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Before soundcheck even began Sept. 21, Prospect Records, Georgetown University’s student-run record label, had to cancel its Homecoming show.
Sebastian Larsen (SFS ’27) and Clare Didden (CAS ’26), the organization’s co-presidents, were setting up equipment for the unofficial fraternity Zeta Psi’s live concert in a university-owned townhouse across the street from Georgetown’s campus. Weeks of preparation had gone into planning the event, which would feature three student bands: Kicking Cans, Araujia and No One And The Elses.
But the concert came to a halt when a staff member from Georgetown University’s Office of Residential Living, which handles student affairs and facilities management, entered the townhouse’s backyard and informed Larsen that the organization could not proceed with the show.
“It was a noise thing essentially, said we couldn’t even set up and didn’t give us a chance to prove that we could keep it at a reasonable volume,” Larsen told The Hoya.
The abandoned concert is one of multiple on-campus live music events which have been canceled or shut down. In the last year, university officials stopped events including performances in Red Square and a concert in the Alumni Square courtyard, citing university policy about amplified sound causing disturbances.
Griffin Elliott (CAS ’26), a member of No One And The Elses, said the sudden cancellation of the Prospect Records show appeared unwarranted, given the absence of any explicit university policy in regards to live band performances.
“During regular school hours, there can’t be amplified sound, but at homecoming, we got shut down on a day where there were no classes, and they used the same rule,” Elliott told The Hoya.
Residential Living policies permit amplified sound until midnight on Fridays and Saturdays during any outdoor informal gathering in common areas of Village A, Alumni Square and LXR and Nevils Halls; there is no explicit policy for gatherings occuring in townhouse areas. The concert was scheduled to begin at 1 p.m.
The university’s student code of conduct prohibits excessive noise.
“Excessive sound which infringes upon the community’s right to reasonable peace and quiet is prohibited at all times,” the code reads. “For non-University owned properties, if noise can be heard beyond the property line, it is probably excessive, taking into account the time and the nature of the activity generating the sound.”
However, Noah Vinogradov (SFS ’25), a member of No One and The Elses, said the university’s preemptive shutdowns do not give musicians a chance to regulate the sound on their own.
“How can you say that something is excessive sound before you’ve even heard it?” Vinogradov told The Hoya.
A university spokesperson said the university aims to support students’ musical expression and encourages students to work with Residential Living staff to find space for concerts.
“From Gaston Hall’s history as a formal concert hall to the Hilltop’s role as an incubator for the local punk scene, Georgetown has a proud history of nurturing musical expression by its students,” the spokesperson wrote to The Hoya. “Contemporary examples include the student-organized Battle of the Bands and Georgetown Day’s student band performance in front of White-Gravenor Hall.”
“We encourage students to speak with their Community Directors in advance of any planned activities so we can collaborate to find a workable solution. As students plan events, they should be sensitive to the peace and privacy concerns of their colleagues, students and local residents,” the spokesperson wrote. “In addition, Residential Education staff are in the process of working with other university colleagues to identify spaces where students may perform without adverse impact on the surrounding neighborhood.”
Student musicians traditionally perform at parties, in basements, and publicly on campus, even though university policies restrict the use of amplified sound. (Meghan Hall)
Georgetown’s Musical Past
Student-performed live music has been flourishing in recent years, with student bands drawing large crowds.
In particular, the band Rosewater, composed of Will Lefever (SFS ’24), Will Staniar (CAS ’24), Sofi Schlesinger (CAS ’25), Will Atkinson (SFS ’25) and James Dolan (CAS ’25), gained popularity performing in student-owned basements, backyards and on the front lawn of campus before breaking up.
Benjamin Harbert, an ethnomusicologist and the chair of Georgetown’s department of performing arts, conducted a study with students in his first-year seminar about the importance of live music at Georgetown.
“What we found in our study was that live music was crucial for Georgetown students, faculty and administrators because it was an important tool for people feeling like they were part of a community,” Harbert told The Hoya.
Harbert said live music has the ability to bring people together in a unique way.
“Live music, as opposed to recorded music, means that the people you live with and go to class with and study with and the people who are part of your community are the ones who are creating that sense of ‘we,’” Harbert said.
Dolan, Rosewater’s guitarist and a member of Prospect Records, said that student music began to flourish on campus two years ago when Prospect began allowing bands to use its audio equipment, rather than restricting its use to Prospect-run shows only.
“What ended up happening was, because people could use the equipment to have their own shows, bands on campus started making their own shows to play. All of a sudden, live music exploded because people could create something that belonged to them,” Dolan told The Hoya. “And instead of asking their friends to Uber across D.C. to come to a Prospect show, they could come to a two-hour-long show on campus.”
Following this new policy, bands like Rosewater gained momentum, with Prospect renting out equipment 39 times last year, according to Dolan.
Sofia Gershanik (CAS ’27) said her experience at a Rosewater concert last year opened her eyes to the talent of student musicians.
“That was the first time I have ever seen a student band of people my age really and truly blow me away,” Gershanik told The Hoya. “They sounded like professionals. They acted like professionals. They performed and had a stage presence, just as professionals do.”
The university has supported student bands, inviting Rosewater to perform at the McDonough School of Business’s annual gala and Georgetown Day, an end-of-the-year celebration on the last day of classes, last spring. On Sept. 20, the day before the canceled Prospect Records concert, the university had invited Kicking Cans to perform at its Traditions Day celebration, part of Homecoming Weekend.
Despite participating in this university-sanctioned event, Dimitri Rosenthal (MSB ’26), a rhythm guitarist and vocalist for Kicking Cans, said the performance was not as impactful as the one on Homecoming would have been.
“It wasn’t quite the crowd we had anticipated, because there’s something different between a Georgetown-sponsored event and a sort of frat kind of energy,” Rosenthal told The Hoya. “It’s just different there.”
Dolan said that if the university wants student bands to be able to perform at university events, they must allow bands to develop their talent at unofficial shows and parties.
“The university loved having us for Georgetown Day last year, they loved having us for the spring concert, they liked pointing to a student band and saying, ‘Isn’t that so great?’” Dolan said. “But we would’ve never had that experience if we didn’t play those basement, backyard shows.”
Harbert said student bands have been able to attract fans because they have had the space and latitude to play.
“Georgetown’s music scene has always been really mixed, because it’s small,” Harbert said. “There’s a lot of creativity and a lot of surprising learning from each other, but part of what’s allowed it to be healthy is that students have had places to play.”
Community Reactions
Beyond restricting live bands, the university has also prevented individual students from practicing music in public and private spaces.
Harbert said that students risk receiving noise violations for practicing musical instruments in their dorm rooms.
“Something like 70% to 80% of Georgetown students come in having studied an instrument or voice before,” Harbert said. “That’s a really high number of people, and then they come in here and they can’t do it because it’s criminalized, because then their parents are going to say, ‘Why did I get this write up for you causing a disturbance in your dorm?’ That’s crazy to me.”
Harbert, who attended Wesleyan University as an undergraduate, said music was essential to his college experience.
“Every part of my memory of college involves live music, of my friends and I playing,” Harbert said. “I was in bands, I played music for my friends’ dance recitals, I sat out on the hill with guitars and wrote songs with friends of mine. We learned from each other. A lot of live music was watching each other play and being inspired by each other.”
“To me, college doesn’t make sense without music,” Harbert added.
Elliott attempted to busk in Red Square independent of his band last year, playing guitar and keyboard with one of his friends.
“We would just busk in Red Square during farmers markets,” Elliott told The Hoya. “For the love of the game, just to have a place to perform, to bring music to Red Square, to get some eyeballs and have a chance to go play some music for people.”
Elliott said that he and his friend performed three times and received positive attention from students before a fourth performance was cut short by university employees.
“People would stop and form a little semicircle and listen to us and take little videos as they were walking by and request songs and that kind of thing,” Elliott said. “We were just starting to become a fixture there.”
Elliott said policies prohibiting music amplification on campus block students from expressing themselves through performing live music.
“That just kind of stymies student artists’ capabilities to get better at performing and also just enjoy performing and give performances to other people,” Elliott said. “It also gives people less motivation to start bands or keep playing in bands, because where are we ever even going to play?”
“It is definitely actively repressing the band culture on campus and making it intentionally more difficult for musicians to play music live and share their music,” Elliott added.
Dolan said live music plays an important role in fostering a positive campus culture.
“It does a lot for people’s enjoyment of college,” Dolan said. “One thing that I think Res Living might be forgetting is that their job is to foster a healthy experience, and they have their own specific goals for that, but if you’re preventing people from really loving college, then you’re missing the whole point, in my opinion.”
According to Harbert, Georgetown’s music scene is hampered by a lack of funding and the university’s restrictions.
Harbert said he wishes there was more support for music on campus.
“Being involved in the music program, I try to make this a haven for musicians so that they can play music as much as they can, but we don’t have the resources to support the whole community,” Harbert said.
Looking Ahead
Grace Fenwick (CAS ’26), a guitarist in Kicking Cans, said she hopes students will voice their concerns to Residential Living and collaborate on a compromise that provides Georgetown bands like hers with adequate performance spaces.
“We’ve been trying to organize this since Homecoming,” Fenwick said. “Trying to set up a time to talk to Res Living, and we have a list of things that we want to address with them, so that will hopefully happen in the future.”
Despite their disappointment over the amplified sound restrictions, Larsen and Didden have also been in contact with Residential Living to discuss potential avenues for continuing live music performances at Georgetown.
“It’s been a pretty big inconvenience and block as far as setting up shows this semester, but Res Living has expressed that they are open to talking with us, we’ve set up a meeting, so we’re optimistic for the future and that we can reach an agreement that works for the both of us,” Larsen said.
The Prospect team met with Residential Living Oct. 23 in the first of what Larsen said will likely be a series of conversations.
“The aim was to chart a course going forward for how we could make sure that bands could have spaces that we can reasonably expect to be able to play at,” Larsen said.
Elliott said he hopes that Residential Living will be receptive to student requests in these negotiations and that they will put students’ wellbeing first.
“I think I would say that my ideal outcome for these, whatever negotiations are happening behind closed doors right now, would be that the university realizes that independent live music on campus is actually a good thing for students and for the school spirit,” Elliott said.
The university spokesperson emphasized the importance of communication with Residential Living surrounding music performances.
“Residential Education staff frequently communicate with residents in university townhouses, Village A and other locations about maintaining a reasonable noise level, especially during periods of high activity such as Homecoming or Georgetown Day, as well as managing large crowds that loud music may attract,” the spokesperson said.
Gershanik said she believes the university should not only reverse its decision to restrict amplified sound but also actively encourage more young artists to explore the fine arts.
“Somebody like me who’s not sure what they want to do in life, but knows that they just want to be part of that music experience, that music industry, offering a lot more resources for that and a lot more accessibility is a wonderful thing that I think that the university really should be doing more of,” Gershanik said.
For Dolan, live music performances at Georgetown are more than just a form of entertainment — they’re a fulfillment of his lifelong aspirations and a powerful means of community building.
“People since they were little kids have images of themselves, imagining that they were Jimmy Page or Celine Dion, Kurt Cobain on stage,” Dolan said. “Being able to offer people a slice of living out their dreams is largely what Georgetown is all about.”
“Georgetown is in the business of making dreams come true, and a lot of people just love, love music,” Dolan added.
Erin Saunders and Paulina Inglima contributed to this reporting
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