2013 Scout House 75th Anniversary Tour Details
Preston Scout House Alumni Band, of Cambridge, will open and close its 75th anniversary year regular season tour schedule with performances in Rochester, New York.
Scout House already has more than 20 stage, street and field performances on its 2013 performance schedule, including visits to three locations that are particularly memorable in the Band’s history: Rochester and Hornell, New York and Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
The Scout House 2013 summer season opens in Rochester with a stage performance on Saturday April 13 at St. Joe’s Alumni Classic concert and winds up with an exhibition field show performance at the Empire Statesmen’s home show on Saturday August 24. The Alumni Spectacular field concert during Drum Corps Associates (DCA) annual championship tournament a week later on Labor Day weekend signals the end of the Scout House summer touring schedule and the start of the fall parade season in the Cambridge area.
In between the two Rochester appearances, Scout House will appear in more than a dozen communities in southern Ontario, Pennsylvania and New York. Events include the Victoria Day parade in Woodstock in May, Burlington Sound of Music Festival parade and street concert in June, Canada Day parade in Cambridge in July, and the 4th annual Scout House Invitational Tattoo in Waterloo and Cactus Festival Parade in Dundas in August.
Scout House will march in a May 25, 2013 parade expected to provide three hours of entertainment for spectators on the street in Erie, Pennsylvania. The parade is one of many major events scheduled on both sides of the Great Lakes marking the ongoing 200th anniversary of the War of 1812-1814. The Erie parade will celebrate the 1813 American victory over the British fleet for control of Lake Erie. Scout House also marched in a long parade along the Niagara River in Fort Erie, Ontario last June, the first official Canadian event marking the anniversary.
The Band first performed a field show exhibition in Rochester in 1956. The Tournament of Drums appearance was part of a memorable summer schedule that also took Scout House to Drums on Parade in Madison, Wisconsin and the Cavalcade of Champions at Bucknell Stadium in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for the first time. American audiences in these cities were treated to what was widely regarded as the most original, intricate field show of its day.
The field show highlighted the innovative novelty choreography routines that produced standing ovations at every show and came to give Scout House a unique identity in the drum and bugle corps community. Also in 1956, the Scout House horn line introduced new E flat bass baritones created specifically for the Band by a Toronto company.
The 1956 field show opened with the famous Waterloo Fanfare, still popular with alumni audiences more than 50 years later. The Band moved off the line playing the march Hi Ho It’s Off To Work We Go from the Disney movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs followed by the stately Slow March, with knees lifted even higher than the usual distinctive marching style. That was followed by the signature tune Waltzing Matilda, leading into Hi Lily Hi Lo with horn players swaying gently from side to side.
The standstill concert of Rhapsody in Blue was one of the first examples of non-traditional music during a field show. More movies tunes followed the concert, but the highlight of the second half of the show was Wooden Soldiers, with musicians rocking to and fro like wind up toys. Scout House then made its way across the finish line playing Wish Me Luck before turning back to face the audience, kneeling and waving good bye to spectators.
In the year following the wildly enthusiastic response from audiences at every appearance in the United States and Canada in 1956, Scout House added more competition appearances to its schedule.
Until 1957, Scout House had rarely competed outside the Waterloo Music Festival. Most field show appearances were exhibitions. In its first full season of competition, Scout House opened its schedule with a return to Rochester, taking first place in the International Spectacle of Music. In August, spectators at the Cavalcade of Champions in Lewisburg awarded an exhibition performance by Scout House the only standing ovation of the evening at a contest won by Hawthorne Caballeros.
Spectators in Hornell, New York also fell in love with Scout House. Organizers of the 1961 Drum Corps Pageant emphasized the Band over the competing corps in the publicity campaign with bumper stickers that read, “Scout House is coming back!”
In 2013, Scout House will open its field show with a nostalgic touch, playing Memories: The Way We Were, from the 1973 movie The Way We Were. The Band’s street parade repertoire will give spectators a blast from the past with heritage tunes including Waterloo Fanfare, Colonel Bogey, Wayward Wind and Men of Harlech. Along with something old, the Band is offering something new for anniversary year audiences: quad drums in the percussion section. Mello phones were added to the horn line, in addition to French horns, for the 2012 performing season.
Before disbanding in 1967, Scout House performed regularly from the American Midwest to the Atlantic coast, traveling up to eight thousand miles a year while winning more than 80 international, national, provincial and regional titles. The original Scout House Band and director Wilf Blum are both members of the City of Cambridge Hall of Fame. Blum was one of the first Canadians inducted into the World Drum Corps Hall of Fame.
Since its first stage show in 1999, Scout House Alumni Band has performed in more than 360 parades, field shows and concerts in communities across Ontario and Quebec, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Florida, West Virginia and Maryland.
For more information about Preston Scout House Alumni 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/
