Colleen Tolva

She Taught a 95-Year-Old to Play With Both Hands — and She'll Teach Your Child, Too

Colleen Tolva has been teaching piano, violin, and organ in the Vancouver, Washington area for 57 years. That number alone is striking, but what makes it meaningful is the range it represents: students from age two-and-a-half to ninety-five, beginners wrestling with their first G scale and advanced players preparing for competition. She founded and conducted the Northwest LDS Symphony — which is still running after 37 years — served as concertmistress for the Salt Lake Opera Theatre Orchestra, performed with the University of Oregon Symphony, and once arranged a hymn for full choir, orchestra, and dance that received a standing ovation from 10,000 people at Portland's Civic Stadium. Teaching, for Tolva, is not a side pursuit. It is the through-line of a life spent entirely inside music.

Her approach in the studio reflects that depth of experience. Tolva builds lessons around what she calls foundational instruction — music theory, ear training, sight reading, correct posture, and technique — and she draws from a carefully chosen set of materials including the John Thompson series, Hanon, Czerny, and for violin, Wolfhardt, Maza, and Hans Sitt. She teaches across styles: classical, baroque, romantic, contemporary, and blues. She also insists on workshops and recitals throughout the year, not as performances for parents but as tools for building confidence and real-world stage experience in her students.

What shows up repeatedly in reviews is how quickly students notice a difference after coming to Tolva. One parent described bringing her daughter — who had already studied with two other teachers for two years — to Tolva for a first lesson. The change was immediate. 'On her first lesson, the difference was obvious,' the parent wrote. 'Colleen taught her to connect her notes and she immediately sounded 100% better.' That kind of practical, audible result in a single session says something about the precision Tolva brings to technical instruction.

Students also describe something harder to quantify: a teacher who holds high expectations while making the experience feel genuinely encouraging. One adult student in her sixties — returning to piano after decades away — noted that Tolva 'expects her students to do their very best and to feel the mood of the music as well as to master the technique.' Another student, Madison, who has studied both violin and piano with Tolva for six years, offered a candid and telling observation: 'She also puts me in books I don't like; but I know it will be good for me and help me grow as a musician.' That kind of honest trust between a student and teacher takes years to build.

Outside the studio, Tolva is a painter, a photographer, a former president of the Society of Washington Artists, a caregiver who has volunteered in nursing homes, and a grandmother of twelve — with fourteen great-grandchildren. She mentions, with characteristic humor, that she is 'really not that old.' Students travel from as far as Camas to Hazel Dell for lessons with her, and former students from Bountiful, Utah still write to say they miss her. She keeps a quote from Plato posted — 'Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination' — and teaches as though she believes every word of it.

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