MANKAYA, Benguet – The Lepanto Elementary School Drum and Lyre band got a boost in its drive for excellence, following a donation last December 9 of a set of musical equipment by the Lepanto National High School Batch ’70, to make the group a more unique and essential component in the school’s educational and civic community inclusiveness.
There is truth to the saying that “music charms the soul or music has a soul,” driving community members in Lepanto, particularly former students themselves, to band together to support a common cause for the present students desiring to excel in music.
Music, as an art, has a triple function: creative, sanctifying and redemptive. It is creative as it captures the raw materials of feeling and fact, sanctifying because it imparts to the transitory a relative form of interpretation and redemptive because it metamorphoses ugliness or pain of life into joy or beauty.
With these in mind, the donors committed to ensuring that the culture of appreciating music will endure among the elementary students of Lepanto Elementary School.
The Lepanto Elementary School Drum and Lyre band is driven by combining passion for music, love, and loyalty for hometown and school, exposing local musical talents to different activities to further develop them as future musicians.
The band also encourages each member to grow socially as individuals or group, promote school spirit and triggers in each student the desire to reach her or his potential.
The donated musical equipment badly needed by the Lepanto Elementary School to supplement their existing instruments consist of 2 sets of bass drums, 4 table lyre, 2 quadro, 5 snare drums, 1 trio and 1 set of cymbals.
Engr. Cornelio Q. Casido, president of Lepanto National High School Grand Alumni, handed over the equipment to Jessica M. Molano, the adviser of the Lepanto Elementary School Drum and Lyre band.
Casido and Lepanto National High School Alumni, Batch ’70, graduated from Lepanto Elementary School in 1966.
By Eleuterio Tegan