NOTL'S Dr. Peter Simon named to Order of Ontario

As he retires from his role as president and CEO of the Toronto-based Royal Conservatory (RCM) at the end of August, 2024, Dr. Peter Simon may not have much time to prominently display in his office the official Order of Ontario insignia badge he will soon receive from the Honourable Edith Dumont, Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and Chancellor of the Order of Ontario.   

A Niagara-on-the-Lake resident, Simon is one of 25 new Ontarians named to the province’s highest honour on January 2. 

“I am deeply honoured to be acknowledged for the work I’ve done over 33 years,” he says. “It’s very special, and I am very grateful. I happen to know several of the people on this year’s list, too. These are all people of great achievement, and they are very good people who care about their community. I am happy to be included among them.”

For Simon, a highly educated and accomplished pianist himself, his career with the Conservatory has been all about using the arts to further the personal, intellectual, and social development of all people in Canada and beyond.

“I believe that music is the most important means that we have to develop both individual lives and society itself,” Simon tells The Local. “There are immense benefits that studying music brings to young people. It opens their minds and their hearts to creativity and self-expression. It develops discipline and makes them problem-solvers. It allows one to enter the sublime realm of imagination.”

With retirement looming, Simon has had much time to reflect on his more than three decades leading RCM through an extended period of rapid growth and expansion.

During his tenure, RCM launched its Learning Through The Arts initiative that sought to put the arts at the centre of public education. Since its inception in 1994, more than 300,000 students in over 300 schools and communities have benefitted from the program.

Three years later, Simon launched the Glenn Gould School, now one of the most outstanding performance training institutions in the world for exceptionally gifted musicians, most of whom receive a full-tuition scholarship. Each year the school offers as many as 150 master classes with some of the world’s greatest performers and conductors, including Sir András Schiff, Riccardo Muti and Zubin Mehta. As well, Gould School faculty have included the likes of Paul Kantor, Andrew McCandless, Andrés Diaz, and the late Leon Fleisher.

“He was in my view the greatest living musician in the world,” Simon says of Fleisher, under whom he studied at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. “I later persuaded him to teach at the Glenn Gould School so that our students would have access to the greatest mind in music of our time.”

In 2013, Simon led the restructuring of the Royal Conservatory's young artists programs, renamed The Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists, that provides mentorship and training for 90 highly gifted young musicians between the ages of eight and 18 each year.

He oversaw the fundraising for and the 2009 opening of the new TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning and Koerner Hall, as well as a new Performing Arts Division at The Royal Conservatory which presents and oversees more than 300 concerts and events each year.

And the past 10 years have seen the launch of RCM’s Early Childhood Music Education programs, a new teacher certification program, a new digital learning division and an expansion south of the border, where RCM’s structured curriculum and assessment model has been adopted  by more than 100 schools, 6,000 independent teachers, and approximately 10,000 students in the United States.

Simon never set out to become an arts administrator. Music, though, has always meant everything to him, going back as far as when he took his Grade 2 exam through the Royal Conservatory at the age of eight.  

He studied at RCM as a student of Boris Berlin, whom he considers an agent of change in his life, his first major influence before meeting Fleisher. 

“He allowed me to achieve my potential,” Simon says. “He gave me the confidence to move forward.”

With the goal of becoming a concert pianist, Simon went on to further studies at New York's Juilliard School and in London with Louis Kentner. He received a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from the University of Michigan while studying under Fleisher, then divided his time between performing, teaching at the University of Western Ontario, and overseeing the artistic direction of Preview Concerts in Toronto.

His move into arts administration began in 1986, when Simon returned to The Royal Conservatory as its director of academic studies. In 1989 he moved on to the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, where he became president. Three years later Simon was back at RCM to take the helm of the newly-independent Canadian institution.

“I really felt that the nation needed a strong Conservatory,” he recalls, “because it really is the foundational base of music education across Canada. Hundreds of thousands of students study every year through our learning system. It connects communities in every corner of the nation. There’s really no other institution like this in any other country.”

With Simon’s retirement nearing, he and his wife, Canadian pianist Dianne Werner, moved to the Chautauqua area in 2021 with their German  Shepherd/Rottweiler-mix rescue dog named Scoob.  

“We love Niagara-on-the-Lake,” Simon says. “We think it’s a fantastic community, and we’re very grateful to be here. And our daughter and her husband and their two kids (Peter and Maggie) were already here.”

Simon and Werner are enjoying the quieter life in NOTL, though they still maintain an apartment in Toronto close to the Conservatory, which he will need for at least another eight months as he winds down his presidency. 

“It’s been an all-consuming role,” he says of his 33 years at RCM. “It literally is a 24/7 job, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but it’s the right time to go. It’s emotional thinking about all the lasts that are coming in the next little while.”

At the same time, he knows he will never be fully disconnected from the Conservatory, and he hopes that he can use his decades of experience there to help other arts organizations thrive in the future. 

“I’m a strong believer that you cannot focus just on survival,” he avers.“You have to focus on growth and success.”

And on his own success, and that of The Royal Conservatory, as well as receiving the Order of Ontario this week, he sums it up simply. 

“Music is a transformative power that has no equal,” Simon says, “and the things that I have done have been based on that profound belief
about the benefits that music can provide.”