The Watertown Wind Symphony Spring Concert: Revised Programme
an evening of safe, board-approved classical (cis-male) music, carefully vetted to ensure no student is exposed to political content, controversial figures, or "indoctrination" via art
On Tuesday evening, May 12, the Watertown United School District Board of Education in Wisconsin voted 7 to 1 to forbid 40 high school students from performing an instrumental piece they had practiced for the entire school year. The piece is A Mother of A Revolution!, composed in 2019 by Omar Thomas, dedicated to the memory of Marsha P. Johnson and the queer and trans people who fought back at the Stonewall Inn in June of 1969. It has no lyrics. Band director Reid LaDew followed every step of the district’s controversial issues policy, sending opt-out letters home in October, accepting that three of forty students would not participate. The board moved the goalposts six days before the concert anyway, with members calling the piece “indoctrination” and accusing it of inciting political violence, screaming at parents and students who came to object. The students walked out of class the next day.
In the interest of helping the Watertown School Board find replacement programming that meets their newly articulated standard, here is the revised programme.
🎼 Programme
Selections from Joseph Haydn
Sadly unavailable. Haydn spent his career in livery as a household servant to the Esterházy princes, and composed the Austrian Imperial Anthem “Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,” which became the music for the German national anthem, the one with the lyrics, including the verses that are no longer sung on official occasions for reasons the board would presumably prefer the students not look up. Patriotic content. Skip.
Selections from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Sadly unavailable. Mozart was a Freemason, composed The Magic Flute as Masonic allegory, and adapted Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro for the opera stage. The original play had been banned in Vienna by Emperor Joseph II for political content before Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, stripped out the most provocative passages, and even then, the opera kept its frank treatment of class conflict and the aristocratic abuse of servants. The instrumental music is fine on its face, but the man cannot be separated from his sympathies.
Selections from Ludwig van Beethoven
Sadly unavailable. The Third Symphony was dedicated to Napoleon, then angrily un-dedicated when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, with Beethoven scratching out the name on the title page so violently that he tore a hole in the paper. Political content. The Ninth Symphony sets a Friedrich Schiller poem celebrating universal human brotherhood across nations and classes, which under the controversial issues policy would require parental opt-out forms. The Fifth opens with a four-note motif used by the BBC and the Allies as the V-for-Victory signal during the Second World War, beaten out on the timpani before broadcasts to occupied Europe and parachuted into France as pamphlets to encourage resistance. Wartime associations.
Selections from Frédéric Chopin
Sadly unavailable. Chopin’s mazurkas and polonaises were composed in exile as protest music for a Polish independence movement against Russian imperial occupation. Foreign political conflict. Also, he lived openly for years with the novelist George Sand, a woman who wore men’s clothing in public, smoked cigars, and used a man’s name. Lifestyle content.
Selections from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Sadly unavailable. The 1812 Overture commemorates a Russian military victory and includes live cannon fire. Political violence. Tchaikovsky was also a gay man whose letters and diaries describe his relationships with men in language that was censored by the Russian state for over a century before Yale University Press published the unexpurgated correspondence in English, making any performance of his work an implicit endorsement of LGBTQ+ history under the standard the board has just established.
Selections from Franz Schubert
Sadly unavailable. Recent scholarship has reopened longstanding questions about his romantic life, his close circle of male friends, and the homoerotic themes in his lieder. Even the instrumental music carries this association by extension, per the Watertown standard.
Selections from George Frideric Handel
Sadly unavailable. Never married, lived as a bachelor his entire life, and wrote operas for the castrato singers who were the international superstars of his day. Messiah glorifies a religious figure whose teachings on caring for the poor, the stranger, and the imprisoned remain politically contested in some American school districts.
Selections from Johann Sebastian Bach
Sadly unavailable. The St. Matthew Passion and the B Minor Mass are explicitly religious works, in violation of the Establishment Clause if performed at a public school event. The secular cantatas include the Peasant Cantata, which uses Saxon dialect for body parts and sex acts. The Coffee Cantata is a comic piece about a young woman defying her father over her drinking habits. Generational defiance.
Selections from Hector Berlioz
Sadly unavailable. The Symphonie fantastique is a programmatic account of an opium-fueled obsession with a married actress, complete with an “idée fixe” theme representing the beloved that reappears in every movement, eventually transformed into a witches’ dance when the protagonist imagines her at his own funeral after he has hallucinated murdering her and walking to the scaffold. Berlioz published the program with the score. Drug content, stalking, violence.
Selections from Richard Wagner
Available. Wagner was a virulent antisemite whose 1850 essay “Das Judentum in der Musik” went on to influence generations of antisemitic artists and leaders, and whose music was later embraced by the Third Reich with Hitler appearing as an honored guest at the Bayreuth Festival run by Wagner’s family. The board may wish to reconsider, but by the standard articulated in the May 12 meeting, his political views are not disqualifying so long as no transgender people are mentioned.
🎺 Tonight’s actual programme
Four minutes of silence, in three movements, dedicated to the Watertown Wind Symphony students who practiced A Mother of A Revolution! by Omar Thomas for seven months under the district’s own properly followed controversial issues policy, and to band director Reid LaDew, who did everything the policy asked of him.
Following the silence, the Wind Symphony will perform A Mother of A Revolution! anyway, because it is an instrumental piece, because thirty-seven of forty students chose to play it, because hundreds of community members signed letters and packed meetings asking for it, because students walked out of class in protest, and because a school board’s job is to support students learning hard things, not to scream at parents who disagree.
🎻 Programme notes
The standard the Watertown School Board adopted on May 12, 2026, is that an instrumental piece of music without lyrics may be banned because of the identity of the person it honors. Applied consistently, that standard removes most of the Western canon from American public school concerts. Applied inconsistently, it tells 2SLGBTQIA+ students and the adults who love them exactly where they stand.
Omar Thomas is a living American composer whose work is performed by professional and educational ensembles across the country. Marsha P. Johnson was at the Stonewall Inn on June 28, 1969, when patrons of a gay bar fought back against a police raid. Both facts are history. History is what music classes are supposed to engage with.
The Watertown Wind Symphony deserved better than this. So did the community members who showed up and got booed at by their own elected officials. Let the kids play.
🌅 Acts of Interdependence
The Watertown story is not far away. The Wisconsin Examiner has documented that more than one hundred Wisconsin school districts have fielded book challenges since 2020, the overwhelming majority targeting books with LGBTQ+ themes or characters, books by authors of color, and books that discuss race honestly. PEN America has documented nearly 23,000 book bans in American public schools since 2021. The Watertown vote is the same pattern in a new register. Minnesota is not immune, and District 2B is not immune, and the work of keeping our schools open and honest happens at school board meetings most of us could walk into tonight if we chose to.
Show up to your local school board meetings. The “controversial issues policies” the Watertown board hid behind do not write themselves or pass themselves. They are drafted, proposed, voted on, and renewed in rooms that are usually mostly empty. Fill them.
Defend the educators who follow the policies and get punished anyway. Reid LaDew did everything his district’s policy asked of him. The board moved the goalposts six days before the concert. Teachers in this position need community defense, and they need it loudly and in public.
Resist the language. When elected officials describe a Black trans woman as a “cross-dressing prostitute” or describe an instrumental piece of music as celebrating political violence, do not reach for gentler words to describe what they said. Name it.
Support Emily Thabes for Minnesota State House, District 2B. The work of keeping Minnesota schools accountable to students rather than to extremist parent groups happens in St. Paul, in school board meetings across the district, and at the doors of neighbors who have not yet been asked.
Tell the students of the Watertown Wind Symphony, in whatever way you can find, that the rest of the country saw what they did this week. Forty kids walked out of class for an instrumental piece of music by a Black composer dedicated to a Black trans woman, and they were right.
The remainder of the program could be excluded on the same grounds. The board is comprised of a bunch of hypocrite bigots with double standards.