It’s never too late to join the Penn Band!
All you need to do to join is attend our First Rehearsal on Wednesday August 30th, 2023 at 6pm at the Platt Student Performing Arts Center.
See you there! 🙂
Membership in the Penn Band is all-inclusive, and full of perks. All you have to do is come to our First Rehearsal or the next weekly Monday night rehearsal at the Platt Center at 6pm. If you have any questions, check out our website, and feel free to shoot us an email at joinus@pennband.net. The Penn Band welcomes instrumentalists of all types and talents, from keytar to zither to the more traditional brass, woodwind and percussionists – and now color guard members!
The Penn Band is
- Easy to join, easy to attend – No audition necessary.
- Full of perks – Get prime seats to sports games for free, travel across the country.
- A great place to make friends – Social events, road trips, and more.
- Not like your high school band – We’re a scramble band, we don’t march.
- A place to play your instrument – Play fun songs with a talented band at the best events on-campus in front of the biggest crowds.
It doesn’t matter what year you’re in. We welcome all Penn undergraduate and graduate students. Joining the band is not only a great way to keep up on your instrument, but an incredible opportunity to meet lifelong friends and find a solid community early on that can support you throughout your college years. It’s never too late to join the Penn Band!
Email us! JoinUs@pennband.net
What’s a Scramble Band?
If you were part of a marching band in high school, you can basically take all that discipline and regimented marching you’ve learned and throw it out the nearest window…
Like high school marching, we do have Point A and Point B. The big difference is how you move from one to the other. The typical scramble band only has about 4 formations in an entire show. As our Voice reads the show’s script over the PA, each band member can run around however they want, as long as they get to Point B by the time the joke is over. You can run in a circle, you can run is a very screwed up line, you can fall down on the ground and writhe around, you can steal someone’s trumpet and make the chase you…you get the idea. Just go crazy until you’re supposed to be at Point B. Then we park in that formation, play a song, and repeat the process a couple of times. Sounds like it takes maybe one, two hours top to put this kind of show together. And that’s a good thing, because that’s all we’ve got! We do a different show for every game and rehearse the show at the preceding Wednesday night Field Rehearsal. So each show is of significantly less difficulty than a high school marching show, but we do a different one every week.
You’ll find that a scramble band offers the following perks: no stress about perfect marching and no subsequent guilt if you make a mistake, a helluva lot more fun DURING the show, and a lot more free time in your schedule with fewer boring, repetitious field rehearsals.