MENNO BAND DAY: MARCHING ORDERS
The Sioux Falls Lutheran Marching Eagles were led by a human-powered steam engine as the band presented a four-song medley of locomotive-themed tunes, the Dakota Valley color guard wore flannel as the band marched to “Country Roads Take Me Home,” the ladies leading the Tri-Valley Marching Mustangs donned green fighter pilot jackets in support of the theme from Top Gun, “Great Balls of Fire” and “Danger Zone,” and the Tea Area Titans Marching Band put on a show — as in “The Greatest Showman” — as Menno Band Day once again lit up Fifth Street with pageantry and precision late last week.
All told, 21 bands from as close as Scotland to as far as Pierre descended on Menno Friday, Oct. 6 in support of one of the community’s finest and longest-standing traditions. With roots that go back as far as 1970, Menno Band Day has been held 13 times in the past 15 years and every fall since 2020, and band itself has been an important part of the Menno narrative since — remarkably — even before the turn of the 20th century.
“It goes back aways, that’s for sure,” says Judy Headley, who wrote the account of the Menno School included in the town’s centennial history book published in 1979, which reports that a “village band” was organized in 1885 and a town concert band had been established by 1896. And in 1926, the Hutchinson Herald wrote that “Menno out classes many larger cities as a musical center.”
“It hasn’t been just the school,” Headley continues. “There have been community bands over the years, and when Larry Tolzin was here, we got a big shot in the arm. He really liked the marching band — the performance band.”
Tolzin, the legendary director and band booster whose heyday in Menno came in the 1960s and 1970s and who passed away on Jan. 28, 2021, would have no doubt reveled in the sights and sounds of last week’s Menno Band Day.
After all, he’s the one who founded it in 1970, when the Menno Marching Band was one of the best around.
“There were a lot of competitions back in the day,” says Jim Schnaidt, a Menno High School 1972 graduate who played tuba under Tolzin’s director’s watch — and still plays to this day. “We had a really good winning band; we’d play at college homecomings and all these festivals, and Larry loved it.”
In fact, Schnaidt says the story he hears is that Menno Band Day was discontinued just a few years after it started because, in Tolzin’s final year of teaching in 1972-73, just two of the dozen-or-more bands that agreed to participate actually showed up — likely out of petty resentment for the superior Marching Wolves.
“He was done after that,” Schnaidt says. “Band Day fell out of favor for a while.”
In fact, it wasn’t until former Menno band director Gwen Wenisch brought it back in 2006 that Menno Band Day found a new life. With the exception of 2018 and 2019, it has been held every year since.
“It’s amazing,” says Martin Sieverding, who holds a degree in music from Augustana College and came to Menno in the fall of 1979 to start what would be a 21-year career as band director for the Wolves. “It’s so nice to have a place where these students can perform and get an appreciative crowd. Schools don’t have a lot of opportunities like this. Football teams play eight, nine, 10 games a season, basketball teams play 22; it seems like these kind of things don’t happen a lot for musicians so it’s great to see them shine in the things they love to do.”
Sieverding, who remains on staff at Menno as the technology coordinator, was once again the public address announcer at last week’s Menno Band Day and shared a platform three judges carefully considering what was before them. With the exception of the marching bands from Menno and Yankton High School, those attending competed for multiple awards.
Results follow.
Middle School:
1st place: Tea Area
2nd place: Yankton
Class C:
1st Place: Tri-Valley
2nd Place: Canistota
Class B:
1st Place: Centerville
2nd Place: Scotland
Class A
1st Place: Tea Area HS
2nd Place: Pierre TF Riggs
Outstanding Color Guard:
Dakota Valley
Outstanding Percussion:
Tea Area High School
Outstanding Winds
Tea Area High School
Outstanding Drum Major
Canistota High School
Elden Samp Crown Pleaser:
Sioux Falls Lutheran
Sweepstakes:
Tea Area High School
The collective whole
According to the rosters printed in the booklet, this year’s Band Day featured 995 musicians, 131 color guard members, 30 drum majors and 25 directors for a total participation of 1,181. Add to all of that the hundreds who lined Fifth Street for the parade and — well, that’s a lot of people in Menno on a late-Friday morning.
“It’s great to see so many people involved in such an important and rewarding activity,” said Kevin Kessler, who since 2015 has been director of athletic bands at South Dakota State University — including the Pride of the Dakotas — and was one of three judges working this year’s Menno Band Day. “That’s the most important thing — just to see the numbers, how big some of these bands are and how enthusiastic their membership is.”
Kessler says the themes chosen by many of the bands — Menno marched to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” — reflect a relatively recent evolution in style and design.
“It has changed, especially on the street,” he says. “It was not unusual to see that in field shows, but in the past 15 or 20 years, especially in this area, that pageantry has found its way to the street and it’s a lot of fun.”
Sieverding noted the same thing — specifically the retrograde motion that happens when band members intentionally fall out of line in favor of choreography.
“When I was the director we didn’t do any of this kind of stuff,” he says.
In fact, the bands back in his day were discouraged from doing that.
“They wanted the parade to keep moving,” says Sieverding, who likes the change. After all, he says, “music involves the whole body.”
Kessler, who also teaches music education courses at SDSU, wasn’t charged on Friday with judging the movement, but rather the instrumentation presented by the bands, “so I’m listening for how the band sounds as a whole,” he says. “What is their overall tone? And then it gets into details such as, are they playing with good dynamic contrast; are they playing with precision rhythmically; how does their drumline line up with the winds?”
And?
“It was a really good day,” Kessler said. “This competition lines up with the middle or toward the end of some of these bands’ competitive season, so at this point they’re really at the top of their game.”
Organizational effort
In her monthly column published on page 8A of this week’s Courier, Roberta Stoebner zeros in on the volunteer force that makes Menno Band Day work, and touches on the spirit of the day.
“Last Friday people bundled up to watch the performances on a sunny, but very chilly and windy day,” she writes. “But that didn’t dampen their enthusiasm as their favorite bands came into view.”
Steven Bray had both a behind-the-scenes and up-close view of all that went into last week’s event. He is, after all, the band director at Menno.
“Everyone has their job and they do their job well,” says Bray, who is in his second year directing the Wolves. “Aside from myself sending out the worker/volunteer information, people in the school administration office are helping me organize things, my Menno Music Boosters put together all of the concessions and meals that we feed the bands, and they do a fantastic job with that.”
Bray also says his band students really “rose to the occasion” in helping get everything set up, “and a lot of people come up and say, ‘What do you need?’ and ‘What can I do?’
“It’s awesome.”
It’s that level of commitment that has sustained music in Menno — band specifically — over the decades and through the generations. From the tax level imposed by the city of Menno in the early 1900s that help pay for instruments and uniforms to the level of support Sieverding felt early on in his career at Menno, it has been a constant.
“I thought I’d be here three, four, five years and then move on,” Siverding said. “But I had all the help I wanted from the community and the parents. I always felt so supported and that’s the big reason why I stayed.”
And that’s a big reason why Menno Band Day will assuredly return in 2024. “I hoping to keep this consistency going,” said Bray. “Because this is fantastic.”
