Колумбийский университетский духовой оркестр: История и скандалы

University marching band

The Columbia University Marching Band (CUMB) was the marching band of Columbia University. Founded in 1904, it claimed to be the first college or university marching band in the United States to convert to a scramble band format, making the switch in the 1950s. Today, all of the Ivy League bands (except Cornell), as well as the Stanford Band, William & Mary Pep Band, and Marching Owl Band have adopted the scramble band style. The CUMB had a reputation for edgy humor and is often thought to be the most controversial and irreverent of the scramble bands. Since the 1960s, national news outlets have covered the band's most infamous pranks. CUMB billed itself as "The Cleverest Band in the World." In September 2019, the band was officially banned from Columbia athletic events and its funding revoked, with many pointing to the administration's distaste for the band following the Orgo Night controversy. On September 14, 2020, following allegations of inappropriate behavior, the band voted to disband.

In addition to playing at every Columbia football game, the band played in the stands at Levien Gym for Columbia basketball games, and at various other events. These have included the New York City Marathon, the Walk Against AIDS, and at New York City's 34th Street post office on Tax Day. The CUMB appeared on many television programs including an early episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, the Late Show with David Letterman, The CBS Morning Show, MTV's Total Request Live, The Howard Stern TV Show (on WWOR), and Columbia's student run television station CTV. CUMB had also been featured in the films Turk 182! and Game Day. In the final years their musicianship had improved exponentially, and they have been invited to perform at New York Fashion Week, birthday parties, and Good Morning Tokyo.

One innovation of the CUMB was the introduction of the "miscie," which rhymes with "whiskey" and is short for miscellaneous. While many of the band members carried a musical instrument onto the field, the band's miscies carry whatever they choose. Some miscie instruments of the past have included a washboard, spoons, juggled balls/pins, the Game Boy Advance, the ROLM phone, beer bottles, spare tires, steel mailboxes, condom harp, football stadium bench (no longer attached to the stadium), passenger handle from the interior of an MTA Redbird subway car, unicycle, and kitchen sink. Towards the end of the Band, the miscie section had a toilet seat player. Other, slightly more melodious, instruments have included the shofar, the E♭ contrabass sarrusophone, a didgeridoo (the didge), and the B♭ lenthopipe (an 8 foot length of electrical conduit, with rubber hose and horn mouthpiece at the bottom end, and funnel at the extreme end). Band members had a long history of raiding competitive Ivy League schools and other institutions for memorabilia, including flags of Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Berkeley and the outsized stick used to beat the Harvard University Band's iconic giant bass drum. In a guerrilla action, the band once surreptitiously switched its regular dress for the dark blue of Yale University and appeared in the Yale Bowl as the Yale Precision Marching Band.

The band regularly stirs up controversy due to its irreverent sense of humor. In 1964, the band performed a "Salute to Moral Decay," featuring a formation of "the upper part of a topless bathing suit" (all marchers left the field except for two sousaphones, while the band played "My Favorite Things") and a typically heavy handed reference to Walter Jenkins, an aide to President Lyndon Johnson, who had been caught in flagrante delicto in a men's room. Columbia's president had to fend off angry letters from several notables, including conductor Leonard Bernstein. In 1966, the band was suspended for several games for the infamous "A Tribute to Birth Control" show where they formed a birth control pill, a calendar (for the rhythm method), and a chastity belt. In 1972, at West Point, the band formed what it called a "burning Cambodian village" on the field. The band has been effectively banned from ever playing at West Point again. In 1973, a brawl broke out between the CUMB and the Harvard University Band over the alleged attempted theft of the giant Harvard Bass Drum. The band performed a 1981 halftime show at Holy Cross with the theme "The Lions vs. The Christians". Holy Cross administrators subsequently dis invited the band from any future games played in Worcester. Columbia's next road game vs. Holy Cross in 1983 was the beginning of what became an NCAA record losing streak; the Lions would go almost five years without a win. The band's script for the 1982 season opening road game against Harvard mysteriously turned out to be identical to the script the Harvard band had planned to use moments later. The CUMB denied the idea that such an astonishing coincidence had anything to do with the fact that two of its members had spent the previous week posing as new freshmen at Harvard's undergraduate orientation. In 1990, the band received a bomb threat over its symbolic formation of a burning American Flag accompanied by The Doors' "Light My Fire," a reference to the recent United States Supreme Court ruling in Texas v. Johnson upholding the right to flag burning, and public debate around the proposed Flag Desecration Amendment. Following this media firestorm as well as an outpouring of support for the band from various alums, students, and bandies, and an apology from the band, the Athletics department—in the interests of Columbia's "core free speech values"—allowed the band to perform at the season's final game. In December 2012, a promotional flyer for Orgo Night which featured a pun on "Gaza Strip", i. e. "Everyone Wants a Piece" was met with some backlash by student groups on campus as well as activist Sherry J. Wolf. Subsequently, Kevin Shollenberger, Dean of Student Affairs, criticized the band via a student wide email. In the wake of the event, despite the few protestors who attended Orgo Night, the band received overwhelming support from the Columbia community.