50-Year-Old Fight Song Rediscovered
Shelved for decades, Montezuma Majesty returns to the Marching Aztecs repertoire.
Bryan Ransom had seen the title before. As SDSU’s director of athletic bands, he had come across the chart for “Montezuma Majesty” in the music department’s files (click here to listen).
“But it was hand written,” Ransom said, “and just looking at it without fully examining it or having somebody play it, I didn’t know what it was.” Until earlier this summer when he made a surprising discovery.
“I was just poking around in the library and found it along with two vinyl recordings and I took it home,” he remembered. “This was the first recording I had discovered of it and I loved it the first time I played it.
“It’s so indicative of a college fight song. I love our fight song because it is fight-song sounding, but it’s so different sounding than any other college fight song and ‘Montezuma Majesty’ is really typical of the traditional college fight song sound. It’s different enough that it’s not of the same mold as ours, but it has characteristics of ours and it has a little quotation of the alma mater—‘Hail Montezuma’—at the end, which is really the thing that pulled me into it.”
Revived musical tradition
Ransom came across “Montezuma Majesty” barely a week after a conversation with Aztecs quarterbacks coach and SDSU alumnus Brian Sipe, who has been instrumental in reintroducing school traditions to boost the football program.
“He had been talking to me about what I could do to help him in his vision of reviving and creating some traditions,” Ransom said. “I thought of him immediately when I heard ‘Montezuma Majesty’ and said, ‘I’ve got to get this rearranged and into the books this year.’”
Ransom turned to Facebook to track down the song’s composer to request permission to rearrange the music. Almost immediately, he located Ted Lucas, a former professor and college administrator now retired and living in Ventura County.
“I didn’t even know in the first place that they had retained it,” Lucas said of the song he remembered writing in 1961 as a 19-year-old undergraduate music major. “I was surprised Bryan liked it and surprised he wanted to do a revival of music that hadn’t been done in a while.”
'The tune in my head'
Lucas grew up in a musical family in El Cajon. At San Diego State, his instrument of choice was the violin, which he played in the symphony orchestra. He also played the piano and several brass instruments, including the French horn and baritone, in the concert bands.
“I was very active in the music program,” he explained. “I played sousaphone in the Aztec Marching Band, so I marched in many football games at Aztec Stadium. Marching band was one of the highlights of my years at San Diego State. I enjoyed it very, very much.”
Lucas said it was his experience with the band that provided the inspiration for “Montezuma Majesty.”
“The reason I wrote it, as I recall, is that I noticed there were few singing fight songs back in the ’50s and early ’60s at San Diego State,” he explained, “so it just occurred to me that SDSU could use one more fight song for their football games.”
At the time, Lucas had a piano that came with a house he was renting near campus.
“With ‘Montezuma Majesty,’ I heard the tune and chords in my head, so I sat down at the piano and cranked it out,” he remembered. “It probably took two hours to come up with the tune from beginning to end and to add chords. Then, of course, it took several days to do a complete piano score and the band score.
“So I wrote that for the band and I don’t know where that title came from—it just occurred to me. I never did get around to writing lyrics for it. I wrote it and gave it to the band director and he played it and he liked it. I know it was played at several football games as a kind of spirit fight song.”
In fact, “Montezuma Majesty” was so well received it became the band’s primary tune. Jerry Zullo, an SDSU alumnus who has served as SDSU’s band announcer for more than four decades, remembers a time when it replaced “Fight On” as San Diego State’s fight song.
“I think the band director at the time was Charles D. Yates,” Zullo recalled. “One year—I think it was in the early '70s—he said, ‘The fight song has just been played over and over and I want to replace it with ‘Montezuma Majesty,’ so he did.
“We just didn’t play the fight song anymore and instead, after all the touchdowns and field goals and everything, they played ‘Montezuma Majesty.’ I don’t know whether he got any complaints about it, but for the whole season they used ‘Montezuma Majesty’ as the fight song. Then, the next year, we went back to ‘Fight On.’”
Zullo says it wasn’t long before “Montezuma Majesty” and other unique Aztec tunes like “Sons of Quetzalcoatl” disappeared from the band’s playlist.
“They just kind of died sometime in the ’70s and no one played them anymore,” Zullo lamented. “I’m thrilled that ‘Montezuma Majesty’ came back because it’s a nice tune and it’s got that little riff from the alma mater in it.”
Updated arrangement
As current band director, Ransom had mentioned it was that echo of the alma mater that hooked him, too. Once he realized what the music department file had contained for almost half a century, he was also excited about the original composition Lucas had written by hand.
“He drew a little picture of a teepee and some stuff on the front,” Ransom said. “It’s really classic.”
As he updated the arrangement for “Montezuma Majesty,” Ransom hoped to retain the original’s spirit while enhancing the appeal for current members of the Marching Aztecs.
“I kept the integrity of the tune using about 80 percent of what was on there,” Ransom said of his new arrangement. “I added a little bit of ornamentation and some articulation that was not in the original, but pretty much it’s straight off the page. I added an updated drum part because, basically, back when Ted wrote this the drum parts were rudimentary, so I added a little bit to the drum parts to make it more time-appropriate for us.”
The band’s reaction?
“They love it,” Ransom insisted. “That was my biggest concern because I had already hyped it to a bunch of people that we were going to be doing this before I had even played it once with the band. We read it down in camp and everybody put it down and went, ‘Yeah!’ and clapped their hands and I thought, ‘Ok, great. This is good.’”
For the first time in decades, the band played “Montezuma Majesty” for the football team’s Sept. 4 season opener at Qualcomm Stadium. The song seemed to strike a familiar chord with many alumni and fans who clapped along with the music and instinctively shouted, “S-D-S-U, SDSU Aztecs fight!” at the end. The once-popular march has been played at every home football game since.
Honored as SDSU’s 1994 Music Alumnus of the Year, Lucas said he still communicates regularly with several of his former music professors. He still plays the violin and piano regularly, “but I haven’t played brass since I graduated from San Diego State,” he admitted.
As for the song he composed almost 50 years ago that has reclaimed its place among Aztec traditions, Lucas said he welcomes any ideas for improvements.
“If somebody wants to write lyrics to it or even change the name, that’s fine with me,” he said. “I think it would be fun to hear somebody sing it.”
