Myanmar Police Band

The Myanmar Police Band (Burmese: ရဲတပ်ဖွဲ့ တီးဝိုင်း) is a military/police band formation in the Myanmar Police Force. Being a battalion-sized organization (it consists of 240 musicians in total), it follows a British and Malaysian military format for marching bands. It is today regarded as Myanmar's oldest brass band, having established in 1945. It is also one of many militarized marching bands in the Myanmar Armed Forces, with the police band being based in Yangon.

History

It was founded in 1945, three years prior to the country gaining its independence from the British Empire. It was at that time, Indians soldiers and Gurkhas from Nepal were recruited to perform during flag-raising ceremonies. The newly formed band consisted of 13 recruits that were trained in Mandalay and sent to towns to train other uniformed musicians. Since 1997, the band has played at military parades and official receptions. The band took its first trip abroad in 2006 to Malaysia to perform with 10 other bands from ASEAN. In 2017, the band hosted the International Police Band Concert in the Kyauktada Township for the first time.[1][2][3][4] It takes part in that event every year, where it performs with police bands from Vietnam and Singapore.[5][6]

Conductor

One of the musicians trained in Tharyarwaddy was U Ba Tin, who would lead the Rangoon Armed Police Band (RAP) with 35 members, working as its band director for almost three decades. His son is Major U Myo Kyi, who is the current director of the band. He took over in 1997 during the military rule of the State Peace and Development Council. He learned clarinet in 1974 and later learned the saxophone before joining the band in 1977 at the age of 18. He expanded the band's profile by personally providing background music for films and radio. One of the more famous movies he performed in was Sone Yay, which was released in August 1990.

Organization

The band is organized into three companies:

  • A Company (42 members)
  • B Company (62 members)
  • C Company (120 members)

A Company is responsible for performing at national ceremonies such as Armed Forces Day[7] and Independence Day. B and C Companies perform at small scale events such as graduation ceremonies.[8]

Sources
  1. "နှစ် ၇၀ ကျော် သက်တမ်းရှိ ရဲတပ်ဖွဲ့တီးဝိုင်း". The Myanmar Times. November 15, 2017.
  2. "ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲတီးဝိုင္းေဖ်ာ္ေျဖပြဲ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ ပထမဆုံး ျပဳလုပ္မည္". ဧရာဝတီ. October 23, 2017.
  3. "ေလးႏုိင္ငံရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕၏ ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲတီးဝိုင္း ခ်ီတက္ေဖ်ာ္ေျဖပြဲ ရန္ကုန္တြင္က်င္းပ - Yangon Media Group".
  4. http://myawady.net.mm/index.php/news/localnews/item/35483-2018-11-27-09-14-10
  5. "22nd International Police Band Concert (2017) held in Yangon". October 28, 2017.
  6. "Myanmar Police Band participating in 23rd World Police Band Concert in Thailand". Ministry Of Information.
  7. "မြန်မာနိုင်ငံရဲတပ်ဖွဲ့ကိုယ်စားပြု မြဝတီစစ်ကြောင်းမှ တပ်ဖွဲ့ဝင်များနှင့် နည်းပြများအား ဂုဏ်ပြုညစာစားပွဲဖြင့် တည်ခင်းဧည့်ခံ | NPE". www.moi.gov.mm.
  8. "Myanmar's oldest band". The Myanmar Times. November 10, 2017.
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