HBHS Rocks, Grooves and Plays Jazz Around the Clock

Irrepressible Head of Music Adrian Botting led an enthusiastic group of students, staff and parents through a 24 Hour Musicathon this weekend, to raise cash for a music trip to Fiji in June.  The event began at 6.00pm on Friday and involved musical performances, rehearsals and ‘events’ which attracted audiences of up to seventy people at different times.

The Captain of Arts, Tahi Fu (Year 13) commented:

The idea was to raise money for the trip to Fiji, to have a really good time, and to raise awareness about the idea that Music is a really cool aspect of school culture. We printed out fliers and sent them around, used word of mouth and created a Facebook event which brought people in.

On Friday  we had around fifty to sixty people in the room, including quite a lot of parents.  This increased and decreased as the night went on – we had more than a full house at different stages which was really great.  We started off with the Gypsy Pickers last night, then moved on to some single items, then Dinosaur Goes Rawr (an HBHS band), and The Good Fun, featuring Leroy Clampitt.  After that we had smaller items including myself, Tyler Campbell and Leroy by himself.  We had a very cool electronic music demonstration by Jeremy Mayall (HBHS Old Boy and previous member of the Music Faculty) and Mr Peters (current HBHS teacher). I performed at 3.00am – I did a couple of songs and then I think I fell asleep. We got up at 7.00am to do a Choir performance for an hour, and there were more solo and ensemble performances as the evening went on.

We’re really pleased that we’ve had an audience for the whole event, and even if we didn’t, we’d still keep performing because we’re sponsored, and the opportunity to practice together is really important. The parents have supported us with a sausage sizzle, with security, and with transport. It’s been really great, and this will be an event that we all look back on and say to each other ‘do you remember when we did the 24 hour Musicathon at school?’

I want to tell Mr Botting he’s a great Music teacher, mentor and co-ordinator.  Every single one of the boys appreciates the effort he and teachers like Mr Peters puts in, and we’re far better musicians because we’ve been to HBHS.’