This morning I ran into an old friend who had just returned from his twenty-fifth college reunion. It turns out that back in 1986 he graduated from Harvard, a small liberal-arts college back East somewhere, probably in New England. You might have heard of it, but if not, no matter. It’s just the backdrop to this tale.
He told me that he’d run into a bunch of his college friends, most of whom were his fellow bandmates, and I was quite surprised to learn about this aspect of his life. I’d never heard him play and instrument, or sing in the church choir, or even mention an interest in the performing arts. Even if he was no longer musically active, I was surprised that he’d never even mentioned being in a band. In my experience, this is the sort of experience that can leave an indelible mark on the participant.
I gently probed for more information, and he grew wistful. For a moment his eyes seemed to focus on infinity and his face took on the expression of a traveler, lost in a strange city at midnight, trying to figure out which highway lane has EZPass. And then he smiled, and told me a story I didn’t expect, a story so unusual and unique that I knew I that I could bank on getting several page-views from it.
He told me about the Harvard University Band.
I have to be careful in what I write, because he made me promise that I would not repeat any of his stories verbatim or connect the names of any of the many people, now living quiet and respectable lives, who might not want to have their names associated with actions they were said to have taken in their younger, wilder, more carefree days. There was too much rumor and innuendo; too many crazy stories. It couldn’t be true, of course; the tales of under-age drinking and wild parties were clearly pure nonsense. My friend, although kind and reliable, is a nerd’s nerd, and the idea that he could have played a role in such goings on is ridiculous. There were even hints at recreational drug use, casual and spontaneous sex, the stealing of signs, and the violation of any number of university regulations and state and city ordinances against loud noises, buffoonery, and general jackassedness. All false, of course; he could not offer me a shred of evidence of any sort to support his claims. If signs had been stolen then there would be a room somewhere filled with them; if students had been arrested or angry letters written then there would be some written record of all of this.
I’ll give you an example of this–the friends of my friend used to tease him that they had to carry him home after a party in the Fall of his Freshman year because in the midst of the revelry he had been overtaken with fatigue. They continued to insist that this had happened, even though my friend has no memory of this event. Imagine having all of your friends come over to your dorm in the middle of the night and not being able to remember any part of it–unthinkable! How could this be?
But my friend is honest–even if his friends liked to pull his leg. I trust him, and I trust his judgment, and therefore I know that there must be some kernel of truth in his story. My job as a blogger is to embellish that kernel up in a long-winded monologue and pimp it out for you, dear reader, to enjoy, and so that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Between my friend’s story and my nimble Googling, I think I have enough to begin…
If you’re not from Harvard, or haven’t seen them perform, then it is very likely that the Harvard University Band is not what you think it is, except in the most superficial sense of a being a group composed of people who play music together and wear Harvard insignia.
A little history: the Harvard University Band (which I will refer to as “The Band” in future references, because that’s what Bandies, which is the polite name for people who have been in The Band, call it, except in the few cases where the term would be ambiguous, in which case they call it The Band) invented the notion of performing at football games. They invented the idea of performing at halftime. They invented the idea of playing on the field, and then the idea of arranging themselves in some formation other than a concert shell, and then the idea of moving from one formation to another during the course of a single show, and then the idea of having a running narrative to accompany these changes in formation in order to augment the expressive options. In short, if you have seen a band perform at halftime or between the periods of any sporting events, you’re seeing an art form that was invented at Harvard by The Band.
The Band is also considered in some circles to be pioneers in the field of exaggerating their importance and historical significance, although in my opinion their contributions in this crucial area of human endeavor, although notable, are overstated and in any case are utterly overshadowed by the accomplishments in this field of other organizations in their cohort at Harvard.
In any case, it doesn’t take an enormous amount of skill to get a large number of people to wear snappy uniforms, carry shiny instruments, and march around in formations while playing schmaltzy pop. It takes a few people who have good organizational skills, and a lot of people who are decent musicians, good at following directions, and have plenty of time to practice, practice, practice. When done well, the resulting spectacle is truly impressive and inspiring. There’s nothing wrong with the direction that precision marching bands, drum and bugle corps, and the like have taken. If you’re a member of one of these organizations and are waiting for me to say something insulting about them, you will be disappointed. I have complete respect for anyone who does something very well, even if it is a thing that I have chosen not to do.
One of the great lessons of Harvard (or any other decent college, of which there are allegedly several others) is that there isn’t very much value in doing things that other people can do. Competition is fun for a while, but steamrolling your competitors lets you sleep better at night. If you really want to set yourself apart, you need to find the thing that you can do that nobody else can do. And thus is was that The Band continued to evolve until it reached a form that no other organization has ever been able to successfully mimic.
The most notable and unequaled innovations by The Band can be loosely categorized into the areas of professionalism, rehearsal technique, rigorous selection of most talented and dedicated musicians, and strict adherence to a rigid code of moral conduct. The Band eschewed them all equally.
Most college bands have professional conductors, use professionally-arranged music, have professional choreographers, and a staff of other adults that make sure that travel arrangements are made, lodgings, booked, and the like. The Band is an entirely student-run organization. It writes its own shows, arranges and/or writes its own music, designs its own formations, makes its own travel arrangements, raises its own funds, recruits its own victims freshmen, etc.
Most bands rehearse incessantly, or at least give that appearance. They gradually build up a repertoire that culminates in a magnificent show at the end of the season, but if you attend their shows every week, they begin to seem very repetitive. The Band does a new show every week, written from scratch during the course of the week and fine-tuned, often at the last possible moment, depending on the weather, the instrumentation that shows up at the game, and whether they’ve been able to steal a copy of the script from the other opposing band. It is not unheard of to be handed a fresh piece of music, ink still wet, key signature a rumor passed from person to person along each rank, moments before stepping on to the field to sight-read in front of an audience of 50,000.
This sort of thing might sound like unpreparedness, but it is the exact opposite. A Bandie is always ready to adapt to changing situations, to abandon a bad plan when a better plan is offered. For example, at one game the weather was so cold that all of brass instruments–which typically play the lead and carry the melody, while the woodwinds provide counterpoint and harmony–were rendered inoperable, their slides and valves frozen solid. The opposing band was helpless; their music was unrecognizable crap, hollow and empty of melody. The Band’s clarinet players ad-libbed the trumpet parts, and it sounded like crap, but it sounded like recognizable crap and people could sing along with it.
As implied by the two previous paragraphs, which any decent expos teacher would ask me to restructure so that they followed this point instead of foreshadowing it, the defining characteristic of a successful Bandie is the ability to play fast and loose; to react to rapidly changing circumstances, and to get things done even when it’s not clear what is being done. One of the central principles of Taoism, principle of p’u–the uncarved block that can become anything; the water that has no shape of its own; these are familiar to any Bandie.
The cadets at West Point have a tradition of picking people up and passing them up through the stands. Usually it’s a cadet, but once they grabbed an unwilling and somewhat terrified Harvard student and began passing her up. A Bandie charged into the cadet section of the stands and retrieved her.
Someone will opine that the cadets were simply reacting politely to the protestations of the young woman and the effect of the Bandie on the outcome of the situation was probably negligible, but those people weren’t there. The cadets were young, horny boys in a foul mood–possibly because they weren’t permitted to sit down during the entire game, perhaps because their team wasn’t beating the spread, or perhaps because some unknown and unseen agent, allegedly harbored within The Band itself, had recently pelted them with dead fish. Any reliable witness or student of human nature would agree that the grope-less outcome hinged on the actions of the Bandie.
This was not an isolated incident–unusual things happened around The Band with some regularity–but there’s no training for something like this. You can either do it, or you can’t, and the outcome almost entirely depends on the ability to judge situations that are both challenging and highly dynamic and your belief that you will succeed. It is also useful to be slightly insane or inebriated.
The technical musical requirements for being in The Band were minimal when compared to other musical groups. It was necessary to be able to read music–particularly to sight-read music–and play the standards well. There is no excuse for screwing up The Star Spangled Banner or Fair Harvard. The Harvard marches and fight songs–the staples of any parade or post-game performance–are not particularly hard in comparison to the standard repertoire of a college wind ensemble or concert band, but in my opinion they are considerably more challenging than the average college fight song. This the sort of thing that is to be expected when Leroy Anderson and Tom Leher write your college pep tunes, I guess. Nevertheless, the emphasis in The Band is not on virtuosity, but on playing ones role; not of standing out, but of filling in. There is no place for a high-strung prima donna soloist with a custom-built instrument on a cold October morning as freezing rain falls and a thousand intoxicated Dartmouth freshman rush the field in Hanover–there is only a place for a team player who has the trust of his rank-mates and understands that there are ways to use the length and heft of the brass he carries that were never mentioned anywhere in any of his Rubank method books; a man who watches the conductor instead of the onrushing mob, a man who has faith in the strange and inexplicable powers of the prop crew, those smiling ninjas in white, who seem to enjoy this sort of thing in some perverse way.
A trait that is more important that musical virtuosity is punctuality. With such limited rehearsal time (and gigs beginning and ending at times chosen by the whim of the football team), the worst thing that a Bandie can do is to show up late. Latecomers are singled out and publicly humiliated by being forced to act out Debbie Reynolds’ verse of the “Good Morning” show tune from “Singin’ in the Rain”, or something like that. I confess that I didn’t really understand this part and I half suspect that my friend was making this up, because none of it seemed to make any sense at all.
Finally, there is the irreverence. Some have called The Band obscene, profane, crass, lewd, rude, childish, immature, uncultured, disgusting, or even perverted. My sense is that the use of any of these words is misplaced, except in cases where they are preceded by some qualifier such as “very”, “extremely”, “notably”, “painfully”, or “excruciatingly”. There is a ready explanation, of course–they were just trying to be funny, and humor is different when done at the stadium scale than when performed more intimately. The same jokes don’t work. Grand gestures are necessary.
Unfortunately, decorum prevents me from describing any of the alleged grand gestures.
It is a documented fact that The Band often found itself in hot water with the Harvard administration. Very few student organizations had their scripts reviewed before every performance, but The Band did–and this was complicated by the very short lead time on the scripts. There was barely time during the weekly cycle to write a show, have it be reviewed by the appropriate Dean, rewrite the objectionable jokes, have the script re-reviewed and approved, and then figure out how to slip the original jokes back in somehow before finalizing the show. And all of this was done without the aid of computers or even Xerox machines, apparently. It seems like an enormous over-reaction, a symptom of some dreadful insecurity complex, that the administration would demand to oversee the entire process simply because The Band had mentioned that Radcliffe, Harvard’s sister school at the time, had a stronger linguistic tradition than Harvard. From what I can tell from some shallow Googling, the question is still considered open, even though the Harvard students, whom both sides acknowledge to be masters of debate, have begun to eat away at the edges of the argument.
So, where are they now? Where are these zany kids, these people about whom such crazy stories were told? When he saw them at the reunion, what were they like? Had they mellowed with age? Did he still recognize them? Did they recognize him?
When I asked him these questions, it took him a moment to gather his thoughts, and then he answered in a way that told me that I’d asked the wrong question.
They all seemed successful, in their own ways. Most had families, and despite the running jokes of the reunion about trophy wives (or trophy husbands), they mostly seemed to be in happy and long-term, stable relationships, several of which with other former Bandies.
The last night of the reunion, many of the Bandies who attended the reunion gathered at the big, climactic dance party. They drank and danced and told stories about the old days until the small hours of the morning, and then dragged themselves back to wherever they were staying and collapsed, exhausted.
Only a few hours later, early the next morning, was the memorial service for deceased classmates. My friend entered the church a little early, because he wanted to get a seat near an exit so he could slip out if his kids needed him. The church was very empty and very quiet when he arrived, unlike the crowded, deafening tent where the dance was held. Only a small fraction of the people who came to the reunion came to the memorial service, but as my friend waited for the service to begin, he watched people enter. One by one, he saw nearly all of his bandmates come in and be seated. Perhaps they all did; he couldn’t see all the entrances.
They were, as he described them, living in the moment; doing the right thing; showing up on time. They hadn’t changed in any way that seemed particularly important or significant to him. There wasn’t any reason for them to change; they are happy with who they are, and with very good reason.
INC
