Playing to the Sound of a Different Drum: The Columbia University Marching Band
It’s a rainy February evening and the Columbia and Brown men’s basketball teams are doing battle at the Pizzitola Sports Center in Providence. Brown freshman forward Tamenang Choh drives to the basket to make a layup and draws a free throw with 4:20 left in the second half to cut Columbia’s lead to 69–68.
In the far corner of the stands behind the Columbia bench is the Columbia University Marching Band, cheering on the Lions as usual. With Brown’s band busy performing its annual “ice show” at the hockey team’s game, the Columbia band is the primary source of music in the gym this evening, playing everything from the Lions’ fight song to a version of Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” with little regard for public address announcements and other songs played over the loudspeakers during timeouts. But as Choh lines up his free throw, the band is watching eagerly and, if only just this once, rooting for the other team to score.
Choh’s shot falls. The Columbia band erupts, cheering wildly while snapping pictures of the scoreboard before the clock changes. For that second, the scoreboard has produced a series of suggestive sex and drug references. The time remaining is 4:20 and the score is 69–69.
For over a half-century, this has been the style of CUMB (pronounced phonetically, with a silent ‘b’.) Over that time, it has stitched together its own array of traditions, much to the chagrin of many Columbia administrators.
The band has also consistently backed the Lions’ football and basketball teams, showing up at every single home game and several away games to cheer the teams on, totaling around 30 game performances each year, but it also mocks convention, incorporating unconventional instruments like the toilet seat and wet floor sign, and often using profane insults in its chants. In addition, CUMB often uses their performances to make political statements, from heading to Trump Tower on election night in 2016 and playing Cee Lo Green’s “F**k You” to taking a knee in the stands during The Star-Spangled Banner at football games last season in solidarity with athletes across the country who did the same.
CUMB works with the Athletic Department for its game performances, but University administrators have made life difficult for the band, requiring the often-raunchy scripts for the band’s halftime shows, which have bizarre themes such as “The Death of Democracy,” to go through an opaque censorship process. The band must submit their scripts to their advisor in the Office of Undergraduate Student Life. Jokes are removed or edited on a line-by-line basis and the school has never specifically outlined what the Band can and cannot mention in its scripts. The band has also been banned from performing at several schools, including Fordham, which banned it twice — once in 2002 for making a joke about altar boys after the Catholic Church’s sex scandal and again in 2012 when the band made jokes about Biblical references to lions eating Christians.
The band plays on at games despite Columbia’s lack of athletic dominance. Columbia football has won only 13 games in the last five years, although eight of those came this season. As recently as three seasons ago, the team had been on a 24-game losing streak. The men’s basketball team has improved in recent years, winning the CIT tournament in 2016 and just missing out on a chance to make the Ivy League conference tournament the last two seasons. Despite that relative recent success, the men’s and women’s basketball teams have still only topped .500 just three times combined in the last decade.
The logic the band seems to have adopted over the years is that if the teams they watch are going to be a joke on the field, they will gladly joke around and be as weird as they want to off it, which is the logic that drew me to become a member. The band is a diverse group of around 40 characters, ranging from timid trombone players to brash bass drummers. It allows band geeks and oddballs of all sorts to have a shared space to let their weird flags fly. In my time in the band, I’ve found it to be an awkward, dysfunctional, but loving family. The group is majority-female, with a diverse mix of members representing every class year and all of Columbia’s undergraduate schools, with even several graduate programs represented. It has members who are white, African American, Hispanic, international, LGBT-identifying and Jewish, although those last two are both especially well represented in the band (from time to time, they perform “Hava Nagila” and dance the Hora.)
Late last month, after meetings between the band and administrators, the school, in a letter signed by University Librarian Ann Thornton, Provost James Coatsworth, and the deans of all four of Columbia’s undergraduate schools, formally prohibited the band from performing its usual exam-time performance in room 209 of Butler Library, a ban that the school has handed down several times before but one that the band has occasionally circumvented.
CUMB has become an integral part of the University community, but has been stifled in part because of its unusual style and its willingness to speak up, take strong stances, and poke fun of the school.
It’s an unconventional relationship between the band and the school, a point that CUMB’s Head Manager Vivian Klotz (BC ’20) acknowledges.
“We show a lot of school spirit but we do so in a different way,” Klotz said. “We’re there, a lot of it, as showing our love for the school but also being very much ourselves without as much of a regard for the carefully manicured image of a school that athletics puts out.”
But the band’s most hallowed and perhaps most controversial tradition is one that occurs off the field. At the start of exam period of nearly every semester since 1975, CUMB has marched into Room 209 of Butler Library, one of the largest reading rooms on campus, playing songs and telling jokes in what it calls “Orgo Night”: an effort to lower the curve on the organic chemistry final.
Orgo Night quickly became a campus tradition. Hundreds of students routinely packed the room each semester to take a brief break from studying and laugh at jokes lampooning some of the most interesting happenings on campus.
But at the end of the Fall 2016 semester, Thornton informed CUMB that they would not be allowed to play in Butler Library, citing noise concerns. The band was kept out for two semesters, to the frustration and disappointment of alumni.
Samantha Rowan (BC ’96), President of the Columbia University Band Alumni Association, helped organize band alumni from as far back as the 1940s to lobby the university on the issue.
“Moving Orgo Night out of the library is like moving the Thanksgiving Parade to the West Side Highway. The tradition would still be there but it wouldn’t be the same,” Rowan said. “We’re kind of at the end of the rope with this Orgo Night thing. I don’t think they’re addressing the needs of their constituency by doing this.”
Last fall, however, CUMB performed in the library in defiance of the university’s prohibition. The band had snuck its instruments and its members in over the course of the day, who at the stroke of midnight, quickly donned their signature baby-blue-and-white rugby shirts and performed.
It was a moment that current “bandies,” including Klotz, who helped organize the performance, will not soon forget.
“I never fully understood why people loved Orgo Night in Butler 209 until I had Orgo Night in Butler 209. For me it might have been an even bigger moment because standing on that table in that library with some of my closest friends at midnight… was one of the biggest reliefs that I had felt,” she said.
Despite a formal ban and warning from the school, the band has announced that it will attempt to enter Butler 209 Thursday night. It remains to be seen how the night will unfold and what consequences will result, but considering CUMB’s dedication to tradition, it seems likely that the band will find a way.
Roey Hadar is a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a proud bandie and you can find him in his rugby at Orgo Night.
