We Had Our Turn. Now Let Them Have Theirs.

I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week talking about last notes.

I didn’t actually plan to. I went to DCI Finals this year for the first time in my life as a spectator. I’ve been to Finals before.

But the other times, I was performing. This time I sat in the stands.

And apparently that opened a door I had kept pretty firmly shut for almost three decades.

I started thinking about the kids aging out.

Then I started thinking about the kids coming home from tour and trying to figure out how to fit themselves back into their high school bands.

Then the parents started talking to me.

Parents who had spent years following buses around the country.

Parents who had built summers around rehearsal schedules, shows, laundry days, airport runs, care packages and Finals.

Parents who suddenly realized that their child’s last note was also, in some strange way, their last note too.

And then I started thinking about those of us who came before them.

The alumni. People like me. And I realized all of these conversations are really the same conversation.

They’re about letting go.

To the student coming home

You may not understand why home feels strange yet.

You just spent weeks living inside an environment where everything had purpose. Where everybody around you understood the assignment. Where excellence wasn’t something somebody put on a motivational poster. It was simply the expectation.

You ate together.

You slept on gym floors together.

You hurt together.

You got pissed off together.

You laughed at things nobody outside that group will ever understand.

You stood in places most people will never stand and experienced moments that are almost impossible to explain to somebody who wasn’t there.

And then one day somebody counted off the final release. You played the last note. And eventually you got on a bus, or into a car, or onto an airplane. And you went home. Except something was different.

You were different.

Then everybody around you expected life to go back to normal.

School.

Band.

Work.

Family.

Friends.

Maybe your high school rehearsal suddenly feels painfully slow. Maybe somebody is complaining about something that seems completely insignificant after what you’ve just experienced. Maybe you’re frustrated. Maybe you’re sad. Maybe you’re restless. Maybe you don’t even know what the hell you’re feeling.

That’s okay.

But remember something:

The people at home didn’t go through what you went through.

Your high school band didn’t suddenly become worse while you were gone.

Your friends didn’t become less committed.

Your director didn’t forget how to teach.

You changed.

And now you have an opportunity.

You can come home and use what you’ve learned as evidence that you’re better than everybody around you.

Or you can use it to make everybody around you better.

Choose the second one. Every time. Bring the standard home.

Not the ego.

To the parent standing beside them

Give them some room.

You may desperately want to know what happened this summer. You may want the stories. You may want to understand why they’re quiet. You may wonder why they’re emotional. You may wonder why the kid who couldn’t wait to come home suddenly seems like they don’t quite know what to do with home.

You don’t have to fix that.

Sometimes the best thing you can give them is the permission to feel whatever they’re feeling without requiring them to explain it immediately. And someday, if this continues long enough, you’re going to have a last note too.

Nobody really warns parents about that.

You spend years driving.

Paying.

Volunteering.

Watching.

Traveling.

Waiting outside rehearsal sites.

Checking scores.

Sitting in stadiums.

Finding hotels.

Following buses.

Learning names of kids who aren’t yours but somehow become part of your family anyway.

Then one night your child takes the field for the last time.

They perform.

The crowd stands.

The final note releases.

And that’s it.

Their performing career in that activity is over.

But a chapter of your life ended too.

You’re allowed to grieve that. You’re allowed to miss it. You’re allowed to sit in a stadium years later watching somebody else’s kid perform and think:

"God, I wish I could have that back."

That’s love... And love sometimes hurts when a season ends.

And now I need to talk to my generation.

I marched drum corps in the 90s. I was fourteen when I left for my first summer. I turned fifteen on tour.

When I came home, one of my mother’s biggest complaints was my mouth.

She was horrified.

Apparently spending a summer living with college students and people fresh out of boot camp had expanded my vocabulary.

Considerably.

Profanity had basically become punctuation. Welcome to drum corps in the 90s.

And you know what? I fucking loved it.

I loved our version of this activity.

I loved the sound.

The uniforms.

The drill.

The drumlines.

The buses.

The gym floors.

The ridiculous things we did.

The people.

The intensity.

I loved standing under those lights. I loved walking through the tunnel.

And almost thirty years after my own last note, I can tell you something I didn’t fully understand until I went back to Finals this year:

I still miss it.

Badly.

There is still a part of me that wants it back. But here’s what those of us from that generation need to remember.

We had our turn.

That version belonged to us.

This one belongs to them.

And those kids do not owe us a reenactment of our youth. They don’t owe us our uniforms. They don’t owe us our instrumentation. They don’t owe us our drill. They don’t owe us our arranging style. They don’t owe us our design vocabulary.

And they sure as hell don’t owe us our nostalgia.

You are absolutely allowed to dislike a show.

I do.

You’re allowed to think a design choice didn’t work.

You’re allowed to hate electronics.

You’re allowed to wish somebody would park-and-bark for twelve minutes and melt your face off.

Sometimes I do too.

I’m from the 90s. Cue the pterodactyls.

But there is an enormous difference between saying:

“I don’t like this art.”

and saying:

“This isn’t drum corps.”

We should know better.

Remember 1993 Star of Indiana?

Medea.

That show was polarizing as hell. People didn’t know what to do with it. It was weird. It wasn’t what people expected.

And now? We study it. We teach it. We talk about it as one of the landmark productions in the history of the activity.

Apparently our generation wasn’t quite as universally welcoming of artistic evolution as nostalgia sometimes allows us to remember.

We’ve done this before.

The generations before us did it.

We did it.

And now some of us are doing it to these kids.

We need to stop.

Because today’s performers deserve exactly what we had.

Not the same product.

The same ownership.

They deserve the opportunity to create something that belongs to them. They deserve to push too far sometimes. They deserve to make weird shit. They deserve to try things that don’t work. They deserve to make things we don’t immediately understand. They deserve to take what we handed them and ask:

What else can this become?

That’s what artists do.

Preserve the opportunity. Not the artifact.

This is where I think all three of these conversations meet.

The student coming home.

The parent learning to let go.

The alumnus watching an activity evolve beyond the version they remember.

Every one of us eventually has to accept the same thing:

The experience doesn’t belong to us forever.

Our responsibility is not to freeze it. Our responsibility is to protect what made it possible.

Protect the education.

Protect the excellence.

Protect the opportunity.

Protect the community.

Protect the expectation that young people can come together, work harder than they thought they were capable of working, and make something extraordinary.

Protect the places where kids discover that they are capable of more.

Protect the teachers who create those places.

Protect access for the next kid who needs this activity more than they even know yet.

Protect that fiercely.

But the art? Let the artists have it.

Right now, those artists are somebody else’s kids. Some of them may be YOUR kids and you have decided to talk shit when they aren’t in the room… Stop that. They are listening. They are always listening.

Someday they’ll be alumni too. Someday they’ll sit in the stands and hear a sound that transports them back thirty years. Someday they’ll watch whatever drum corps has become in 2056 and think:

What the hell is this?

And hopefully somebody sitting next to them will smile and say:

We had our turn.

One last thing.

I started SoundstageEDU because I believed the adults surrounding young people could do better.

Better leadership.

Better support.

Better listening.

Better understanding.

Somewhere along the way, this has grown into a much larger conversation than I ever expected.

Students have joined it.

Parents have joined it.

Directors have joined it.

Alumni have joined it.

And lately, a whole lot of people I have never met have started finding these stories.

So if something here helped you understand your student, your parent, your former self, or the activity you still love, share it.

Not because I need another number on an analytics page. Share it because somebody in your world may be struggling to put words around the exact same thing.

If you’re a parent, send it to another parent.

If you’re an educator, put it in front of the adults around your students.

If you’re an alum, send it to the person you marched beside thirty years ago and have the conversation.

And if you’re a student, send it to the adult you wish understood.

That’s how this work has grown from the beginning.

One person finds something useful and holds the door open for the next person.

If you’d like to keep having these conversations with me, follow SoundstageEDU and follow my personal page too. You can find me on Facebook - very likely by the post about this that was shared with you.

The SoundstageEDU page is where you’ll find the resources, education, podcast episodes and tools we’re building.

My personal page?

Well…

That’s increasingly where you get me.

Apparently I’ve stopped trying quite so hard to polish all the edges.

You’ve been warned.

And if you’re a drum corps parent or student, we’re also building a permanent collection of resources specifically for you—something that can still be there when the algorithm has moved on to whatever shiny object comes next.

Because social media is where we can start these conversations. It should never be the only place they live.

There is room in this conversation for the kid who just played their first note.

The age-out who just played their last.

The parent sitting quietly in the stands after everyone else has left.

And yes, even those of us from the 90s who occasionally need to be reminded that the pterodactyls are extinct.

Come on in.

We’ve got work to do.

Let’s raise the bar, together.

~Mike

Founder, SoundstageEDU