Marching bands from several US high schools traveled to London this New Year’s to bring some music to the distinctly English New Year’s Day Parade this afternoon. The band from Barrington High School in northwest-suburban Illinois performed right between a dance group from Bolivia and a bagpipe band from England in what is the largest parade in the world, the Daily Herald reported.
“It’s a big experience,” the paper quoted band director Randy Karon as saying. “We’ve traveled all over North America but we’ve never traveled overseas. There’s so much history and culture here, you just can’t help but learn something. We’ve had a tremendous experience.”
US high school bands participating in the parade included:
- Barrington, Ill., Randy Karon, director
- Leon High School, Tallahassee, Fla., Brett Pikuritz, director
- Menchville High School, Newport News, Va., Deborah L Sarvay, director
- Middletown, Del., Brian Endlein, director
- Mill Creek High School, Hoschton, Ga., Erik Mason, director
- Oak Grove High School, San Jose, Calif., Chris and Teresa Moura, directors
- Park Hill South High School, Kansas City, Mo., Craig Miller, director
- Pittsburg, Calif., Jennifer Martinez-Narez, director
- Ramsey, N.J., Clifford Bialkin, director
- Santa Fe High School, Edmond, Okla., Mike Lowery, director
- Southwest High School, Lincoln, Neb., Terry R Rush, director
- JP Taravella High School, Coral Springs, Fla., Cheldon Williams, director
- Troy, Ohio, Katherine A McIntosh, director
- West Monroe, La., Robert Freeman, director
The event was streamed live on the Internet, and it seems there was some rain—fairly typical for London this time of year. The weather didn’t seem to dampen the festivities at all.
The BBC reported that the lead-off marching band, the Banda de Musica Colegio Moisés Castillo Ocaña, from the city of Chorerra, Panama, had their instruments seized at London’s Heathrow Airport on Dec 27.
As this was the band’s first experience on the European continent, the required paperwork for bringing instruments like tubas and 70 others into the UK wasn’t filled out properly. We know the instruments were shipped through Amsterdam, but further details weren’t reported. Thanks to some people at Heathrow, the band got their instruments in time for the step-off at noon on New Year’s Day, but they hadn’t arrived in time for the group to participate in a practice run on Monday.
In the end, everyone was just happy to get the instruments back from the authorities. “The band have been preparing for a considerable time and they’ve raised a lot of money to give storm-lashed London a lift,” a member of the parade team was quoted as saying, as he was thanking Heathrow officials for processing the shipment so the parade could go on.
Next year, we know one band that will participate in the parade, and that will be the band from Dulaney High School in Timonium, Md. We look forward to that event next New Year’s.
