Behind the BandFor 140 years, OSU's marching band has given Beaver spirit its steady drumbeat.

Rain or shine, win or lose, our marching band plays on. Flash back to this time last year as band members geared up for a home game. 

It’s exactly 5:35 p.m. on a cloudy Friday, and the members of the Oregon State University Marching Band are packed into two tunnels on the north side of Reser Stadium.

This is a game day — kickoff for the Beavers football game against Utah is about a half an hour away — and everything for the next 25 minutes or so hinges on precise timing. The band’s pregame show starts in about 11 minutes. This game is being nationally televised, so time matters there as well.

By this point — before the nearly 300 members of the band have played even one note in front of a packed stadium — they’ve been in their uniforms for more than four hours: band members report

At this moment, as they wait in the tunnels at Reser, it will be nearly another five hours before they leave the stadium.

Meanwhile, a pair of military jets is zooming toward Reser for a flyover that’s timed to occur as the band reaches a specific spot in its performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The flyover is scheduled for exactly 5:54 and 30 seconds. If the band doesn’t hit the mark, it’s not as if the jets can just turn around for a do-over.

But that’s about 20 minutes away. Right now, they await the signal to march onto the field.

It’s time for The Spirit and Sound of Oregon State University to take the field — an OSU tradition that dates back to at least 1890.

Tradition and Good Times

Since those early days, the OSU Marching Band has grown to become the largest student group on campus, and the 2023-24 edition is one of the largest ever fielded. By the time the full band, including its new first-year members, had gathered for band camp in the days before the start of classes, it was 285 members strong.

Only about 10% of its members are music majors; in fact, 65 different majors, covering all of OSU’s colleges, are represented in the band’s ranks.

The reasons students give for joining the band are legion, but ask around enough, and certain themes emerge: Many have parents or relatives who played in marching bands. Others like the opportunity to perform before tens of thousands of people. Still others just enjoy playing fun music in a collegial atmosphere.

Says Trinity Henderson, one of the four leaders of the trumpet section (the largest section in the band): “It’s an automatic way to have a giant group of friends.”

With so many members, Olin Hannum, OSU’s associate director of bands, has to rely heavily on its student leaders. “When you have numbers like that, organization is from the top down,” he says. 

So student leadership is a constant with the band — from signaling instructions all the way to choosing the halftime shows.

But while the halftime shows change, the band’s 11-minute pregame routine has been essentially the same since 1968. In fact, Hannum says he hears complaints if he messes around too much with it.

And no wonder: The show plays like a greatest-hits revue of OSU fight songs, with “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the marching band chestnut “Rock and Roll Part II” thrown in for good measure. Much of the music was written by former OSU band directors.

The pregame always includes the maneuver known as the “Beaver Spell-Out,” with the members of the band spelling out the letters “O”, “S” and “U” across the field. Legendary band director James Douglass wrote the music for that section.

The pregame show is a celebration of tradition, says Justin Preece, the band’s percussion coordinator and drumline instructor.

“And that’s something that multiple generations of fans can recognize,” Preece says. “And they do — octogenarians standing up, clapping enthusiastically and singing. Kids who haven’t hit double digits do the same thing. And that’s a nice unifying moment.”

A Precision Pregame

On the field, at the north end zone, band assistant Dave Manela, wearing a headset, worries that the cloud cover might prevent the flyover, now less than 10 minutes away, by two jets racing toward Reser. These flyovers almost never come off on time, he says, and he would know — as a student at OSU, he played tenor sax in the band before graduating with a computer engineering degree. He’s another example of how the band attracts students from throughout the campus.

Finally, at 5:47 p.m., the drumline takes the field, followed by the members of the marching band, drawing a big cheer from the crowd.

New members — those not quite yet drilled in the marching routines — move to the west sideline and play along with the music. The video screen in Reser shows a view of the band as seen from the second deck of the stadium — if you’re seated too close to the ground, you don’t have a high-enough perch to make out whatever the band is spelling.

After a few tunes, the band is ready to play “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but the timing isn’t quite right yet for the flyover. So Eric Leung, the director of bands at OSU and the conductor for the anthem, gets the signal: Stretch. The opening drum roll plays for an additional 15 or so seconds before Leung brings in the rest of the band. It’s 5:53 and six seconds.

Eighty-four seconds later — just as the band reaches the “home of the brave” part of the song — two jets scream over the stadium.

They’re right on time.

And the rest of the pregame routine — complete with the Beaver spell-out — goes fine, despite earlier worries. After the show, band members dash for their assigned seats in the south end of the stadium. Preece applauds them as they clamber up the steps off the field, even as the opening kickoff, boomed high into the air, heads their way.

“That was awesome,” Preece says. “Good job, everybody.”

Band members won’t march again until halftime. But they still have hours of work ahead.

The Game’s Soundtrack

With the game underway, band members scramble back to their seats to provide the musical soundtrack for the game — a soundtrack that can change at a moment’s notice, depending on what happens on the field.

Hannum handles conducting duties during the game, using hand signals to cue the selections he wants played at certain points.

The most frequent is the five-note snippet of music played every time the Beavers rack up a first down. (Another former OSU band director, Brad Townsend, wrote that piece.) On this night, as the Beavers collect 15 first downs, the tune — appropriately named “First Down” — rings out 15 times.

But Hannum, who watches the video board as he directs to keep tabs on the game and to get a sense of what music might be appropriate, can call on any of 14 different selections — and has a hand signal to go with each one.

“Generally, I try to follow the game script,” he says. “If we’re on offense and the team is right in front of us, I’ll hold off on playing to let them communicate. The opposite is true if it’s the opposing offense; I’ll try to play something disruptive.”

It’s not all “Seven Nation Army” and “First Down,” though: A fan with an ear for classical music can pick up snippets from Holst’s “The Planets” and “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana. Whenever a player is injured on the field — Beaver or opponent — the band stops and members take a knee.

Hard Work and Halftime Magic

The first half zips by. At 7:24 p.m., less than 90 minutes after kickoff, they get the signal to assemble for the halftime show and start heading back down to the field.

The 70-second selection the band plays as it takes the field for the halftime show (it’s called, naturally, “Take the Field”) is created fresh each season by Hannum and Preece, the drumline instructor. 

In each new version, they sneak in snippets from OSU fight songs. During early rehearsals, the two challenge band members to identify the hidden Easter eggs; Dutch Bros gift cards go to students who get it right.

Tonight, the band is performing — for the first and only time — a tribute to Dolly Parton. The idea surprised Hannum when it first surfaced.

The process of creating the band’s three or four halftime shows each season starts months beforehand, when students and others are invited to suggest themes for new shows. That session typically yields about 50 ideas, Hannum says, which eventually get whittled down to three or four actual shows.

“We’re looking for shows that are going to be interesting, not only to the audience that’s experiencing it, but also to the students who are working on it,” Hannum says. “We’re looking for things that are in the tempos that work well for step sizes and for marching to those pieces of music. We’re looking for interesting concepts that haven’t been done before — or haven’t been done a lot. There are certain cliches in marching bands.”

So, for example, you won’t hear the OSU Marching Band doing an Earth, Wind & Fire show any time soon, even though Hannum is an EW&F fan. “It’s been done,” he says. “It’s been done a million times. The Beatles have been done a million times. What are the shows that haven’t been done a million times?”

He says he’s constantly surprised by the suggestions he gets from the students. 

“I get exposed to all kinds of weird cool stuff,” he says, like certain genres of Korean pop. (A song by the K-pop band Blackpink worked its way into the band’s tribute to girl groups. Another show featured music from Avatar: The Last Airbender.)

And, as Hannum learned, students these days are very much into the music of Dolly Parton. “I wouldn’t have predicted that,” he says. 

The Parton show features four well-known tunes: “I Will Always Love You,” “Jolene,” “Why’d You Come in Here Lookin’ Like That” and “Nine to Five.” Once Hannum and company obtain licensing rights to perform the songs, they start working on custom-made arrangements that fit the band.

“We arrange the wind parts, and then that arrangement gets sent off to the drumline people,” Hannum says. “And then that whole thing gets sent off to the color guard instructor, who writes the choreography for the color guard. When all of those charts are done, I write drill.”

It used to be that marching band directors worked out drill routines outlining every step of a routine by using graph paper — hundreds and thousands of sheets of graph paper, each with dots showing the location of every member of the band.

Today, those dots are created digitally — but the goal is the same: to ensure that every member knows where to stand to be one piece of a bigger picture. Just a few members out of place means that picture can get fuzzy in a hurry.

When Hannum finishes creating a drill, he shares it with each of the band members, who download the program on their smartphones, identify the dot that represents them, and get a sense of how the drill is supposed to work and how and when they have to move.

Each halftime program involves a different set of visual challenges for the band members. For the Parton program tonight, the band spells out the word “ALWAYS” during “I Will Always Love You.” Then they reform into the shape of a guitar. Along the way, they put down their instruments to perform a little two-step. Finally, they spell out the name “Dolly!” (See it all in action here.)

During rehearsals, it has proven to be a tricky bit of business to get the two “L”s in the name straight. But tonight, it’s better — the second “L” might be a little off to a practiced eye, but the thousands of spectators can easily make out what they’re spelling.

The show takes almost exactly 10 minutes. It represents hours of work — and some shows, like this tribute, are performed only once.

The Last Serenade

The Beavers build on a 7-0 halftime lead and pull away for a 21-7 win. The players head to the locker room.

It’s 9:22 p.m. — more than eight hours after the band’s initial call — but the musicians still have work to do as fans stream out the stadium.

At the end of every home game, band aficionados — friends, family, music fans — head over to the south end zone to watch the band perform tunes like “Radar Love” and the inevitable “Beer Barrel Polka.”

Somebody watching calls out for “Free Bird.”

The band does not play “Free Bird.”

Instead, the final selection is always the alma mater, “Carry Me Back to OSU.”

More than 20 minutes later — it’s 9:44 p.m. — the show ends. Instruments go back into cases. Equipment is packed up. The members of The Sound and Spirit of OSU head out into the night.

“It was what I was hoping for,” Hannum says about the season’s first full band performance. “I’m always expecting things to go well. If I’m ever pessimistic about things, I tend to rehearse down to it.”

But he’s already looking ahead.

“Monday’s going to be a pregame day,” he says. “Take the field.”