Madison Scouts welcome their first-ever female brass soloist

The Madison Scouts will make history in 2018, welcoming their first female brass soloist ever for the corps' milestone 80th anniversary.

The corps announced over the weekend that Megan Hutera, a sophomore music education major at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, will headline the corps' 2018 production as a flugelhorn soloist.

"We are excited to involve Megan in our upcoming production," Madison Scouts executive director Chris Komnick said. "She certainly brings an element of intrigue to our show design along with the expected challenges to our long history."

Featuring female performers in the all-male organization which was founded in 1938 as a Boy Scout drum and bugle corps is not unprecedented.

As recently as 2005, Madison utilized a lead female dancer to help bring the corps' modern take on the opera "Carmen" to life.

 

Following the 1980 Drum Corps International World Championships in Birmingham, the Scouts found themselves in need of several additional performers to form an honor guard to compete at the VFW Nationals competition in Chicago. With the help of two Blue Stars members traveling back with the corps to Wisconsin and the younger sister of a Scouts drummer, the trio donned the corps' traditional uniforms complete with penciled mustaches, to hold and guard the American flag for that single performance.

Even earlier in 1971, the Madison Scouts rocked the world of marching music when they utilized the daughter of corps director Bill Howard to play the starring role in the corps' "Alice in Wonderland" production. More so than the corps featuring a female performer, the seminal production has gone down in history as one of the first to feature a fully integrated thematic approach to show design.

Hutera joined the Madison Scouts for the first time during the corps' rehearsal camp February 23-25 at Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis.

"When I walked into the room, [assistant director] David Lofy opened the door and said, 'Welcome to the Madison Scouts,'" Hutera said. "I knew in that moment that this summer is going to change my life."

The Madison Scouts will kick off their 2018 summer tour on June 23 in Whitewater, Wisconsin.