B’ville-area residents gathered ‘round the TV to watch the 88th Annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade will have another reason to be thankful next week: C.W. Baker High School’s Marching Bees band will march in the parade.
The Marching Bees are the first marching band from Central New York to participate in the parade, and the first New York band in about a decade.
Band director Casey Vanderstouw received the invitation not long after he applied to be in the parade in February 2013, but he had to keep the news under wraps for two months.
“I applied four times — the fourth time was the charm,” Vanderstouw said, adding that it was “surreal to find out Baldwinsville is going to be marching in the most famous parade in the world.”
The Marching Bees’ musicians and color guard — “one-hundred sixty of Baldwinsville’s finest,” as Vanderstouw calls them — will take part in the nearly three-mile parade, which starts at 77th Street near Central Park and ends in Macy’s Herald Square on 34th Street in New York City.
For most of the parade, the Marching Bees will be performing a “Patriotic Medley” that includes songs such as “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “America the Beautiful.” For the 6th Avenue stretch — the part of the parade filmed for television — the band will play an arrangement of Daft Punk music, made popular by hit a cappella group Pentatonix.
“By chance, Pentatonix is going to be in the parade with us,” Vanderstouw said.
Vanderstouw said the marching band has doubled its usual load of songs for the season to accommodate the parade in addition to its regular fall schedule.
The students braved the cold for a handful of “endurance rehearsals” on the track at Baker’s Pelcher-Arcaro Stadium. Vanderstouw charged them with marching and playing 12 laps around the track, about the length of the parade.
“On a night this cold, they shouldn’t sound this good,” Vanderstouw said of the Nov. 12 rehearsal, when the low temperature was 34 degrees. “They can be trained to perform in any element.”
Senior flute player Emily Bayhan said she cried when she found out the Marching Bees would be in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that we’d gotten a spot in this amazing parade,” Bayhan said. “All this practicing we’re doing is making it become a reality.”
Bayhan said the Pentatonix medley of Daft Punk is “super-poppy” and relevant to what is popular on the radio currently.
As for the chilly endurance rehearsals, she said they are “physically taxing.”
“It’s a discipline exercise to be out here in 30-degree weather,” she said. “We have metal instruments, and it gets really cold and my lips get chapped.”
Despite the weather, Bayhan said she goes home “knowing you’ve achieved something no other group in this school district can achieve.”
The parade will be one of Bayhan’s last marching band events before she graduates.
“It’s one of those ‘last hurrah’ kind of things,” she said. “Having this opportunity to continue marching and playing music with the people I love is fantastic, and I love every second of it.”
If you don’t have the chance to be one of the 3.5 million people who experience the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in person, you can watch it from the comfort of your home (with 50 million others, of course). NBC broadcasts the parade at 9 a.m. Thursday, Nov. 27.
“For the people in Baldwinsville to see these kids march into the star in Herald Square — that’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” Vanderstouw said. “These kids are going to remember it for the rest of their lives. This is the top of the top.”
