Performances + Events
In 2019, Omar Thomas ’08MM was commissioned to compose a piece “to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.” The resulting work, A Mother of a Revolution! “is a celebration of the bravery of trans women, and in particular, Marsha ‘Pay It No Mind’ Johnson,” Thomas’s program note explains. “Marsha is credited with being one of the instigators of the famous Stonewall uprising of June 28,1969 — one of the pivotal events of the LGBTQ liberation movement.” The instrumental piece has since been performed more than 100 times all over the world.
Last month, the School Board in Watertown, Wisconsin, removed the piece from the local high school band’s May 18 concert on the grounds that it “violated the district’s controversial issues policy,” Wisconsin Public Radio reported, quoting Board Vice President Sam Ouweneel as saying, “This is a perfect example of what everyone here ran on, which was ending indoctrination and radical curriculum.”
Quickly, the Watertown community rallied around the student musicians, who’d been rehearsing the piece since October. The Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church hosted a performance of Thomas’s A Mother of a Revolution! by the Watertown High School Band, former students, and members of the local community, and the performance was livestreamed so people outside the church, which reached capacity, could hear the music. Instruments and music stands were donated, as the School Board forbade the use of school property, and Thomas donated sheet music because, he said, “they had to destroy all copies of my music.”
A Mother of a Revolution! should not have been viewed as a political piece, Thomas said, but as a historical one. “I chose to focus on a figure who was there and was part of this moment,” he said. Those who voted to remove the piece from the May 18 concert program are “just committed to ignorance.”
Thomas, who studied composition in NEC’s Jazz Studies Department with Ken Schaphorst and Frank Carlberg, said, “I was never told what to write or how to write” during those years. “It was always, ‘What are you working on?’ and ‘What are you trying to say?’
“I show up as I do in my music,” Thomas said. “If I have something to say, I say it.”
He wasn’t surprised that some viewed A Mother of a Revolution! as “controversial.” Still, it was the first time that it had become “a major news story.”
When Watertown residents rallied in support of the musicians in the local high school band, who, along with their non-musician peers, had walked out of school in protest of the School Board’s action, Thomas was invited to Wisconsin to conduct the performance at the church.
“It was a really great show of community and solidarity,” he said. “It was no small thing” that townspeople came together in support of art, the First Amendment, students, one another, and marginalized communities — in this case the queer and trans people — and to “push back on the notion of erasing people’s stories.”
