Reflections
The School Board Did Not Just Cancel a Song
A memory piece about school music, rehearsal, and what students lose when adults cancel the arc from chaos to concert.
From the chaos of the first sight-reading to the final concert, music teaches young people how to become.
There is a moment every semester when the band director hands out new scores. The folders open and pages rustle. Then the first read-through. A train wreck.
The freshmen are lost. The upperclassmen are trying to hold the thing together through sheer force of will. The clarinets are counting like their lives depend on it. The brass are too loud because brass players believe volume is a substitute for confidence. The percussion section has either transcended rhythm or completely abandoned it.
And yet there is energy in that room. They can hear fragments of what the music might become months from now. A phrase lands correctly for two measures. A chord blooms into something beautiful before collapsing again into confusion. The melody breaks through the noise for a moment.
Then rehearsal starts. Again. And again. And again. Wrong notes become fewer. Entrances sharpen. Breathing synchronizes. Teenagers who barely knew how to listen to each other begin learning how to move as one organism.
My freshman year, it was John Williams’s Star Wars. I can still remember the feeling of hearing it emerge from noise into music. My senior year, it was Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Between those years were marches, overtures, fight songs, movie themes, and pieces tied to wars, revolutions, nationalism, triumph, grief, and human violence.
Schools have never been afraid of music with difficult histories. We played battle hymns. We played rallying cries. We played music inspired by wars that killed thousands. Sometimes we played music written by deeply flawed people. Sometimes we played music celebrating victories that depended on suffering somewhere else.
We played the music because the purpose was larger than the politics surrounding it. Music taught us discipline, teamwork, delayed gratification, and how to survive embarrassment long enough to become competent.
Music transformed us.
That is why the recent controversy in Watertown, Wisconsin hit me harder than I expected it to. The school board voted 7-1 to remove Omar Thomas’s instrumental A Mother of A Revolution! from the high school Wind Symphony’s May 18 concert after students had practiced it all year. The piece honors Marsha P. Johnson and the 1969 Stonewall Uprising; the board cited the district’s controversial-issues policy.1 The arguments around the piece quickly became political, historical, and ideological.
But I cannot stop thinking about the students. They did not just cancel a song. They stole an opportunity to grow while bringing joy and beauty to themselves and their community.
Non-musicians often underestimate what concerts mean to young musicians. The performance is not entertainment. It is proof that the chaos of the first read-through can become coherence through patience, repetition, failure, and collective effort.
A concert is often one of the first times teenagers experience the reality that disciplined practice changes both the work and the worker. The music changes them while they are changing the music. That is why I struggle with removing instrumental music from students after months of preparation, especially music without lyrics.
If adults disagree with historical framing, then argue about the framing. If they dislike a composer’s intent, then discuss the intent openly. If context is controversial, include the context, revise the program note, or let people opt out. But unless schools are now issuing cannons and swords as instruments, music itself is not violence.
Today my tears flow because these band kids carried that music home months ago. They annoyed their parents as they practiced difficult passages. An exhausted band director spent months herding teenagers. And then, someone told them that their work was unacceptable. That hurts.
Because I remember what it felt like to be a part of something much larger than myself.