HERMANN — Between stops in St. Louis and Kansas City, a group of 30 music students from Hannover, Germany spent two full days in Hermann in a setting that was at once both familiar and completely foreign to them.

The jazz band from Kathe-Kolowitz-Schule (KKS Big Band) is well-renowned in Germany, and the families of some students even move to the area so their child can study at the school. Many of the students have received recognition and awards for work with their various instruments. The band takes a trip every year to travel and perform in a different country. This year, they received an invitation from Kansas City through a connection formed due to both cities being designated a UNESCO City of Music, according to the band’s Instructor Michael Thiemann, who has led the band for 28 years and spoke with his son Sören translating at times.

They flew into Chicago and spent a few days there before spending two days in St. Louis. They checked out some of the main tourist spots in those cities, including a trip up the arch. After Hermann, they’ll travel to Kansas City, where they will spend a week before returning home.

“I think it’s really great for us to be here, because they saw the big-city life in Chicago and St. Louis and now we’re in a small town. This is also a real, American experience for everyone,” Sören said.

The KKS Big Band arrived in Hermann the morning of Friday, Oct. 16, and experienced the whirlwind that is a homecoming assembly, parade and football game on the same day. Sports are organized through different club structures in Germany, rather than through schools.

So, the unabashed school and community spirit and the effort that went into the assembly and parade were especially impressive, and completely novel to the students. Several brought it up as the highlight of the trip so far. But they did express some disappointment that they weren’t allowed to join the local students at the homecoming parties that followed the game.

They appreciated the marching band’s ability to play their instruments in unison while moving in formation during half time, but the KBB Big Band stuck to playing with Hermann’s high school band in the stands during the game. Thiemann said that their training and skills allowed them to provide accompaniment rather seamlessly, even though all the songs were completely new to them.

The town of Hermann, however, provided a bit of comfort to the group, with its historic European buildings and a landscape that Thiemann said was similar to the German state they are from.

“I understand why the Germans in the 19th century thought this is a really fine place to live,” he said, noting how many familiar German names they had seen throughout Hermann.

On Saturday, Hermann resident DeAnn Els, wearing a traditional German outfit, met the students at 10 a.m. to give them and their chaperones a tour of the Historic Hermann Museum at the German School Building built in 1871. Els also organized the host families that the students stayed with during their three nights in Hermann. She said she was proud of how so many in the community stepped up to act as hosts.

In the museum, the music students were especially drawn to the array of instruments and sheet music that made up portions of the exhibits. Several could be seen stopping to read the various pieces of music and heard humming or singing out loud.

Els even let one student whose focus is keyboards play one of the small, historic organs. He managed to successfully get all the way through a song but admitted that the need to provide air to the organ with the mechanism pumped by the feet while playing was quite a challenge.

After a couple of hours in a museum, even one with a connection to their home country and a generous amount of music-oriented displays, the group of high school students began to get a bit restless and filtered into the museum’s hallways and the benches outside.

But before that, they gathered in one of the larger rooms in the museum and, as a group, sang a song called “The Moon is High,” by German poet Matthias Claudius. Thiemann introduced it as a historic German song of appreciation to thank Els, and the entire Hermann community, for their hospitality. The students spoke very highly of the residents who shared their homes and said the accommodations were very much preferred to the hotels they had been staying in.

It was a beautiful, sunny day in Hermann and after the museum tour they dispersed into smaller groups to check out Hermann and its Oktoberfest festivities, with seven hours of leisure time to enjoy what one student said was a much needed break after an intense first week.

Some students said they planned on spending the day relaxing, while another said he and his friend, who happen to enjoy golf, were planning on meeting some Hermann students to go to the range and hit some balls.