Empire Statesmen At Geneva Family Festival
It’s an Old Time Family Fun Festival, so Rochester’s Empire Statesmen are taking the kids with them to Geneva, NY this weekend, with both groups scheduled to perform on Saturday, June 3. The Empire Cadets, the youth marching band operated by the Empire Statesmen as a community outreach program, will perform at 4:30, and the Empire Statesmen will perform in concert at 5 pm.
The concert performances are part of the weekend schedule that includes two days of intensive practice on the Statesmen’s 2006 field show contest routine. The Statesmen will leave Rochester Friday evening to travel to Marcus Whitman High School in Rushville, NY, just a few miles west of Geneva, for an indoor concert in the high school auditorium at 8:30 pm. The corps will then travel to Geneva, to spend two nights in one of the dormitories at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
Hobart College was founded in 1789 as Geneva Medical College, but eventually included studies in literature, letters, and the humanities. In 1822, Reverend John Henry Hobart, the Episcopal Bishop of Western New York helped to expand the college, which was renamed Hobart Free College (then Hobart College). William Smith College was founded in 1908 by Geneva nurseryman and philanthropist William Smith as a co-ordinate women’s college, sharing certain facilities and faculty with Hobart College.
The Empire Statesmen will spend most of the day on Saturday at practice, beginning at 10 am, and practicing again on Sunday from 9 am to 3 pm.
The Statesmen’s summer contest season begins two weekends later, at the Drum Corps Associates (DCA) contest in Wildwood, New Jersey. That contest features the Reading Buccaneers, the 2005 DCA champions. Statesmen finished second to the Bucs at last year’s championship tournament in Scranton, Pennsylvania. This year’s tournament will be hosted by the Empire Statesmen in downtown Rochester’s new Paetec Park Stadium on Labor Day weekend.
The Empire Statesmen will be working hard when members of the public enjoy the Independence Day holiday weekend in July. The Statesmen will present the Vince Bruni Preview of Champions contest at Wegman’s Stadium at Aquinas Institute on July 1; march in three local parades over the weekend and present a field exhibition during a Raging Rhinos soccer game in Paetec Park Stadium on July 3.
The Empire Statesmen drum and bugle corps is a self-supporting independent group that represents the city of Rochester across the United States and Canada and as far abroad as Europe, the Caribbean and South America.
This year’s performance schedule will take the corps across the northeast, from the Atlantic shore of southern New Jersey to central Ohio and southern Pennsylvania.
The Statesmen have won the DCA world championship title five times in the past 15 years: in 1991, 1994, 1997, 1998 and 2004. The corps also won the American Legion national title in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2004.
In 1998, the Statesmen became the only drum corps in history to win the triple crown: the World Show Band Championship, with the highest score ever recorded in that contest, in London, England, the DCA title and the American Legion championship. The World Drum Corps Hall of Fame chose the Empire Statesmen as the senior corps of the decade for the 1990s.
More information about the Empire Statesmen summer performance schedule is available by calling (585) 266-2232 or visiting the Web site at: www.statesmen.org
