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And the Bands Play On
In their other lives, those wacky halftime shows in the Bowl are likely to play as much Hindemith as Sousa.
October 1994
by Tom Verde
As an accomplished composer and adjunct professor of music, Thomas Duffy has earned the respect of his students and colleagues. As Director of University Bands, a job that includes the oversight of three distinctly different musical organizations on campus, his reputation is a bit less secure. He has in fact become somewhat notorious as head of one of them: the Yale University Precision Marching Band, that decidedly imprecise cohort of undergraduates who are cavorting this season—as they have ever since the turn of the century—during halftime at Yale football games, often to the dismay of their well-heeled audiences.
Showing a visitor around his office in Hendrie Hall, Duffy drags a folder of letters as thick as a New Haven yellow pages from a file drawer and thumbs through it with rough familiarity. “These only cover the last fifteen years or so,” he says, dropping the folder on the table. “But it ought to be enough to start with.” Glaring from the pages are adjectives such as “vulgar” and “tasteless,” which are among the tamer judgments passed upon the marching band for its tweakings of a variety of subjects including God, country, and Yale. They are mitigated by an occasional “excellent” or “funny and thought-provoking,” but, by and large, the contents of Duffy’s folder are not friendly.
Duffy suffers the assaults in good humor, and says he has no plans to tamper with the band’s tradition of irreverence. “They were undergraduates,” he explains, referring to Yale marching bands of the sixties, seventies and eighties. “It was their intention to shock.” What bothers him is that so many of his critics don’t realize that beneath the blue wigs and war paint on Saturday afternoons there are scores of serious and dedicated young musicians whose theatrics in the Bowl represent a mere fraction of their talent and performing time. Many of these self-same purveyors of “puerile, cheap, sadism” (in the words of one irate alumnus) also appear with Duffy as members of the Yale Jazz Ensemble, a standard 18-piece “big” band, which has performed with such greats as Duke Ellington and Jane Ira Bloom. Others concentrate their off-the-field energies on the Concert Band—a 75-piece wind ensemble that plays everything from John Philip Sousa to chamber pieces—and have performed in tuxedos and evening gowns before audiences at Carnegie Hall. So convincing was the recreation by these “extraordinarily offensive” and “repugnant” individuals of the Glenn Miller repertoire of the 1940s that they were invited to France this past spring to take part in the official celebration of the 50th anniversary of D-Day.
To some degree, all three of Duffy’s bands can trace their origins to June of 1775, when the fife-and-drum corps of the feeling a bit underappreciated in recent years, they were suddenly overwhelmed with attention beginning last spring, when they took on the legacy of the legendary Glenn Miller. During World War II, Miller, who was then an Army captain, chose New Haven as the headquarters of his 418th Army Air Forces Technical Training Command Band. For 15 months in 1943 and 1944, the Miller band delighted local audiences with concerts on the Green and a weekly radio program broadcast from Woolsey Hall. Duffy got the inspiration to recreate the sound and look of the wartime Miller band after the jazz ensemble played WW II-period pieces at a Class of 1945W reunion. With the help of Norman Leydan '38, '39MusB, who had been Miller’s arranger during the war, Duffy rehabilitated a repertoire that included such tunes as “St. Louis Blues March” and “American Patrol.” To complete the effect, the performers—who were drawn from all three of the Yale bands—dressed up in vintage khaki uniforms (purchased with money earned by painting the seats in the Bowl). Duffy went so far as to temporarily shave his beard, change his hairstyle, and invest in a pair of wire-rim glasses so that he could better impersonate Miller on the podium. “It was real theater,” says the director.
The show was a smash hit in New Haven, and word rapidly spread. So powerful was the band’s evocation of the wartime atmosphere that the organizers of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the D-Day landings invited the entire group to join the ceremonies in England and France, where their audiences included French government officials and the U.S. ambassador.
“It was an amazing experience,” recalls trombonist Setlow. “I couldn’t believe the reception we got. In Cherbourg, people kept filling the square, cheering and shouting and hanging from the balconies.” The welcome was no less warm on the beaches of Normandy. “Two French sisters in their 80s called out ‘Hey Yanks,’ after we finished a set in uniform,” recalls Duffy. “They pointed to a hill and told me that in the spring of 1944 they had sat there clapping as American planes bombed the German defenses. Then they shook our hands and said they just wanted to say ‘Thanks.’”
The Miller tour produced reams of press coverage, with stories appearing in, among others, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on the CBS “Sunday Morning” program. And it’s not over yet. In March, the band, sponsored by the local Yale Club, will be taking its Miller program to the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. Meanwhile, the concert band is in the process of putting together a series of performances of new music based on works in the Yale University Art Gallery.
However successful such high-minded pursuits may prove, they are not likely to overwhelm the role of the marching band on the greater Yale stage. Nor, perhaps, should they, for the organizations, while related, have fundamentally different goals at heart. “The marching band is not really a musical organization, it’s an activity,” says Duffy. Indeed, for while the core of the enterprise is made up of musicians, virtually anyone is welcome. (Typically, the nonmusicians carry tambourines or any other noise-making apparatus they choose and are used as the moveable parts of the formations.) And the aim of its operations has more to do with morale than melody. Duffy and his students assert that poking a bit of fun at the whole thing and having a good time is what playing at the games is all about. “For a lot of us, it’s a great way to relax and have some laughs,” says band librarian and trumpet player Else Festersen '96, who has followed in the footsteps of her jazz clarinetist father, Paul Festersen '61, also the band librarian during his years at Yale.
In pursuing its own goal, the marching band has deliberately avoided the paramilitary affectations of most such groups. Even if it wanted them, it could hardly afford them. The band’s annual budget is a dwarfish $6,000 compared, for instance, to those of Big Ten schools such as the University of Alabama ($104,000), Ohio State ($127,000), and the University of Michigan ($150,000). Money for tours or special events like the Miller concerts must be raised by the band members themselves.
Such financial adversity puts considerable pressure on the band to compensate with creativity. Not surprisingly, some of the band’s best stunts have been pulled at the Harvard game. For the 1992 edition, the band members, having heard that Harvard had something special up its sleeve, called their rivals and identified themselves as network censors who needed to review the Harvard program for conformance with broadcast standards. The “censors” learned that the Harvards were planning to disrupt the Yale “Y” formation by marching into the stadium from four corners and “X"-ing out the letter. On game day, when the Harvard band marched onto the field, the Yale contingent quickly reformed into an “H,” leaving the Harvards to spring their visual prank on themselves.
Aside from making the Crimson blush, the marching band’s idea of fun has often involved what might charitably be called marginal taste. The 1982 “Nuns for Elvis” routine during a game against Boston College is cited with some embarrassment even today. A few years later, the group was banned from West Point when Academy officials took umbrage at a script that “revealed” that Ronald Reagan and other well known conservatives had communist connections. (Excerpts: “General William Westmoreland has a lifetime subscription to Redbook magazine"."Casper Weinberger has donated funds to the International Red Cross". “President Reagan was once seen laughing at a joke told by Red Skelton.”)
Such pointed performances sparked so many complaints from offended alumni and fans that former President A. Bartlett Giamatti was forced to compose a form-letter response, which began: “Thank you for your letter regarding the half-time shows and the Yale Band. I did think a conversation with the Band leader was called for by me, and I spoke with him.”
Since that time—whether because of Presidential concern or the expanded tolerance of the audiences—the halftime shows have begun to concentrate more on the news of the day and are likely to have a unifying theme. “We consider ourselves more Johnny Carson than Pee Wee Herman,” says Duffy. As a result, protests have dwindled to a handful, and even include a few complaining that the band is not radical or shocking enough!
High comedy or low humor? Ultimately it appears to be in the eye, and ear, of the beholder. Duffy, quite unobjectively, asserts that the Yale Marching Band has a reputation as the cleverest in the Ivy League. And at least one longtime professional observer agrees. Says ESPN college football commentator Beano Cook, who has endured more than his share of halftime shows in 30 years of covering college football: “I like the Yale Band the best because they enjoy themselves. They have not forgotten that they are there to entertain and make you laugh. You don’t laugh when you see a Big Ten band march. With Yale, it’s organized chaos, it’s the Marx Brothers. But they know what they are doing.”  |
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