Songs and Shows
The band's repertoire is heavy on classic rock of the 1970s, particularly songs by Tower of Power, Santana, and The Who. In the 1990s, more modern music was introduced, including songs by Green Day and The Offspring. For many years, it has billed itself as "The World's Largest Rock 'n Roll Band."
The de facto fight song is "All Right Now," originally performed by Free. The band prides itself on its vast song selection, never playing the same song twice in one day (except for All Right Now), and has a library of over one thousand songs at its disposal, nearly one hundred of which are in active rotation. One of the first collegiate marching bands to record and release their music, the band has produced thirteen albums since 1967. Arrangements focus on the loudest brass instruments—trumpets, mellophones, and trombones—and percussion—one bass drum (called the Axis of Rhythm), snare drums, and single tenor drums. This led a Rolling Stone writer to note in 1987, "It's hard for anyone raised on rock to imagine that a band could sound this loud without thousands of watts of amplification." Many traditional band instruments like bells and glockenspiels are altogether absent.
Traditional "marching" is also missing, as the band "scatters" from one formation to the next. The halftime field shows feature formations that are silly or suggestive shapes, as well as words (sometimes of the obscene variety). A team of Stanford students writes a script for the halftime show explaining to some degree what the band is doing in any given formation. The announcer reads this script over the public address system.
The band is one of a few American college "marching" bands with a song on iTunes with "Golgi Apparatus".
Read more about this topic: Stanford Band
Famous quotes containing the words songs and/or shows:
“When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the rumba, or the cha cha, to rock and roll and to twist and even to dance the waltz and foxtrot. But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of the gombe sugu, the mangala, nyang’umumi, kiduo, or lele mama?”
—Julius K. Nyerere (b. 1922)
“Nothing more powerfully excites any affection than to conceal some part of its object, by throwing it into a kind of shade, which at the same time that it shows enough to prepossess us in favour of the object, leaves still some work for the imagination.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)