've ever heard," said
Mr. Laskin.
Mr. SCHROER's style of playing was as distinctive as his music.
Four years of busking long hours in Toronto's subway stations
resulted in tendinitis, a condition that has ended many a promising
musical career. After taking a nine-month hiatus, during which
he started composing music, he changed the way he held his bow.
In the process he discovered he could produce exquisite music,
so he kept playing that way, said jazz singer and actress Michele
George, a friend for 25 years. "He took something you could look
at as negative and saw how it could work to take him further
into a new way of making music and a way to hear music that wouldn't
have happened had it not been for the tendinitis."
Mr. SCHROER's large stature in the music world was matched his
physical appearance. Standing 6 feet 6 inches, with his mohawk,
goatee and designer frames, he did not conform to most people's
image of a fiddler. He enjoyed being outrageous and changed his
hairstyle frequently for effect, his brother said. The mohawk
was the favourite look. His goatee grew back bushier than ever.
Over the past year, he would wear clogs - one red and one orange
- just to startle people, his brother said.
Mr. COFFMAN said his friend was a wise man, but could also be
silly, mischievous and goofy. Most of all he was inspiring. "He
just made you want to go out and do great stuff. He was one of
those rare people who expand your sense of what is possible."
Part of Mr.
SCHROER's legacy is Twisted String, a project he
launched about seven years ago with the idea of teaching young
violinists. He was living and teaching in Vancouver and started
the group after going to Smithers, British Columbia, to conduct
a violin workshop. Smithers is located about halfway between
Prince George and Prince Rupert, which means it is a 14-hour
drive from Vancouver. As such, the children there would never
have been exposed to a musician like Mr.
SCHROER, said Emilyn
STAM, who was one of his first students. Other artists, such
as Miss BOYD, later followed in his footsteps to Smithers.
Mr. SCHROER taught his students that nothing was too crazy or
wrong when playing the violin. "He told us to embrace any mistake
and to turn it into something cool," Ms.
STAM said.
He became a father figure for many of the students, and mentored
them all as though they were his own children. "He taught us
how to live life," she added.
Since then the original group has grown and several of his original
students, including Ms.
STAM, are now not only leading Twisted
String but also establishing new groups elsewhere in the country.
Some have gone on to form their own bands.
About two years ago, Mr.
SCHROER was diagnosed with myelodysplasia,
a condition that inevitably leads to the leukemia that developed
early last year. He moved back to Toronto to be near Friends
and family, and to undergo chemotherapy. It was later learned
that the cancer had spread to his spine.
Mr. SCHROER did not let the disease slow him down. During his
chemotherapy treatment, he composed 59 musical pieces, one for
each of his students in Smithers. Each tune had the person's
name in the title and totally fit each kid's personality, Ms.
STAM
said. The tunes make up Smithers, his final CD, which he sent
to each student at Christmas.
His last public performance was on June 5 in Toronto on what
he dubbed the Last Concert on the Tour of the Planet. He played
one solo to a standing-room-only crowd of 800 people.
He continued to work even as the end drew near. Doctors and nurses
in Unit 14A at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto let him
bring in a piano and other recording equipment into his room
so he and his Friends could work, Ms. George said.
A final message to Friends and fans which he posted on his website
reveals that he had come to terms with his pending end on this
Earth. "Some people live very intensely and burn very brightly
during their time here. I think I am one of those people. A shining
star while I am here. So I look at my life as I have lived it,
and I feel very satisfied with all I have achieved and gone through."
Oliver SCHROER was born June 18, 1956, in Toronto. He died July 3,
2008, of leukemia at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. He
was 52. He leaves his mother Irene, brothers André and Ansgar
and sister Martina.
A celebration of Mr.
SCHROER's life and music is being planned
for early September. Details will be posted on his website: http://www.oliverschroer.com.
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