by Jeffrey Bell-Hanson

I am sorry that I sucked you in with the word “naked.” I just meant “unvarnished,” or “raw,” or “improvisational,” or something like that. Shame on you for thinking otherwise!
For readers who have access to my Facebook posts, you may be aware that I recently attended the reunion of the Huskies Pep Band. This is not the one in Washington state that I once was mistaken as referencing (really just a marching band in disguise). I mean the real one—the Michigan Tech Huskies Pep Band, whose most recent motto is “the most fun you can legally have.” I was invited because…(gulp)…I am one of six previous directors of this proud organization. (What many of my current students have long suspected is true. My past is…complicated.)
Actually, I wear this mantle proudly, and now more so than ever. In the fourteen years during which I had this particular tiger by the tail, I did not fully appreciate what the organization was, either culturally or musically. It seemed far from my cup of tea (in spite of my history with athletic bands), and I tried to find lots of ways to create a sense of mission for myself and for them beyond our role with the athletic program.
Unlike my two predecessors in the job, I was not a sports fan. I had some professional credentials that might seem to qualify me for this leadership position. I had led the Notre Dame hockey pep band as a graduate assistant, and I had been the pep band director for five years at a junior college in Kansas with a fairly good athletic program. (Let’s not discuss how the coaches there regarded me.) I ostensibly understood the culture from which the imperative of the pep band arose, but I never really bought into it.
When I was being considered as a sabbatical replacement for Mike Griffith, my immediate predecessor with the Huskies Pep Band, what my record did not show was that I had followed my particular path because, during my collegiate years, my imagination had been fired by my experiences as an orchestral musician, not by any experience with athletic bands. In plain language, my work with pep bands was a way to stay employed while I worked my way into a career as an orchestral conductor.
Complicating that plan was my concern even then about the dominance of a zero-sum paradigm in our society. In as much as the pep band was an instrument of that paradigm, it seemed to me not to be a good way to employ my art. The band’s goal was the defeat of an opponent; not just the team, but their band too. We were banned from the hockey arena at our neighboring school, Northern Michigan University, because we competed with their band in order to help our hockey team win. Our paradigm dictated that it was us or them, and we were clearly there to make sure it was us.
I don’t claim, because of my attitude, any moral ascendancy. I enthusiastically led more than one of those “battles of the bands” trying to secure a win for us with someone else’s loss. But for what it is worth, I lost a lot of sleep during those years over the tension between what I saw as the zero-sum mission of the band and what I believed to be my role as a musician, a facilitator of community and a proponent of unity, not a combatant in a symbolic war of institutional identity.
What I am able to see more clearly with hindsight is the inexhaustible creativity and joie de vivre that the students in the Huskies Pep Band brought then and still bring to their performances. Outwardly, they seem to be the fiercest competitors one could imagine in a battle of bands. They love to win, which they don’t do by being a better or more disciplined musical organization; DCI they ain’t! Instead, they just have more fun than anyone else; and the depth of their collective imagination at finding ways to do so is astounding. The fact that they clearly don’t take what they do or why they do it or anyone around them at the time too seriously—that they are willing to make fun of anything and everything, but in the end make it clear that it all comes from a desire to share their fun with everyone—makes what they do unfailingly infectious and engaging. While they can appear to be playing a zero-sum game, in the end they always seem to stop short and dance away laughing. And everyone laughs with them, and claps, and sways, and smiles. They are the court jesters in their realm, and they use music in fascinating and intuitive ways. In the end, they often sound pretty good doing it.
While I don’t think I would ever want to hear them play Mozart, they are, in some essential ways, quite Mozartean. Most musicians could learn a thing or two from them, including me.