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On Tuesday, October 13, the UCI Band performed on KUCI for an on the air "pep rally." As it turned out, we started the broadcast with the Fight Song, then in the middle played a round of "Go Big Blue" (Fresno Lick for you old timers), and ended the broadcast with the Fight Song. The KUCI announcers introduced us and repeatedly referred to us as the UCI Marching Band. Many of our members were aghast. We are not a marching band but a pep band, so we think. |
But are we? If you look at other Universities and how their groups are
organized, you might come to realize that we are really more like a marching band than we
would really care to admit. Consider the University of
Nevada, Reno. They have a football team so they have a marching band with over 120
members. Their pep band is a select subset of the marching band who also perform at
basketball games. In order to be in the pep band (in most programs that have
marching bands), you need to be a member of the marching band. Also, they have an
alumni band who is distinct and separate from the pep band.
Apparently, at universities that have football teams, they want to make their marching
band as large as possible. With over a hundred people in your typical marching band, it is
not hard to constitute a select pep band out of that. Other schools, such as Long Beach
State, have small ensemble groups with one or two people on a part, and they amplify the
band with microphones.
| Anyway, if you consider this, we are probably more of a marching band than a pep band. We take everybody and we have never required auditions. We welcome everybody including alumni and community members. We always perform standing up. If hard pressed, we even march. |
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| When I first joined the band, we specifically demanded that we be called the UCI Band and not the UCI Pep Band. In our minds, pep bands are small groups. We aspired to be large and loud and at that time we had 30 members, and the following year we would grow to have 50 members at almost every game. |
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While we may not have grown as much as I would have liked, we have definitely beefed up our trumpet section (there are 17 on the rolls, and about 9-11 at each rehearsal so far), and almost everyone from last year's core is back this year. Let me repeat. Almost everybody from last year's core is back. In all the years I have been involved with this band, I have never seen such a return rate. Thus, even though we did not recruit as many new people as I thought we could have, we made up for it by the fact that most of us from last year have returned for another year.
Also, I have recently discovered various band member's web pages out on the web. I found them through the standard search engines and have included links to them on my UCI Band links page. Check it out. I hope to see more members put forth such efforts. If you're not quite up for writing your own web page but would like your voice to be heard, go ahead and write something, like your own commentary, and email to me at carden@home.com. I will happily include it on this site.
