“Crusties”: The Harvard Band’s Extraordinary Alumni

At every Harvard Football game, the athletes and enthusiastic onlookers are joined by a boisterous third party: The Harvard University Band. They march onto the field playing fight songs and throwing flowers and confetti, livening the mood with school spirit.

“Playing an instrument is a lifelong thing,” says David N. Carvalho ’76, who played alto saxophone in the band.

The same can be said for being a member of the Harvard Band. Graduated alumni — what the band calls “Crusties” — are welcome to return on game weekends to play with the current band. At any given game, it is not unusual to see older alumni marching alongside current members, playing the same songs and sporting the same uniform as when they were undergraduates.

It might seem odd to most people to see a raucous band with 18- and 80-year-olds marching alongside one another, but for the Harvard Band, it’s embedded into tradition.

For the past 15 years, band alumni have chosen one weekend to coordinate their return – called “Crustie Weekend” or “Crustie Playdate” — coming back to play all together at a game.

The tradition started in 2009 at the band’s 90th reunion, sparked by a bar conversation between alumni who had attended Harvard in the 1970s. Samuel G. Coppersmith ’76, who now organizes the weekends each year, recalls that he and other alumni were motivated to organize the event when they realized that, in their mid-50s, they were at an age where they had the flexibility to do so.

“Somebody pointed out that we’re in kind of the Golden Age in that our kids are old enough that we can leave for the weekend, but we’re still mobile, so we should take advantage of this and pick one weekend every fall,” he says.

The first Crustie Playdate took place in 2010 and has continued since. Though it was organized initially by and for students who had attended Harvard in the 1970s, it has since become something that all band members are familiar with — and expect each fall.

“In college, something becomes a tradition after three years, because everybody who knew that it just got started is graduating,” Carvalho says. “So we were doing this, and the undergraduates thought, ‘Oh, Crustie Weekend, that’s a thing.’”

Across our interviews with band alumni, they spoke about the importance of the relationships they were able to form because they had joined the Harvard Band.

“Playing music was the excuse for being in the band, but it wasn’t the real reason,” Bob H. Rosen ’65 tells us when we interview him over Zoom.

Rosen — who, over the course of our interview, took several sips from a mug with the word “Crustie” emblazoned on it in red font — described the band as the unique place on campus where he was able to find people he could connect with.

“I found in the band a great sense of community. There were, it was nice to see there were others of my species at Harvard, which I hadn’t discovered for myself,” Rosen says.

Coppersmith — who described himself in an email as “irrationally devoted” to the Harvard Band — says that the kinds of connections that he was able to make through the band were something he was not able to find elsewhere at Harvard.

Coppersmith told us that his experience of the University in the ’70s was that it was less committed to the undergraduate experience than it is today, making it harder for students to find their place on campus — especially students who, like him, came from public school backgrounds.

“The band played a large role for me back then as kind of my organization, the place where, when you felt overwhelmed, you could be with your friends,” he said. “And it really acted, for me, the way they thought the House system would, but really didn't.”

Although the sense of camaraderie has persisted, other traditions have shifted or faded away over time — something that the band’s longstanding relationship with its alumni continues to bring to light.

Caravalho says that one of the biggest surprises for him and the other Crusties was learning that current band members now sing the fight songs instead of just relying on the instrumental.

“We’re marching along, and suddenly all the undergraduates start singing the second verse.

So everybody older kind of looks at each other and go, ‘What are they doing?’” he recalls.

But there have been more systemic shifts as well.

The Harvard Band was first founded in 1919 — 50 years before the University began the process of becoming fully co-ed. Many older Crusties joined the band just as the shift to co-ed education began, which required a shift in the band’s culture as well.

“I got to campus in the fall of ’72 and the band had been all men until, I think, 1970. And we still didn’t have sex blind admissions,” Coppersmith says.

Anastasia M. K. Carney ’20-’23 says that there were still echoes of misogyny present while she was a student — but adds that current leadership has made a serious effort since then to make the environment more inclusive for all musicians.

“I think there has been a really conscious effort by senior staff, and then with buy in by band members to make it more — not just inclusive for the sake of being inclusive or for buzz words or for lip service, but actually making it a good place for people who are here to have a good time and to play good music together,” she says.

Another place in which the band has seen a shift over time is in membership — particularly after the pandemic. Where they once had 120 students marching, now there are closer to 30 or 40, according to Rosen.

This has made the close relationship with alumni all the more important, as recent alumni are able to substitute in for harder-to-fill parts, Carney says.

“To be completely honest, if you’re particularly hard up for a particular part, you'll text someone who you know still lives nearby, like, ‘Hey, are you free,’” she tells us. Carney, who still lives in the Cambridge area, says she used to come to shows once every other week — now that her work has picked up, it’s closer to once a month.

Despite smaller cohort sizes, when the current members and the alumni come together for major annual reunions, they are still able to field hundreds of people. From 18 to 80, dressed to varying degrees of the Harvard Band uniform, current members and alumni will come together to do the one thing they all love — play music with other people.

For the 100th reunion, Rosen says they were able to get an additional 300 people to march with the band — a significant increase, he notes, from their usual 40 or so.

“We were the largest, most dysfunctional marching band in the world that day, and it was just quite extraordinary,” he says.