The Music Marches On

Before Havre had Festival Days the third weekend of September, it had its own sound of music in the city’s May Festival, which showcased area school bands. As these school bands have succumbed to time and interest in other activities, the Havre High School marching band is beating the odds to carry on the musical tradition for parade-goers.

The Havre High marching band will have a few more than 60 members this year, which is about average for a school its size in Montana, said high school band director David Johnke.

Much like the fall sports teams they play music for, the marching band participates in an end of summer practice camp to jump start the school year.

“To kick things off and give them a head start, they do a five-day camp the week before school starts,” Johnke said.

This is a 35-hour camp with instructors brought in specifically to teach students the intricacies of playing in a marching band. Once school starts, band members attend practice for an hour each morning before classes begin.

Though being in pep band, which rallies the crowd and home team during games, is voluntary, participation in marching band is considered co-curricular with being in the school’s concert and jazz bands. For many of the kids, though, Johnke said, playing in the marching band is a highlight of the year.

The band generally skips half-time show performances at the first few home football games while they are still perfecting stepping in time to the music for the public.

“Some kids pick it up fast, and some struggle with it,” Johnke said about learning to march to the music they are playing.

For those kids who need more work, the band goes through a lot of drills, slows the routine down and breaks into small groups to get the kids more individualized help.

“The way I see it, if you can tap your foot in time, you can march. Some kids just don’t think about it, they walk along then think, ‘OK, yeah, I guess I’m supposed to march in time,” and then it starts to click, he said.

Along with learning to march in time and memorizing the marching routines, the band members learn three pieces of music. One is the school song “which they play 100,000 times,” he said, and the other two are show pieces.

“The parade actually helps us to continue to rehearse,” he said, and joked: “... I don’t know how many times we end up repeating (the songs) in the parade but enough times by the time they’re done they better darn well have it under their belt.”

Historic music festival

In the May Festival of early Havre history, bands from area schools marched through town in a parade and went to assigned locations around Havre to give free, mini, street concerts, said Debbie Vandeberg, executive director of Havre Area Chamber of Commerce, who also participated in some of the May Festivals in the mid-1960s.

“I remember I was a part of some of the later May Festivals when I was in middle school,” she said, “and so I played, in fact, down in front of the Barkus Home Center place (now Havre Hardware and Home) in a street concert, because after the parade then everybody was assigned a location then there was 30-minute concerts, all day long.”

She said that there are few records of those May Festivals beyond a handful of fliers and photos, and some personal recollections, but one flier shows that the inaugural event was held May 23, 1931.

That event, organized by Havre Band and Orchestra Association Inc., was anticipated to have 200 musicians performing with bands from Big Sandy, Gildford-Hinghan, Chinook and Turner along with the city, high school and grade school bands from Havre.

The day started with registration, followed by talks during the lunch break from all the musical directors in attendance and Dr. G.H. Vande Bogart, who was president of Northern Montana College at that time, and then 40 to 50 minute concerts from participating school bands.

The event concluded with a parade of all bands and a concert with all the bands playing together.

An entry about May Festival in “Grit, Guts and Gusto: A History of Hill County” says that the following year the festival was held over two days, May 6-7, 1932, with 22 bands from 17 towns — including Shaunavon in Canada — bringing 1,000 musicians and 8,000-10,000 spectators.

A photograph accompanying the writeup shows hundreds of vehicles circled around a filled stage area in an open, natural bowl west of town, as the vehicle occupants wait for the massed band concert.

The writeup says that at its height, the May Festival attracted more than 100 bands.

“I’m not sure when that event ended,” Vandeberg said. “All I know is that 36 years ago a group of business people tried to breathe life back into an event that kind of celebrated the community, so the new face of the event became Festival Days. And they decided to do it in the fall, as I understand, more as a celebration of harvest and the end of summer. I don’t know who those people were. They didn’t keep very good records and I didn’t come on the scene — I chaired Havre Festival Days in 1987 was the first time I got involved.”

When Vandeberg came on board, organizers tried to get the bands back to town, but had no success at it.

Modern challenges

“We were sending letters out to all the area schools. I mean, we went as far as Great Falls and into Canada,” she said. “The challenge is that with kids nowadays they’re so involved in athletics, and with women’s sports, too, that they’re having a hard time making up marching bands. We don’t even have a middle school band that marches anymore.”

Johnke said that other issues also come into play to make participation in these events difficult.

“Marching band is not supported by the (Montana High School Association), so if you do have a marching band it’s on your own scheme, more or less.”

Havre High’s only fellow marching band during the Festival Days parade, South Alberta Pipes and Drums, the popular bagpipe group which drops down from Canada almost every year, is having a difficult time getting enough people together this year, too, said Malcom Sissons, the group’s secretary.

Pipe and drum bands have a long tradition in Canada and the British Empire, said Sissons, including as part of the daily routine in military regiments from the mid-1800s to World War I.

The group, which has organized under the South Alberta Pipes and Drums name since 2004, is a few years past celebrating its 100th anniversary of pipe band tradition in the Medicine Hat, Alberta, area.

Though group’s members enjoy marching in the Festival Days parade and playing around town afterward, this year might be one of the few they have missed, Sissons said.

“We are a small band and if a few of our members have other commitments — work, family, etc. — we are in a tight spot,” he added.

But come Sept. 19 parade-goers will still get to see and hear the local Havre High students during the parade, which is arguably the favorite single event of the weekend.

“We rehearse a lot so they are prepared, so they do sound good,” Johnke said. “That’s the plan. The beginning of the year can be tough because you’re still trying to get them going but, hopefully, by the middle of September, we’re starting to lock on, starting to do pretty well.

“My attempt is to try to get more of a — I don’t want to to say tradition, but more of a custom here that they can try to continue on in the future.”