Peter Andrews

Homecoming is coming! So you’re invited to join alumni of Columbia’s Marching Band, Concert Band, Wind Ensemble and Jazz Band for our fall get-together. The plan is a little different this year:

• When: Saturday morning, October 14!
• Where: Columbia Alumni Center, 622 West 113th Street
• What: We’ll gather for an hour or so starting at 9:30 a.m. (free coffee and snacks), then ride a complimentary “spirit bus” up to Baker Athletics Complex (singing optional) for mingling with the general alumni population, lunch and the game against Penn. Former Spirit Managers will be needed to help lead songs on the bus!
• Bring: Your instrument if you like (let us know if you want to join the Band for pre-game rehearsal, or if you’d like us to email you sheet music so you can practice to play “Roar, Lion” in the stands)

Starting the Year Off Right
The Marching Band had a pre-season gig on West 39th Street, playing for a hot young designer as part of New York Fashion Week. As football season gets underway, the group had an unusually successful recruiting effort, with especially strong percussion and lower brass turnout. The Wind Ensemble, meanwhile, is looking to a November 19 concert on campus, for which they’re getting set to dig into a repertoire that’s decidedly 21st-century but with a much older crowd-pleaser as a likely encore: Lassus Trombone (1915) by Henry Fillmore.

Planning a Gift?
Alumni unhappy that the Columbia administration continues to prevent the Band from playing Orgo Night in Butler Library have asked if they can make their annual tax-deductible donation to us instead of to their school as a protest statement. The answer: Yes, you can.

Come see us on October 14!

Reunion 2017
Whether or not you’re in a Reunion class this year, you’re invited to join alumni of Columbia’s Marching Band, Concert Band, Wind Ensemble and Jazz Band:

When: Saturday, June 3, 4:00 to 5:15 or so
Where: TBA (find a Reunion program at any check-in table and look for “Performing Arts Group Affinity Reception”)
Cost: Absolutely nothing (food and drink included)

Making a Gift?
If you are a member of a reunion class, we’re told you can earmark your reunion donation to the Columbia University Marching Band or Columbia University Wind Ensemble and have it count toward your class total. Ask your school’s alumni office how to make this happen. Columbia’s future alumni instrumentalists will be thrilled.

Rounding Out the Semester
Those instrumentalists had a typically busy spring. The CUMB made a pop-up appearance at the New York City March on Science and continued traditions like Tax Day on the steps of the city’s main Post Office building just before the midnight filing deadline and Orgo Night (see next paragraph).

Meantime, the CUWE hosted its ninth annual multi-group Columbia Festival of Winds, played Carnegie Hall again (with a little financial boost from your Band Alumni Association, and featuring a guest appearance by former conductor Andy Pease) and squeezed in an outdoor concert on campus and another in Riverside Park.

And They’re Sticking To It
For the second semester in a row, the Marching Band was met by a phalanx of campus security guards barring the way into Butler Library for the traditional midnight show the eve before the start of finals. Once again, the Orgo Night roast went on – but outside Butler’s front door instead of in the more comfortable and appropriate setting of Room 209, the College Reading Room. The party line from Hamilton and Low continues to be that after 41 years the administration suddenly realized that students studying in 209 must have quiet, and complaints about some jokes in past years have nothing to do with the eviction order.

Despite the recommendations of all four undergraduate student councils, Spectator’s editorial board (“…to claim that students would be irreparably distracted from their studying by a publicized event in a place they could easily avoid for one hour a semester is absurd”), Bwog (“the only ‘study break’ that anyone at Columbia actually goes to”) and hundreds of alumni and students, it appears that at Columbia, political correctness trumps free speech. Sad.

Here’s the letter CUBAA wrote to Columbia College Today about the administration’s attack on Orgo Night (bottom of the page). We’ll keep trying to get the administration to sit down and talk.