First Rehearsal For Scout House Mini Corps
The new Scout House Band mini corps will Riverdance its way into competition in 2015, with rehearsals starting at the Knights of Columbus building, 333 Speedsville Road, in the Preston neighbourhood of Cambridge on Sunday, October 26. The weekly sessions will run from 10 am to noon, with regular Scout House brass and percussion music rehearsals running from 1 to 4 pm throughout the winter.
The rehearsal schedule is planned to prepare the group for various winter and spring performance opportunities leading up to the 2015 Drum Corps Associates (DCA) mini corps contest as part of the world championship drum and bugle corps tournament in Rochester, New York on Labour Day weekend September 4, 5 and 6.
Membership is open to Scout House Band members and others with drum and bugle corps experience. Information about the Scout House mini corps is available at: http://minicorps.scouthouseband.com The new group is under the direction of Scout House lead trumpet section member Eric Bremner, who can be contacted at eric [dot] bremner [at] rogers [dot] com
Eric Bremner has been playing horn since age 14, beginning as a member of the Royal Canadian Sea Cadet Corps (RCSCC) Royal Sovereign in Sault Ste. Marie. He completed many summers with the drum and bugle band at Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Ontario Sea Cadet Summer Training Centre. He served on the Regional Cadet Music Training staff from 1999 to 2013, when he joined Scout House.
He played with Kingston Grenadiers drum and bugle corps in 1999 and 2000 and has also performed with the Royal Marines Association of Ontario Concert Band, of Cobourg. He has also been a band officer with RCSCC Royal Sovereign and more recently RCSCC Warspite, of Kitchener, which in its first year of competition reached fifth place in Ontario.
Riverdance, mainly featuring traditional Irish music and dance routines, has become a favourite theatrical production around the world since being introduced as a seven minute interval performance, featuring Irish dancing champions Jean Butler and Michael Flatley, during the Eurovision Song Contest held in Dublin in 1994. The expanded stage show version opened in Dublin in February 1995. The 20th anniversary Riverdance tour is currently offering performances across the United Kingdom, Europe and China until March 2015.
The 2015 Scout House mini corps program is presented in four parts:
Riverdance Opener: Cloudsong and the main theme of Riverdance are presented in both slow and fast tempos designed to invigorate and excite the audience. Cloudsong represents the negotiations that early people made with the elements as they worked with wood, stone and water to come to terms with a world that exerted great power on them. The passion of the dancer expressed in Riverdance is a response to the sun: in ancient Ireland, fire, pride and beauty came from the south, the land of the sun.
Riverdance Production Part 1: The Heart’s Cry, Women of the Sidhe and Andalucia stand as a nice interlude for the entire show. The Heart’s Cry is a musical response to the urging of our natural instincts, a recognition in songs from the beginning of time that we need and must sustain each other. Women of the Sidhe are sensual, nurturing, independent and fierce, celebrating themselves as they challenge men in a dance of empowerment. In Andalucia, the energy generated by big city street life is reflected in fiery Latin rhythms.
Riverdance Production Part 2: Lift the Wings and American Wake gear up for the grand finale. Lift The Wings depicts the buoyant human spirit of those dealing with the heartbreak of separation when forced to emigrate to a new country. American Wake recalls the anguish of Irish people forced out of their homes in the mid-19th century by famine to a city life in the new world across the Atlantic Ocean.
Riverdance Closer: Home and the Heartland and the main theme from Riverdance bring the show to a dramatic close. Heartland
expresses the confidence and pride of a child of emigrants who brings treasured memories home to their birthplace as a long journey ends under a native sky.
Scout House mini corps activity was originally scheduled to begin in January 2014, but extremely cold weather and hazardous storm conditions throughout most of the winter forced cancellation of so many initial practice nights that the project was postponed until now.
Regular Sunday music practices for the full Band are already underway although Scout House still has several performances scheduled for the weeks ahead. The Band will participate in November 11 Remembrance Day ceremonies in support of the Royal Canadian Legion branches in the Galt, Hespeler and Preston neighbourhoods of Cambridge. This year’s ceremony will take place in Galt.
The performance season winds up with Christmas parades in Cambridge on Saturday evening November 15 and Sunday afternoon in Guelph on November 16.
Since its first performance in 1999, Scout House has performed more than 425 concerts, street parades and field shows in Ontario, Quebec and 10 American states: Michigan, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland and Florida.
Scout House now includes about 90 marching members from more than 20 communities across southern Ontario who had previously been associated with more than 75 marching music organizations. The Scout House family also includes the Scout House Cadets drum and bugle corps for boys and girls from age 10 to 18.
New members for both groups are welcome throughout the year in marching music positions and a variety of support positions.
For information about Present Scout House Cadets, email pshcadets [at] outlook [dot] com, telephone (519) 886-7468 or visit the web site at http://www.scouthouseband.com/
For more information about Scout House Band, contact Activities Director Nancy Weiler at telephone (519) 653-3376, email prestonscouthouseband [dot] adm [at] sympatico [dot] ca or visit the Web site at http://www.scouthouseband.com/
