My favorite thing today – members of the Watertown High School Wind Symphony in Watertown, Wisconsin, were joined by school alumni and community musicians to perform the instrumental piece “A Mother of a Revolution” on Wednesday night.
World-renowned composer Omar Thomas wrote the piece in 2019 to honor LGBTQ+ activist Marsha P. Johnson and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Johnson, a Black transgender woman, became a leader of the gay rights movement.
Even though the high school students rehearsed the piece all year, the composition was pulled from the Wind Symphony’s spring concert just days before the performance after some school board members called the piece “indoctrination – because god forbid high school students learn a snippet of LGBTQ history…
The Wind Symphony’s music directors, Reid LaDew & Chad Martin, wrote in a letter to parents last fall explaining the composition was chosen for study to introduce students to “a range of contemporary compositional techniques, rhythmic layering, and stylistic fusion—combining concert band tradition with elements of disco and dance music.”
When the story of the school board banning the piece from the spring concert hit local news, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church stepped in and organized a special performance of the piece last night.
More from the local Fox News affiliate:
At a May 12 special meeting, the school board voted to pull the song from the spring concert.
“This is a perfect example of what everyone sitting at this table ran on, which was ending indoctrination in classrooms and ending radical curriculum,” said Sam Ouweneel, Watertown School Board vice president.
The issue dates back to October, when the wind symphony director sent a letter to parents in line with the district’s “controversial issues in the classroom” policy.
After the school board banned the piece from the students’ spring concert, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church hosted a performance of the piece, and Thomas flew in to conduct it.
One Watertown student, Clayton Fliess, told reporters, “We worked on it because it was technical, and the school board taking that away last minute is just really frustrating.”
On Wednesday, Thomas flew in to conduct the song performed by a coalition of musicians, including some members of the high school wind symphony, to a standing-room only audience
The concert was not an official school event, and some students chose not to participate.
According to local news, there was a line out the door an hour before the performance. As hundreds packed the church, a livestream of the performance garnered more than 3,000 viewers.
The clip below is cued up to the performance. Back up a few minutes to hear Thomas’s remarks about the history of the composition and his pride in the students’ desire to perform the piece.
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