Firstly, many people in both the marching and performing arts accuse me of wanting to eliminate something they love most. I’m in no way against either art form; I enjoy every marching band show, I love the show Blast, I continue to play the tuba, and I will forever be a band geek. I love both marching and performing arts. Yet the people that I will fight back against are the monsters that make both art forms abusive, exploitive, ableist, gatekept, and the environment toxically competitive. I was also a victum of discrimination, harassment, and vitriolic threats by Mary Procopio at Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan.
I was told constantly to forgive her, forget the discrimination and threats, and practice other toxic positivities that do no justice for Autistic people like myself who remember everything. The Staff and Students at Mott never received justice, for they were also told to do the same cycle of forgiving and forgetting, which does no good, like the people who offer thoughts and prayers as a cop-out, then buy another hand rifle after a school shooting. The thing is, I wish my parents were more like the father who attacked and beat Larry Nassar, a man who thrived in an environment of abuse and sexually preyed on girls at an isolated ranch in Texas, where gymnasts were beaten into shape and shamed into dieting.
Instead of blaming the adults who allowed me and others to suffer in silence. I got blamed and shamed for wanting to be a music teacher or educator like my own teacher, Chuck Russel, and Chuck Daellenbach of Canadian Brass. It’s no different than a man who blames a woman for what she wore that night after he gropes her, like Garrison Keillor, who is still touring and speaking after he did so.
I wanted to be one because so many Neurodiverse and Disabled people in both art forms are not treated as humans, but as shiny tokens to make a band director look good on paper, without ripping the curtains away or avoiding accountability by the myth of the One Good Thing. My Mom would always remind me, yes, that Schindler was a bad person, but he did one good thing to save the Jews! The problem is at the end of the film, even after the Second World War is over. He still feels helpless and hopeless that he could not save all the victims of the Nazis and stop the systems of power that allowed them to thrive in the first place.
People who prey on children and teenagers at their most vulnerable are not music teachers, strippers, or drag entertainers. The worst kinds of groomers teach members how to be groomers from day one to one hundred. Band directors kill creativity, critical thinking, cooperation, equality, and the autonomy of every person. This is why a tenet of r/FlyingCircusOrchestra that angers people is to be music teachers, not band directors. Music teachers value the needs, rights, health, and well-being of children and teens.
It’s not about the title of who that person is; it’s what they value. People who value learning from all things are teachers; people who enjoy and embrace and empathise with the awkwardness and goodness of childhood and adolescence as things to protect are teachers. When learning music or arts no longer becomes an act of joy, play, creativity, and meaning, it is when we are no longer dealing with what Arnold Jacobs calls creatures of Song and Wind, but with Monsters and Robots, Scores and Numbers, Winning and Competition, Money and Profits. When the marching and performing arts are no longer art forms, but sports for others to judge and profit from. This is where the DCI (Drum Corps International) and BOA (Bands of America) Robber Barrons and Band Directors come into our Public School classrooms and harm and corrupt the arts into something devoid of creativity and cooperation by calling it an activity that will transform and change your life, only for it to be broken.
We Have Always Existed As Artists.
The Wilten Boys’ Choir, one of the oldest boys’ choirs. Six of its members formed, in the 15th century, the nucleus of the Vienna Boys’ Choir as established by Maximilian I.
Music has always been some form of expression and motivation; military, theater, dance, choirs, bands, and even animated films need music and songs to guide movement, actions, feelings, and doing. Day to day, we don’t realize we live in a world of many motifs. Motifs are the musical equivalent of a verb or proper noun in writing. Right now, if I told you to close your eyes and imagine a monster with no music at all…you would leave. Yet if you heard scraping strings, there’s a guy with a knife in the shower! Tuba players can conjure a Great White Shark, Godzilla, and a Brontosaurus! Motifs are the musical form of a verb in any language and convey different meanings.
Arnold Jacobs says we, as musicians, are storytellers of sound. So many cartoons, video games, and animated films would not have drive, motivation, and action if it were not with music and sounds. This is why a script and a score direct where things need to be in all animation art forms and mediums.
People have also always created places for artists to thrive and exist, with other artists doing the same in return. George Frideric Handel wrote The Messiah, facing imprisonment for debt. Debtors’ Prisons were a horrible place for poor people who could not afford rent or housing. They lived in sickness with no clean water, deteriorating living spaces, terrible food, and were forced into mental work or indentured servitude overseas. After he finally finished the job and got out, he made all proceeds from performances to free all debtors from prison. His work is performed for charity every Christmas season in honor of his kindness and compassion.
The performing arts have always existed outside of corporate power and ownership until the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Even then, there were still bands and choirs that became more widespread thanks to the invention of recorded music.
Sousa’s Mechanical Mennice
The Marching Arts range in diversity across all cultures, yet what happens when only one style and one way of doing the marching or performing arts is dictated to the point of oppressing and assimilating all cultures? This is something we begin to see with great composers like Johann Strauss and John Philip Sousa, with big egos and wealth dominating both Austrian and American classical music. Until they heard of people recording their own musical oral folk traditions and songs, laying the foundations of the study of field recordings and music anthropology. Instead of embracing these new tools, people like Sousa attacked them despite being the most performed, played, and arranged composer of his time. These recordings also laid the foundations of new emerging genres like Bluegrass, Country Ballads, Gospel, Blues, Dutchmen Polkas, and even Early Jazz. Sousa and other band leaders later founded the first band competitions to combat the menace of music, which were a waste of money and a failure for both schools involved, and the students who slept in conditions similar to today’s bands and corps.
Many college fight songs come from older traditions of march and pride music from Germany, Austria, and many other Eastern European countries. In traditional dances like Schuhplatter, Landler, and some Marches, each occupation and profession has a dance and music to go with it. Many Marches that are Volksmusik canon became their own folk pieces for other musicians, much like the Stomps and Rags of Early Jazz being improvised marches.
A new movement in Germany rose out of frustration with Music Education not teaching the soul, heart, and value of where music comes from, which is from folk traditions that needed to be preserved instead of assimilated or annihilated by classical elitism and gatekeeping by academics and the music industry. This movement became the Wandervogel movement, which protested the desolation of farms and villages by factories by camping and singing in the woods, along with archiving oral stories and musical traditions from each village.
Much of the philosophy of the movement influenced composers like Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and Weber. Before Der Freischütz began as an opera, it was told orally and was a folk play performed by hunting clubs. The real villains of the story are not only Kaspar and Samuel the Huntsman, but the Prince of Bohemia himself, who owns land that does not belong to him and wants to marry Agathie for money.
The Prince is Greed
Kaspar is Ambisous Pride
Kilian is Pettiness.
Annchen, who is supposed to be Agathie’s Bridesmaid, is Vanity and Toxic Positivity.
Samuel the Huntsman is Toxic Masculinity.
Max is no virtuous prince like Mozart’s Tamino from Die Zauberflöte; he is an ordinary person, and at the very beginning of the opera, he is mocked, told he’s a loser, and laughed at by the whole village for losing a shooting contest. Killian is a very sore winner, pushing all of Max’s buttons along with Kaspar. Many German Socialists sympathised with Max as a character and his struggles because of the income inequality between the wealthy who owned and gatekept mobility for people in poverty.
However, in its history, it has rarely been performed in America because of the great sin of anti-German sentiment and xenophobia in my country, which is still ongoing. Many German Americans experienced two waves of xenophobia and hate beginning in the 1920s because of the Temperance Movement, which terrorized and burned down businesses where German Culture thrived. Any fight or college song that mentioned bars or drinking was outlawed during prohibition, including Manie’s Stein Song under the Volstead Act. German-language presses and children’s picture books like Der Struwwelpeter and Max und Moritz were burned.
Around this era was the founding of the American Legion, which is a militant Christian Nationalist group that hammered Assimilation of American Values by forcing schools to not embrace other cultures, segregated dark-skinned people, and re-wrote history textbooks without the history of slavery, the civil war, or the mass genocide of Native Americans, and the tribal leaders like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geranimo who fought agression by the US Military. A good friend of r/FlyingCircusOrchestra is the YouTuber and Pocaster of The Marching Relolution, who goes further into the American Legion’s foundations that lead to DCI and BOA culture, changing its language from militant to jargon found in high-demand cults like Scientology and in large corporate retreat groups like Landmark Education.
Give Them A Piece of Blue Sky, or Be Broken.
Much of the language of modern DCI corps borrows language used in cults like Scientology. They now call it a transformative experience when victims know it’s anything but. When an art becomes toxically competitive, you lose the meaning and beauty of what a peice of art is, and its meaning and context, like Bluecoats show Garden of Love.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.-Whihem Blakes The Garden of Love
George Hopkins is not the only bad apple in music education; many apples were and always have been allowed to be rotten for a long time by the foundation DCI and BOA in Public Schools. Many of DCI’s governing corps are in communities of economic poverty and inequity because that is how DCI works as a 501c3 to hide any investigation of abuses, much like Scientology does with the Sea Org.
BOA owns not only Music for All but also United Sound, which was supposed to help disabled and neurodivergent people in music education, until BOA corrupted it into what Stella Young calls Inspiration Porn. All Disabled and Neurodiverse people in all marching and performing arts need accommodations, cooperation, needs met, and mental health support, not treated like objects to avoid accountability in the marching and performing arts.
Bluecoats corrupted the actual meaning of Whiheim blake’s poem The Garden of Love, which is about religious or any kind of indoctrination from the point of view of a child. Many DCI and BOA members join the group around the ages of 12 and 13, when they should be playing for their own joy, creating new ideas, and playing with other kids in activities outside of music. No person joins a cult like DCI or BOA because they want to or know it’s a cult off the bat. They join because they are taught to do so by other people and are told it’s the only way out of poverty and suffering, by suffering and becoming broken with other people. Yet no victum is to blame for abuse in DCI or BOA, because it was the adults they trusted that did nothing but allow and profit off of more abuse and suffering of young people.
What Does Full Abolishment of DCI and BOA Look Like?
A world without DCI or BOA in Public Schools means that programs can focus less on toxic competition and winning trophies, and instead create new ideas and innovations that progress the Marching and Performing Arts into spaces of accomidation, cooperation, upward mobility, creativity, and equality. Local music stores and businesses will benefit by selling their goods to all Public Schools and Community Programs that benefit the well-being and needs of all people. One example of a corps that left DCI’s model of toxic competition was Star of Indiana. To find a way out of toxic competition, they joined the Canadian Brass to create Brass Theater, which laid the foundations for the Toney Winning Show Blast!
I have always been a huge fan of Canadian Brass, Blast, and even college marching bands at every football game. I have always enjoyed bands of all kinds around the world that perform at Macy’s. I enjoy the marching bands in my state, Michigan. The Marching and Performing Arts do not need monopolies or corporations like DCI and BOA to exist because musicians have always existed as human beings; we musicians and artists are all creatures of Song and Wind, no matter what body we exist in, and our limitations.
For victims of both DCI and BOA, know you are not crazy or alone and that there are others like yourself in the world. You need knowledge and truth to free yourself and others from the suffering done by people who broke you, and that others have every right to fight back against DCI and BOA as monopolies.
You cannot change both monsters from within; it’s like climbing into the mouth of a shark and thinking it won’t swallow you. The only way to save Music Education is to abolish DCI and BOA in all Public Schools and create a hard wall of separation between the Churches and Corporations on Public School grounds.
NAMM needs to be busted so all local and smaller stores and programs benefit. Music teachers need to join the IWW. DCI and BOA have always been broken and must be abolished. If Michigan is first, it will set an example for other states, from Wisconsin, the home of Chuck Daellenbach, Minnesota, home of the Six Fat Dutchmen, and Indiana, the home of Blast itself.
This fight will never be over for victims because you just can’t let it go. I will never let it go because I want justice and relief for not only myself but also others who have suffered from people like Mary Porcopio, Jonathan Waters, Morgan Larson, George Hopkins, Mike Stevens, and many other people who abused, hazed, harassed, discriminated, and groomed students.
Screw the thoughts, prayers, and toxic positivity of people who profit off of Drum Corps International and Bands of America. We have had enough of them.
https://www.iww.org/
https://www.angryeducationworkers.com/