Two Area Bands Set To Embark On International Good Will Trip
ST. CLOUD (WJON News) -- Two community bands are set to embark on a goodwill trip on Thursday. The St. Cloud Municipal Band and the Meire Grove Community Band have teamed up for a trip to St. Cloud’s sister city of Spalt, Germany, and Meire Grove’s ancestral city of Holdorf, Germany.
In between the group will do some site seeing as well. The joint band will play a concert along with the city's band in both Spalt and Holdorf. The Municipal Band’s Business Manager Joe Fox says it is only natural to do a few concerts when the bands travel abroad:
“Every time we’ve gone over we’ve done a joint concert with the Spalt band and when Gary went over they did a joint concert so of course when both bands are going over we’re going to do joint concerts in both cities.”
Meire Grove Band Director Gary Zwack says visiting Holdorf is like visiting family for them:
“So when we went over there it was interesting to see the Corpus Christi Chapel that the Meire family had hundreds of years ago and to see the farmland that they were growing up in four generations ago and so there was a lot of that and so not only family but then of course friendships and there’s a lot of interest in the history.”
Fox says besides building new friendships on the trip there is so much history to see:
“When you go over to Europe it’s thousands of years old so they have buildings that are seven, eight, nine hundred years old, you just don’t see that in the United States so it’s very, very eye-opening to go over there take a look at some of that history.”
Fox says this will be the St. Cloud band’s first trip to Europe since the pandemic and he reached out to Zwack about doing the joint trip. Zwack says it is a natural fit for the two groups to team up:
“We have kind of a similar history the band started in 1883 and we’ve been performing every year since that date and in 2011 and 2016 we took trips over to Germany kind of following the traces of the Meire Grove community, they came from the northern part of Germany, Holdorf, and Dinklage and so we’ll be ending up this trip with concerts there.”
Zwack says they have people of all ages in both bands and one of the things that makes playing in a band so great is the length of time you can do it.
He says bands are like a big family and some people going play in both the Meire Grove and St. Cloud bands. There are 40 band members going on the trip and they will be gone from June 13th through the 24th.
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