ATHOL — For the first time in a century or more, the sounds of John Philip Sousa will fill the air at Memorial Hall at Athol’s Town Hall. The John Philip Sousa National High School Honors Band will perform, beginning at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, June 28. Athol is the first stop on a tour that includes a performance on June 27 at 7 p.m. at Gardner’s Monument Park and another on June 29 at 7 p.m. at Mechanics Hall in Worcester.
Dr. Thomas Reynolds, the administrator of the band, told the Athol Daily News, “We’re getting the National High School Honor Band up and running again after a hiatus of a couple of years due to the pandemic. We did start it in 1981 and had it every two years since then.
“It started in Washington, D.C., moved for a couple of years to New Orleans. After we had our festival in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina hit and it kind of went on hold because people didn’t seem to want to go back to New Orleans, and that’s where they wanted to have it. So, it was left kind of dormant until 2017 and in 2018 we brought it to Massachusetts. We had it Boston.”
Reynolds said plans then called for performances in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
“So, we’ve been working on this particular project for a couple of years,” he said. “Now we’re at a point where we’ve had students audition for it around the country and we’ve selected a group. And now we’re ready to move forward again.”
Reynolds explained the thought behind the choice of venues.
“The reason that Athol and Gardner were included in the performance venues, in addition to Worcester, is because all three of the venues were sites where the original John Philip Souza band actually performed,” he said.
Reynolds said plans call for Sousa historical plaques to be presented to each community during the band’s performances in Athol and Gardner. A similar plaque was presented to Worcester during a performance by a New England regional band in 2019.
He added that the band truly is a national band.
“We have students from all four corners of the country,” said Reynolds. “Washington state, California, Texas, North Dakota, Florida, Maine and a whole bunch of places in between.
“In this case, choosing them was fairly easy because most of the state all-state music festivals for high school students around the country were done virtually. So, what happened was they had to prepare videos of their pieces and they sent us copies of the pieces they played to try out for their own all-state festivals. We could actually listen to each one and compare them. It worked out very nicely for us.”
Reynolds said a total of 90 high school musicians — freshman through senior — are performing with the band.
Locally, the John Philip Sousa National High School Honor Band will include Alma White and Dylan Wornham of Athol; Brianna Nunez of Templeton; Tiana Graessle of Winchendon; Olivia Charette, and Emily Shouse of Gardner and Declan LeClair of Westminster.
Asked about Sousa’s connection to Athol, Reynolds said, “They performed in Athol between 1898 and 1928 six different times. The Sousa band always enjoyed staying at the Pequoig Hotel.
“The Sousa Foundation commissioned someone to write a book, kind of a data base listing of all the communities the Souza band performed in during the entire time it was in existence. It’s thousands of performances all over North America, South America, Europe, a few in Africa, and Australia.
“In looking at Massachusetts for the book, we discovered that Athol had six performances, Gardner had three, Mechanics Hall in Worcester had 27 performances. We have a historical marker project — the Sousa Foundation — where we’re trying to be involved in presenting different historical plaques to different communities and we just felt this was a natural extension of the program we’re doing, by blending this with the National High School Honor Band program that we do.”
A visit by the Sousa band was, in its day, akin to a tour stop by Kenrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, Florence and the Machine, or Future, or (for those of us of a different generation) the Beatles, Stones, Springsteen, or Pink Floyd.
John Philip Sousa was born in 1854 in Washington, D.C. He joined the United States Marine Band as an apprentice in 1868. Between 1880 and his death in 1932, he focused on conducting and composing. Becoming known as the “American March King,” Sousa is probably best remembered for penning “The Stars and Strips Forever,” “Semper Fidelis,” “The Thunderer” and “The Washington Post March.” He also wrote several operettas.
Sousa is interred at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com