Peggy Revell
All the hard work by the Fort Frances High School band has paid off as members finally head off on their long-awaited trip to Italy over the March Break.
“I’m excited. I’m glad it’s finally here,” Fort High music teacher John Dutton said of the trip that will see a total of 72 students, accompanied by 23 adults, perform and experience the boot-shaped country.
The group is leaving town at 12:30 a.m. tonight to catch a flight out of Winnipeg to Toronto, where they will fly onwards to Italy and arrive for a week-long stay early Friday morning.
And for the first time, district residents will be able to follow the band’s adventures in Italy thanks to a blog hosted at www.fortfrances.com
“This is really cool, this is new!” Dutton enthused of the blog. And with a few laptops going along for the trip, updates just will depend on Internet access.
“What I’m sort of pleased with is I’ve had a number of people that aren’t involved with the band say, ‘Oh I saw your itinerary online,’” noted Dutton. “I think we’re going to sort of be followed along with the trip by more people than ever before.”
Upon arriving back home from their overseas trips, the band always hosts a show-and-tell night, he added.
“It’s very popular,” Dutton said. “We have people coming who aren’t related, they just come because they’re curious.”
What Dutton is looking forward to with this trip is seeing the reaction of students to the sights of Italy like the Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s Basilica, and Michelangelo’s Pieta—things that wowed him the first, second, and even third time he saw them.
“They know what they’re going to see, but they don’t really know what they’re going to experience. It’s just different,” he remarked. “They really don’t know what they’re getting into because all of they’ve got is pictures and my talk.
“So I’m really looking forward to their reaction and their amazement.”
The trip also marks Dutton’s final one to Europe with the Fort High band since he will be retiring at the end of this school year.
“I certainly have some feelings of sadness, but [also] a major sense of accomplishment about what we’ve been able to put together,” he said. “Because it is a major group effort, a lot of dedication to this, and they’ve been an amazing group.
“We raised about $200,000, which is a lot, through any method you could imagine—truck raffles, oranges and grapefruits,” he noted, adding it was a big load off their shoulders when they finished what was two years of fundraising in January to make the trip affordable for the students.
“At this point, the band is ready, the choir is ready. They’re ready to perform,” Dutton enthused, praising the students for their progress as musicians and how they’ve matured to the point of being able to perform more than a dozen musical numbers for an audience, which the community heard at the “farewell concert” held March 5 at the Townshend Theatre.
“If you go and listen to a symphony concert, they play five numbers, they play four numbers,” Dutton explained. “I mean, yes, their numbers are longer, but it’s four or five pieces of music.
“Last [Thursday], we sang eight and we played nine. That’s not something you can ask of too many high school bands.”
Last Thursday’s performance included all the numbers the band will be playing in Italy, from movie themes to pop songs and big band—music that “has become universal,” Dutton said.
“[The students] play the stuff well that they like to play,” he added. “They play a good variety of things and they play with a level of maturity that makes me happy.
“People know the music, people like the music, and they like hearing things they know,” he reasoned.
“We’re doing ‘Carmen’ because when we went to Italy 16 years ago, it was the piece that they kept asking us to play again,” Dutton continued. “If they asked for an encore at the end of a concert, they’d say ‘Play Carmen again.’
“And they did that more than once.
Dutton said he’ll be glad when they’re finally on the road, admitting he’s still worrying about a few things that can go wrong, such as Air Canada deciding it won’t allow certain instruments and containers onto the plane because of their size.
In years past, the band would bring everything, including tympanies. Recently, however, Dutton said there have been issues with these pieces.
And while no tympanies are coming along this year, there is a concert bass drum which is going—whether he has to “beg, plead, or whatever.”
“But I think we’ve covered everything, thought of everything, and the things we haven’t thought of we’ll fix on the way,” Dutton remarked.
