The Rose Bowl Parade and The Arts
A Marching Story
Happy New Year my friends! Even though it’s 2024, subscriptions remain free, so…
I haven’t posted during the last week because I traveled to Los Angeles and Pasadena to watch my elder daughter march with her high school band in The Tournament of Roses Parade. This amazing, once-in-a-lifetime experience for her (and us) saw its culmination in the band’s outstanding, made-us-all-proud performance. They absolutely rocked it!
Our kids’ school, a rural high school outside a small city (Green Bay), outperformed many of the participants who strolled by, including the Michigan and Alabama marching bands! Why? They were the only band who didn’t march straight ahead the entire time, relying entirely on sound and song. Our kids danced, jumped around, whooped, played accordions for a polka, and performed the masterful maneuver required for properly turning a corner while maintaining perfect formation. This was the school’s 4th invitation to The Rose Parade, for which you must audition (we were the/a Midwestern representative), and this says a lot about their band, the school’s commitment to this specific program, as well as the community’s support. In my amateur video, my offspring and her bandmates proceed to jump around and have fun. Behold!
As you can see and hear, they look great, sound great, and they’re having a blast!
Not only did the band and the “Friends and Family” who joined the trip get grandstand seating for the parade, but we also experienced the following:
A tour of the parade floats in the process of being made. Did you know that all floats must be built from natural materials? It may not be obvious, but other than the roses, a lot of what you see on a float is colored rice and other such materials. (Float building is indeed an art.)
Universal Studios, including an on-set view of “Jupiter’s Claim,” the theme park in Jordan Peele’s fantastic film Nope.
Dinner on the Queen Mary
Hollywood
Disneyland
BandFest (where all the high schools performed their field shows)
Los Angeles, Pasadena, Long Beach, Irvine, and the Santa Monica Pier
Why do I highlight this? There’s one thing that made this possible: the arts. I will say it again: THE ARTS.
What else made this possible? ARTS IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS! There’s a vile assumption among those who believe the arts to be merely a luxury—that everyone has the resources for themselves or family members to participate in the arts. That everyone can easily pay for lessons, classes, memberships, and camps. They can’t. The true luxury resides in having the means to do so, not in the art in which one participates.
Even with some public support, the band had to raise money for this trip; the school/tax base/state funding cannot (or do not) provide enough. In the small community which surrounds my children’s high school, individual donors and household income aren’t enough to fund this experience; this is not uncommon. Fortunately, corporate sponsors stepped forward because they simply love the band and the kids. For example, Schneider National, based in Green Bay, transported all instruments and equipment, via truck, for free. This is not the first time they have done so. America has a long history of corporate and philanthropic support for the arts, even in small regions such as ours.
You know what brings communities together more than anything else? You guessed it: the arts. Let’s just say that my family’s politics are the minority in our area, and even more so in our school district, which is deeply conservative. You know what effortlessly brings us all together and creates space for the harmonious existence of difference? The arts. When the school musical begins (my elder daughter has a lead!), the show will sell out each evening and people will come together around the arts. Yes, technology brings people together (Art is also a technology!), but I would argue that our smart phone and “social” media era technology often fractures more than it creates community. The arts—and I mean real participation in the arts, not simply consumption like it were an evening of Netflix—has the power to bring people together and solve real problems. I have seen this happen over and over.
What else happened because of the arts?
People traveled and spent money in communities that value the arts and arts practitioners. The arts economy is real and significant.
The participants experienced significantly more diverse communities than our own. Not just by simply being in the region (Southern California), but also participating, side-by-side, with diverse communities in a unified event. My daughter’s band marched with an HBCU, the Hawaiian all-state band, the Pasadena Honor Band, as well as a host of other groups from different geographies and backgrounds. The arts provide boundless opportunity for such community building and cooperation.
Too often we equate “supporting the arts” with simply consuming the arts. Yes, of course audiences and consumption are important, but to truly value the arts, to unleash the community-building power that the arts have always been, you must support participation in the arts. You must support infrastructure in the form of arts education. You must see the arts as a human endeavor that provides value just as meaningful as “STEM,” business, or tech professions.
We cannot let the arts and humanities become experiences and knowledge available only to the “elite” or those with means and wealth. Ironically, those who often see the arts as a luxury are the ones who want that luxury for themselves. It is not an overstatement to say that the arts are vital to our democracy, and thus access must be viewed through the lens of equal opportunity. If someone were to advocate, for example, cutting liberal arts programs in areas with lower-income students because the primary concern should be a trade and that first job, this should be recognized as an undemocratic viewpoint.
Wendell Berry, in his essay “Two Minds,” distinguishes between the rational mind (cost, profit, efficiency, return) with the sympathetic mind (that which adds non-financial, human concerns to calculations of value). Berry sees the sympathetic mind and approach as superior, as it dares to step outside of neoliberal definitions of “value.” We could learn and grow a lot by applying this type of thinking.
A community and their children traveled, performed and shined, and grew as people and a community. This happened because of the arts. The artwork itself is not always the final product, as that product is often the community created as a result.
So a final message, especially to public educational institutions at all levels. Take note and start investing in the arts (or maintain, rather than cut, your investment), as the costs of not doing so outweigh mere dollars. The myth of the starving artist becomes reality when we don’t support the arts at an institutional level. It becomes reality when we accept the falsehood that the arts are a lesser form of knowledge, expression, and value.