Ch.1 Introduction (Excerpts)

This dissertation examines the experiences of participants in two distinct musical organizations and explores why a comparison of these two groups within the academic study of religion can generate valuable insight about religion, the self, and human experience. I am interested in the frameworks individuals employ to construct meaning and the impact of that meaning-making process on their sense of self. Experiences of family, community, transcendence, and joy contribute to a sense of spirituality for some individuals. For others, spirituality includes themes of overcoming challenges, commitment to something greater than the self, or communing with nature. I argue that the role of attribution is central to the process of making and remaking meaning and that there is no inherent hierarchy of experiences denoting those that are considered spiritual as better or more impactful than others, unless the individual structures their own perceptions that way. Through the comparative process, I gained further insight into the need for expanding the category of religion as interdisciplinary studies explore the significance of religious communities on health and well-being.

Once I selected these cases, the phenomenon of shared flow[1] through music and movement sparkled as a potential tertium comparationis. While the initial tertium is of course that both cases are of interest to me, the project formed around the common inquiry of how embodied experiences relate to the meaning-making process. This inquiry formed the basis of my initial research question: to explore how religious experience might be conceptualized through bodily experiences that involve music.

Like any unpredictable ethnography, though, the data offered new and different conclusions, and a new tertium emerged: human flourishing. Interview and survey questions were designed to build an understanding of the body’s experiences in these music communities, anticipating the data would support an embodied framework of making meaning, particularly around religious and spiritual experiences. The data showed that even with similar somatic descriptions, an embodied experience of music was not necessarily perceived or labeled as religious: feelings of connection, warmth, and intensity, even the feelings of family, community and joy, were sometimes associated with the body and were sometimes considered religious. This appraisal depended entirely on the individual, their understanding of religion and their belief in the possibility or significance of a spiritual experience. This variation in religious attribution prompted me to examine other features of these groups that were sources of meaning making for members. The features I found included things like happiness, sense of purpose, and strong social relationships, features that aligned with The Human Flourishing Project’s five domains to measure human flourishing.

Case 2: Community Band

A HONK! band is any band that plays in a HONK! Festival. HONK!TX is a free festival of community street bands from around the country that gather to play in the city of Austin for one weekend each spring. This Texas tradition started in 2011, while the original HONK! Fest in Cambridge, Massachusetts began as a festival of activist street bands in 2006 and continues to draw bands from around the world every autumn (Garofalo 2019). There are now twenty-two HONK! festivals which take place annually in twenty-two cities across four continents, including nine US states and six countries (Mike*Antares 2025). These bands are mostly for adults 18+ or even 21+ because of age restrictions at some of the venues where the bands perform. There is at least one summer program through School of HONK in Boston designed to welcome the youth, ages 10 and up, to join the young at heart in making music together (School of HONK 2025b).

Outside of the official HONK! Festivals, honk music is a subgenre of street band music that incorporates mainly but not exclusively brass instruments and whose general tone is one of “honking.” The loud, raucous sounds of many of these bands on the move reflect elements of jazz, funk, New Orleans-style brass bands and second-line bands, and Brazilian street bands. The honking itself is most noticeable from the brass: especially sousaphones (tuba-like instruments that wrap around the player’s shoulders), trombones, and trumpets. However, the spirit of honk music dictates that any instrument which can be taken to the street can honk, from a clarinet to a five-gallon plastic pickle tub to an empty tin can. For many of these bands, members need not have formal music training. They may offer peer instruction or have dedicated instructors to support new members who would like to learn an instrument. Music arrangements are written to include parts that are accessible to the beginner and easy to play. This leaves lots of room for improvisation and more advanced players can flesh out the tunes with increased complexity of riffs and rhythms. The improvisational element is not limited to the notes and beats a person may choose to play, but also the expression through freestyle movement and experimentation with costumes can be read as visual representations of the freedom of the band.

These street bands perform in public spaces like parks, streets, and festivals. Some are associated with social movements and celebrations. Many welcome anyone to join in the music-making. All share an initiative to co-create an atmosphere of joy, rebellion, or solidarity through their performances. For the HONK! bands, their activism is rooted in both their radical acceptance of new members and their belief in the power of music to change the world (School of HONK 2025a). These ensembles are not marching bands, for they do not move in precise, choreographed formations, yet I classify them in the category of the marching arts based on other characteristics, such as the instrumentation, mobility, and pageantry. I will expound on these features, and how they compare to drum corps, in chapters 3 and 4. One could argue that these vibrant, communal bands do not belong in the category of the marching arts at all and that theoretical categories of musicking[2] and banding[3] are more appropriate frameworks. The aim of this project is descriptive, not classificatory, therefore establishing a precise definition for the category of the marching arts is not a priority. The community band with whom I conducted my fieldwork, Blowcomotion, participates in HONK! festivals, therefore it is sufficient to classify it as a HONK! band. This band’s roots run deep to both Brazilian-style bloco bands and New Orleans style brass and second line bands, and yet they are, for many, emblematic of an iconic Austin style. They play at all kinds of community events, private parties, festivals, and parades all over Austin throughout the year. A whole project on HONK bands, their lineages, and the growing global HONK movement would be a joyful endeavor and may be the work of a future project. In this work, I seek to understand member experiences in their respective communities and to consider how those experiences impact their wellbeing.

Findings

Examining drum corps and community bands as religious worlds invokes an implicit challenge to the field of Religious Studies to think more broadly about religion. As discussed above, this project sought to explore how participants’ experiences of music and the body might impact a sense of religious experience within these communities. Connections between music, ritual, and the body have been richly theorized in the subfield of religion and electronic dance music communities (St. John 2006; Sylvan 2005). Victor Turner (1969) constructed his theory of communitas by observing the shared sensory connections that occur during ritual practice, and Edith Turner picked up this theme of communitas in her work on collective joy, showing how experiences of “social ecstasy and oneness” are possible “when working together for a cause” (E. Turner 2012, 46-49). Richard Schechner’s (1988) work on the relationship between ritual and performance also explores the creation and impact of communal experiences when performing together. Aesthetic theology also offers a unique lens through which to look at this experience of bodies in motion. Aisthesis is the Greek word which means to perceive with one’s senses, and aesthetic theology is the “knowledge of god and religious experience derived from sensory perception in an encounter with the arts, with the beautiful” (Knauss 2013, 106). Knauss’s scholarship resonates with both my observations as a researcher and my own experiences as a musician. By considering a relationship between sensory experience, human connection, and the arts, my inquiries around what constitutes a spiritual experience began to take shape. This idea of shared sensory experiences explicitly facilitated by and through music/art further sparked my curiosity about the body’s role in the meaning-making process.

Feminist anthropologists and sensory studies scholars alike have called for an expanded understanding of knowledge sources, illuminating the value and wisdom in attending with and attending to the body (Supernant et al. 2020; Csordas 1993; James [1909] 2012). In order to conduct more effective ethnographic research on the body, I chose to incorporate auto-ethnographic research, and my scholarship benefited from insights gained through my own body’s experiences in a musical community. My experience of rehearsals and performances during the research process generated new perspectives on the types of questions I could ask as an ethnographer trying to understand what these communities are doing and why.

At the same time, simply by showing up at Genesis and at Blowcomotion, I altered the data; I influenced the potential appraisals of spirituality and religiosity in these musical communities. Time and again during interviews, I would ask if they had ever had a spiritual experience involving music, and people would begin to remember, recall, and rethink their experiences in the context of that question. More often than not, a conversation about religious versus spiritual would ensue, with them asking me to clarify the terms. I tried to tease out their interpretations, but most people struggled to articulate a definition. Even the Oxford Handbook on Religion and the Arts (2014) seems to dodge the question: spirituality and religion are cross referenced in the index, implicating the text’s complicity in this obscuring of terms with no attempts at a definition relevant to the subfield to ground the reader.

Widening the theoretical lenses of religious studies allows recognition of “alternative” spaces for people to (functionally) experience religious community, we recognize more of the nuance of reality. Situating drum corps and community bands in the academic pluralist framework of a multiplicity of religious worlds, we decenter normative religion that demands comparison to itself, recognize that people attribute religious and spiritual meaning differently, and allow for a more interesting, more complete understanding of religion.

[1] I am referring to the concept of “flow” as it has been described by John MacAloon and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I will explore this term and what it seeks to describe in Chapter 2.

[2] This term was originally coined by Christopher Small (1998) in Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening.

[3] The term banding grew out of the British brass band movement during the industrial revolution (Holman 2025; Rhodes 2007; Whiteoak 2003).

Ch. 4 Blowcomotion

Music fills the air
Purple pandemonium
A Blowcomotion
(Haiku #48a)

As musicians gathered in the grassy park for an evening rehearsal, thick clouds gathered in the darkening sky above us. At the first rumble of thunder, the dozen or so woodwind players went under a small shelter. The delicate pads under each key on saxophones, flutes, and clarinets cannot risk getting even a little bit wet. The brass watched them retreat, looking down at our own sturdy metal instruments and resolving to wait out any temporary precipitation that might tease our parched Texas soil. Once the drizzle started, though, we watched the drummers join the woodwinds. It was already looking rather crowded under the shelter, but the rain started to come in earnest, so the high brass agreed to shuffle under the canopy of a nearby live oak tree. The low brass stayed on the edge of the field a little while longer, but, lacking any big trees at that end of the park, it was not long before they too squeezed in with the woodwinds and drums under the shelter.

The park had been cleared of the neighborhood families who had come to play with their dogs and their children for several minutes when out of nowhere two people came running into the center of the field. They began a lively game of frisbee, punctuated with graceful and ecstatic dance moves to our music. Their antics were infectious. The high brass watched them gleefully, giggling between notes. Eventually, every player in this section was completely soaked, and it was becoming hard to see the music which was now soggy even through the page protectors. We finally conceded that the rain showed no signs of letting up and agreed to try to join the rest of the band under the shelter.

Rehearsals usually consist of one hour of sectionals, where members work on improving their playing skills, learning new music, and practicing difficult sections of music, followed by one hour of full-band practice where the group runs through the set list for upcoming gigs or tries out the new tunes introduced in sectionals. Occasionally, the time spent as a full band is longer, or sectionals are skipped altogether, like if there are multiple shows coming up that week with a lot of tunes to run through, or in the case of this particular evening when the different instrument sections merged prematurely due to their forced proximity.

Somehow we fit over forty people and their instruments under this little shelter that comfortably fits two picnic tables. It was like the story of the white mitten where all the forest animals crowd in to get warm, and it magically expands to make room for all (Brett 1996). There were a few unhoused neighbors sharing the space with their pups, unbothered by the crowding of instruments, cases, stands, and soggy bodies. A box of earplugs was passed around by a generous member with the foresight to know how loud the band could get, even when not confined to such a small space.

During one of the few songs I have memorized, I took the opportunity to look around and made eye contact with several people who were also looking around and taking it all in. At that moment, I felt a wave of overwhelming sensation. I could not play for several measures because my throat was thick with emotion. Tears stung the corners of my eyes, mixing with the rainwater and sweat, as I took several deep, shuddering breaths and basked in the music, the storm, the energy, the love, and the absurdity of my fellow bandmates. Awash in a feeling of profound connection, I was somehow both firmly in my body and also floating outside of it. In the moment, everything felt so bright and intense; the colors were richer, whether from the warm yellow light or my extra dilated pupils or just some other shift in my attention that heightened my visual input. The sound was dampened from my earplugs but also seemed further away as my attention shifted from the overwhelming sonic input to the experiences of my other senses. Replaying the memory while I write this, I can recall those feelings and sensations, but I notice a new feeling surfacing, one of gratitude: grateful that I chose to be there, and grateful for every person around me who also chose to be there, and that we chose to create this experience together.

We continued with our practice, the shelter getting hotter and smellier, the music getting louder, the joy rippling out into the storm and the surrounding neighborhood. At the conclusion of this rehearsal, our band leader acknowledged, “Mistakes and situations like this make for really magical moments.” He read aloud an email that came while we had been playing from a neighbor two blocks away:

Even just rereading this email as I write brought back a little wave of that overwhelming sensation from my heart up through my throat and into my eyes. That night, though, the band’s group chat was alive with chatter about the incredible experience of rehearsal. People uploaded videos and pictures of the band packed into this little place. Sentiments of love and gratitude and awe poured in. One person wrote: “Moments like these are why it’s difficult to explain to people why we love music so much. Music transcends the earthly. It was bigger than us” (GroupMe 2025).

Entry

Unlike my intentional and strategic outreach to Genesis Drum Corps, I met Blowcomotion by accident. Just a few days before my first weekend with the drum corps, I was walking with my daughter at one of the few weird places left in Austin, 37th Street. It was the first night of the 37th Street Lights, where a whole city block decorates with ludicrous decorations that appear at first glance to be traditionally festive winter adornments, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves to be a tree full of naked Barbie dolls hanging like ornaments, a giant Christmas Krampus, an alien spaceship dome made of PVC pipes, a purple house lit up with Prince’s love symbol, several neon interpretations of breasts, a stuffed animal petting zoo, and more. We strolled through the annual community opening; a few households offered cocoa or beer, someone was selling cookies, and as I reached for a treat, we were hit with a blast of funky sound from the purple realm. Entranced, I wandered toward a group of purple people and realized it was not just the lighting. They were a glorious mismatch of purple feathers and sequins, purple beads, purple pants, matching purple T-shirts with a print of a sousaphone train, showcasing their name: Blowcomotion. Some of the instruments were decorated with purple string lights. Something tugged at the back of my mind: my fellow youth group advisor had been telling me about her band for months; this must be it! I was transfixed. I stood there and watched the whole performance while my daughter ran off to play and dance in front of the bubble machine with a friend.

After the performance, I approached a member of the group with a beautifully painted sousaphone. He said his wife had painted it, and she turned around with both a drum and a baby strapped to her. Seeing her smiling, simultaneously embracing the freedom of music and the constraint of motherhood, I felt like I had found my people. I never imagined joining an adult band, but I found myself committing to my first rehearsal after the winter holidays with the promise of a rented instrument from the group. The next day, apprehension started creeping in; I was a single mom and a full-time grad student trying to get my prospectus approved—what business did I have joining a band? Then it occurred to me that Blowcomotion could be a fruitful and fulfilling field site. I was not equipped to join a drum corps and engage in participant observation as a member of that kind of band, but this informal, family-friendly group of Austinites was a promising place for a different kind of engagement with my research questions.

When I arrived at my first rehearsal on January 10, 2023, it was already dark. The park was lit up along the perimeter. A few couples were sitting on picnic blankets, and there were a few people throwing balls for their dogs. This was evidently a well-used community space. I had arranged to rent an instrument from the band, emailing over the course of the winter holidays with the band president, Matt. He was going to bring a horn for me; all I needed to bring was a mouthpiece. At the far end of the park, I could see a group of woodwinds to the right, drums to the left, and brass mostly in the center. One person stood out, positioned somewhat in the middle of these clumps of musicians. I approached them and explained my interest in joining the group, my experience in high school and college bands, and my plan to rent a mellophone from this band’s lending library.[1] Another person came over purposefully with a clipboard and a fuzzy purple drum harness. As they came into the light, I saw it was my co-youth group advisor. Shortly after that, Matt arrived with my rental horn, and I carried the huge case over to the clump of brass instruments for my first hour of sectional rehearsals.

The section I joined was referred to as high brass, which consisted of trumpets, French horns, and occasionally a cornet. There was one person holding a shiny new mellophone, and as I took my instrument out of the case, he declared it was his old horn he had rented from the band until he decided to invest in his own. The veins along its bell and the tarnished yellow brass hinted at a story that started long before the horn ever even came to Blowcomotion’s lending library.[1] The markings on the case suggest it had probably come from a school band. This fellow horn player, Nick, spoke fondly of the wrinkles in the bell, as we imagined the long-ago band kid who had dropped it and the instrument tech who had tried to smooth out the damage. I pulled my mouthpiece out of my pocket. It was a tarnished old silver mouthpiece I had pulled out of my rose-gold trumpet that sits atop our old family Wurlitzer. The mouthpiece, like the piano, had belonged to my father. I told my new friend about my dad, the professional trumpet player, and, smiling, made to put this symbol of our connection to music and to each other into the gold horn from Blowcomotion. It would not fit. Frowning, I tried again. I had always used a trumpet mouthpiece on my mellophone in high school, but this mouthpiece clearly did not fit this mellophone. The instrument I was holding turned out to be a marching French horn, which, to the surprise of all involved, was somewhat different from a mellophone. The marching French horn is pitched like a regular concert horn with the Bb key depressed. So rather than being in the key of F, like a mellophone, it is in the key of Bb like a trumpet, but it uses French horn fingerings. This horn still featured three trumpet-style valves like the mellophone, but I was going to need a French horn mouthpiece. So, for the duration of the sectional, I buzzed pitches into my mouthpiece, focusing on strengthening my embouchure and sight-reading the music. There was a lot of laughter in that first hour with jokes about all the work we were doing as well as finding a great deal of humor in the mouthpiece issue.

A few minutes before 8:00, the separate sections started coalescing into a full band at the back of the park. There were some people in the park who seemed to have stayed to watch this part of rehearsal, and they settled on picnic blankets and benches in the shadows at the other end of the field. They would clap after we finished every song. I could not keep up with the pace of the tunes on my mouthpiece during full band rehearsal, so I focused on holding my horn up to start rebuilding some strength and stamina in that regard. There was less outright giddiness during full band rehearsals and more focus than there had been during sectionals; this may have been the influence of the other sections or a shift in attention that resembled more of a performance mindset, possibly enhanced by the presence of that impromptu audience. Most songs were conducted by one person, who was giving so much energy to the group, jumping around as he kept each tune moving and grooving. After rehearsal, my body was elated. My shoulder muscles and biceps were sore from holding the instrument; my mouth and cheek muscles were sore from blowing into the mouthpiece, and my lower back hurt from standing for two hours straight. Yet I was full of a lightness that seemed to come out of my chest and out of the top of my head; I was buzzing with energy, but I hurried home to relieve the babysitter and write up my field notes. I wondered if these feelings were a result of playing music—although I did not technically play any notes myself that night—of being in a community, or of being out for an evening by myself for the first time in six years. Processing this experience quickly reshaped the research questions, pivoting from the goal of producing ethnographic description of two unique subcultures to exploring how people make meaning of the experiences in their bodies.

[1] A mellophone is pitched like a French horn but uses the fingerings of a trumpet. It is designed to bring the warm sound of the French horn to marching ensembles, with a forward-facing bell and a brighter sound.

Structure

Blowcomotion is officially a non-hierarchical non-profit organization with a Board of Directors composed of members of the band. As a 501(c)(3), funding is sourced from donations by students for instruction, grants from the city of Austin, and payment for gigs. The money is used to buy new instruments for the lending library, pay instructors, and save up for big trips, like HONK!Boston. The Board takes on leadership roles of sending informative emails, contracting gigs, tracking attendance, and interfacing with other community leaders as representatives of the band, but anyone can conduct, anyone can solo, and anyone can join. Blowco describes themselves as “a brass band open to everyone, no matter their level of musical experience, financial means, or background” (Blowcomotion 2024). Members share responsibility of contacting the city park when the field needs mowing, welcoming new members, peer teaching, and staying accountable to each other with a newly minted community agreement. “This really is a learning band, and we have to be accepting and supportive of people with little to no experience. That means being patient with people that are still learning their parts, providing feedback and tips rather than broad criticism, etc.” (Interview B7).

Their community agreement was formed in 2025 with input from all the sections and many hours of synthesis and review by the Board members. There was widespread support for the creation of this agreement and the intentional facilitation of input by the members of the Blowcomotion community. People understood the goal—“I like that the leaders are trying to make this the best possible group”—but were also a little confused about the timing; they thought something bad had happened to trigger it (Ibid.). Bev explained that the group had gotten so big that the Board suddenly realized they probably should have done something like this sooner—“We’ve let ourselves be unstructured for so long it’s time”—so they quickly but thoughtfully rolled out the initiative to establish a more explicit structure. Bev drew inspiration from language she found on the Unitarian Universalist webpage about covenant building. She used this language to explain her suggestions to the Board on how they might approach the process of establishing a community agreement with and for the band. She talked about how a covenant is aspirational, not contractual, and framed it as a list of mutual promises made to each other by and for the community. “If it comes from on high, people who want to be oppositional will be like ‘I don’t have to do that,’ but if it comes from the group, it’s like, we all want this.” The Board fully supported this approach, but they chose to remove explicit references to covenants when explaining it to the band to avoid religious connotations.

Another goal of establishing the Community Agreement is so that if or when something challenging does arise, community leaders are able to refer to the guidelines put down by the group, so that “it doesn’t have to be a hard conversation.” Section leaders introduced the practice of Ouch/Oops to help live out the principles of listening to each other and acknowledging accidental hurts. Ouch/Oops is supposed to be a low-stakes tool designed to communicate when someone’s words have an unintentional negative effect on another person. The affected person says “Ouch,” and the other person responds with “Oops,” distilling the conflict resolution process to its simplest elements, no frills. Bev underscored the voluntary nature of participation in the Blowco community when she pointed out, “If someone feels like they can’t abide, they can remove themselves” (Interview B7). Blowcomotion aims to be inclusive, and in its efforts to prioritize this inclusivity in the community, realized some healthy boundaries could in fact translate to a more welcoming atmosphere.

The Board has budgeted for four instructors who get paid $100 a week to work with the band on Tuesday nights. Several interviewees over the course of 2023 and 2024 mentioned a desire for more respect to be shown to these instructors. The group atmosphere is often so informal, people seem to sometimes forget that there are people there trying to help others improve their musicianship. While there is no hierarchy amongst sections or between members, there is the distinction between those who are there for fun and those who are there for work. I have seen instructors get frustrated when their efforts seem to go unappreciated, and I have observed other instructors not seem to mind at all if half their section is chatting and drinking; they just address their attention to the other half that is attentive. Part of Blowcomotion’s mission is to: “build community by bringing people together to learn musical instruments, play in public spaces and experience the joy and sense of belonging one gets in making music with others” (Blowcomotion 2024). Band leaders recognize that the relationship between making music together and experiencing both joy and a sense of belonging. The laid-back atmosphere has in part been intentionally cultivated and preserved because they believe these experiences of joy and belonging can happen organically, and they have not wanted to overly mediate them.

Over the course of the past few years with the group, several people have mentioned that sometimes rallying themselves to show up at rehearsal can be difficult. I have faced a similar reluctance at times to plan my afternoon accordingly to make sure everyone gets dinner before I leave, get my bug spray, water bottle, music stand, instrument, and music. Sometimes I would dawdle around the house, chatting with the babysitter, changing my shoes, putting off the three-minute drive that would take me to that non-ordinary space of community, music, friends, and euphoria. For everyone who has said they have struggled to convince themselves to do the work of showing up has also said that once they get there, they are so happy they did.

More than once, I have asked myself why I drag my feet or find excuses not to go to rehearsal when I know it brings me joy. In trying to understand this, I came across a wonderful article by Patricia Sharp (2014) that offers some insight into what might be happening in the brain. This article appears to use bliss and joy interchangeably (c.f. “bliss induced through meditation” and “joyful states induced through contemplative practices”) and locates the neurological source of joy and bliss in the nucleus accumbens (Sharp 2014, 203). Although her research centered around the Buddhist practice of Samadhi, neurological and biochemical research suggest that while “conditioned (neural) thought patterns block reward signals,” meditation practices designed to clear the mind allow feelings of bliss to emerge. In other words, clearing the mind of discursive thoughts makes way for the reward signals to get to the brain. Thoughts like I have too much work to do, I should stay home with my kid, I shouldn’t spend the money on the babysitter, It’s too hot, It’s too cold, I’m too tired, or even I didn’t work hard enough so I don’t deserve to go to practice are all well-worn thought patterns that have taken root in a process of suppressing dopamine release. Furthermore, the compulsive thoughts themselves feed a kind of negative reward system. Sharp explains:

[T]he human tendency toward repetitive, compulsive thought patterns (i.e., daydreams, fantasies, and obsessions) may constitute an internal form of reward. They are addictive “behaviors” that may be shaped by the same mechanisms that shape behaviorally exhibited addictions. As such, they may come to down-regulate dopamine release into the nucleus accumbens and thus maintain an ongoing state of relative dysphoria (2014, 207).

Smith pinpoints a pattern of dopamine suppression as a characteristic associated with daily life. Her research then focuses on the phenomenon of “enduring meditative bliss [which] may result, at least in part, from the release of conditioned dopamine suppression” (Ibid.). By noticing these patterns in myself, I can attest to their interference with my efforts to shift to an internal experience that goes beyond daily life. Community band practice is a removal from the everyday frame of life, a place set apart, where one can enter a state of being that is out of the ordinary. The flooding of bliss and feelings of communitas that result from making music together are not necessarily just because of the music or the group setting but are at least in part because the brain has cleared the negative thoughts out of the way, has let go of the internal language, the inner dialogue that blocks the dopamine release. By moving out of the “state of relative dysphoria,” one can experience a state of relative euphoria.

History

This laissez-faire approach continues to shape the group even after the incorporation of a community agreement, for the band’s roots are firmly planted in a long history of informal and accessible musical gatherings. In the Introduction, I discussed the phenomenon of HONK! bands. This movement officially started in Boston, but the spirit of HONK! can be seen around the world and looks to a long history of human music-making as community activity, challenging the relationship between performer and audience. A compilation of early HONK! stories offers a variety of insights into HONK! experiences across the world (Garofalo et al. 2019). The first visions for Blowcomotion, before it became the preposterous purple powerhouse it is today, began at the HONK! Rio Festival in November 2017. Brazil’s rich tradition of brass bands was preserved by the Brazilian National Foundation’s Projecto Banda, or “Band Project.” In 1976, the nation codified its support for the community-based ensembles, providing a point of privilege over military, school, and folk groups (Reily 2006, 99). The following historical narrative is predominantly sourced from an interview with Frankie Van Keuren, who attended HONK!Rio that year with her partner, a member of Austin’s Minor Mishap Marching Band. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the bloco bands are open, community bands where all are welcome to join and play. Bloco bands can have around 100 performers; they start rehearsing just a few weeks before carnival season, and their performances have the effect of moving block parties. One night toward the end of the HONK!Rio festival, a couple of Austinites from Minor Mishap sat watching the sunrise, talking about what it would be like to bring this bloco spirit back to Austin.

A couple months later, the Mishap fan newsletter announced start of new project and invitation to come hang out at a little pocket park in downtown East Austin. About twelve people showed up to that first “rehearsal” in early 2018. They were mostly inexperienced musicians with a couple members from the Mishaps to hold the group together. One of these members, Joel Greenberg, suggested the name Blowcomotion, centering the band’s roots in the bloco movement of Brazil. The band’s colors at the time were themed around rainbow and glitter. They started gigging around Austin, playing for community events like the Dyke March with the famous bar, Cheer Up Charlie’s. Blowcomotion’s performances for the first six years always featured a call-and-response “mic check,” though it is used less frequently these days:

With these mic check invites, the band grew rapidly. One neighbor by the old rehearsal location threatened to call the police; they were tired of the weekly noise. The leaders felt it was important to find a new homebase—“we are a community band; we don’t want to disturb the community,”—so they started rehearsing in the Mueller neighborhood, sharing space with an ADA activist community organization (Interview B8). Blowcomotion did some “tune shares” with the Yes Ma’am Brass Band and the Moon Tower Brass Band, both local Austin HONK! bands. A tune share is when two bands share the sheet music for one of their songs with each other. Then the bands merge to perform the tune together. It can breathe new life into a tune whether a staple or one that was getting stale. Hearing different combinations of instruments, a bigger sound, new soloist interpretations of the chords, and standing next to a new person making music together all make tune shares an exciting part of the global HONK! community.

Within their first year, the band got instructors and started their instrument lending library. After two years of growth as a band, the pandemic hit. The band could not meet in person but wanted to keep going. They tried zoom rehearsals with sectionals meeting in different rooms before coming together as a full band. Zoom audio posed feedback issues with all the instruments playing at once, so they quickly decided only the instructors would be unmuted. After a few of these challenging Zoom rehearsals, Blowcomotion leaders found a band friendly video platform that included free recording software. With the new program, they could even layer recordings together to record a song. They even made some music videos, like “Rhino Run,” written by an Italian bandmate and his son. The group shrunk to about twelve people again, but they continued rehearsing on the new platform as a way to still create music together in the otherwise quiet months of lockdown. “A lot of the benefit was community,” Frankie explained; the online band rehearsals for the duration of 2020 were primarily about “staying connected with each other” (Interview B8). By 2021, some of the band felt comfortable getting together outside again, as long as they stayed six feet apart. The percussion section started meeting in a church parking lot with masks; everyone stood on a parking lot line to help them keep a visual on the necessary distance to keep between each other. While HONK!TX had been fully cancelled in 2020—like many festivals there was simply not enough time to pivot with the suddenness of the first covid-19 lockdown in the United States—but HONK!TX 2021 managed to organize itself fully remotely.

After the pandemic, the band started meeting in parks again, and the organization really started to balloon. “We had the structure; we made it through the pandemic. Playing in public spaces was part of our mission and a great recruitment tool. The folks hearing us were eager to come out of the pandemic days and make music together.” It was not long before Blowcomotion became a feeder team or a kind of bridge to other bands in the area. Adults long separated from their musical childhoods would hear the band at some public event and be drawn into the world of HONK!. Many joined Blowco for a time, and once they got their chops back, would join another group that played more intricate tunes. Many have chosen to stay with Blowco as well as these other groups, so that there are some members in two or three or even four different bands. Blowcomotion is proud to play a part in the growth of the wider HONK! movement, and even if some players leave to focus on the more advanced or professional groups, they seem to harbor no hard feelings whatsoever. The leaders with whom I spoke sounded happy for those members who had moved on, feeling like Blowco was continually serving its purpose and living into its mission to bring music and joy to as many people as possible. They pointed out that because Blowcomotion is “not competitive and our shows don’t determine our funding, we can be the way we are. Competition by design leads to resentment and poaching,” and Blowcomotion is “designed to be a band of all different skill levels.”

Pedagogy

Some people drawn to Blowcomotion have little to no experience with music or they simply want to learn a new instrument; for example, a longtime clarinet player decided to learn trombone, and another clarinet player picked up a sousaphone. The educational aspect of Blowco’s mission is lived out when people come to the group for this kind of instruction. It is often helpful to already know how to read music, as this can be a significant hurdle to feeling performance-ready. However, the HONK! movement firmly believes, and Blowcomotion tries to embody this as well, that people can learn by ear and can start playing music and making joyful noise without the formal musical training. One of the instructors embodies a teaching style that accommodates people who read music and also people who want to learn by ear. He maintains we are all learning children regardless of our age, encouraging people to “just keep at it” and to “not be so perfectionist about it.” Learning by ear is a completely different approach to music and not one that I am familiar with at all, having grown up with scraps of sheet music on the back of our grocery lists and coloring pages. I do remember the process of learning new clefs, though, and occasionally performing a laborious kind of translation on the occasion that the instrument I was playing did not match the sheet music I was provided. In those instances, I think I did rely on my understanding of the notes’ sonic relation to each other rather than their printed relationships, and using that sense of sound rather than completely discerning the printed page. For those learning to play entirely by ear, they have to know what the music sounds like first, and then they can try to match the sound. One person described the process thusly: “I want to recreate the feeling the song gives me. I want to feel the way I felt when I heard the music. It’s emotional more than mechanical. It’s intuitive more than intentional. It’s second nature; it’s like when someone smiles at you, you smile back” (Interview B1b).

In the practice of releasing perfectionism, joining in the HONKing, and feeling the music, people can play just the few notes they are comfortable with and dance over the rest. Frankie started out on bass drum holding down the beat and filling in the space between the notes with her sparkly energy. In a tune called “La Murga de Panema,” the French horn joins the bassline for most of the song in nonstop repeated measures of two sequences of six notes. This requires an incredible amount of stamina that I did not and still do not have on my instrument. For the first year with Blowcomotion, I only played the first and fourth note of each measure. My fingers were not fast enough to keep up with the pace of the song and squeeze all the notes out. As my fingers got faster, I worked my way up to playing the first set of three notes in one measure and the second set of three notes in the next measure, but an octave down from what was written on the page because the lower notes require less pressure on the lips and a looser embouchure.

This work of trying new things and accepting imperfection evokes parental efforts to create a safe space for children at home, or even my students in the classroom, to make mistakes and keep trying. More grace is generally given to children, whom people understand are learning and growing and who have educational spaces ideally encouraging that growth; however, there are not a lot of spaces for adults to do that. The expectation is for adults to know how to do things already and/or that it is too late to learn them. Frankie pointed out, “Adults are just as curious, but we get stuck in our lanes.” We discussed a recent discussion on NPR challenging the language learning model about the unique malleability of children’s brains (Hartshorne et al. 2018). Recent research suggests that with curiosity, time, dedication, and an acceptance for learning, adults are just as capable of learning. Blowcomotion’s leadership is invested in understanding how to create an accepting space for adults to learn. People are encouraged to “try new things” and reassured “it doesn’t have to be perfect, and that’s okay.

Impact and Identities

Blowcomotion’s Board of Directors put out several surveys in 2024—one for current members, one for instructors, and one for former members. I served on the Board for one year from May 2023 through May 2024 and was able to contribute several questions for the survey. The present Board kindly shared all the data with me, which can be found in Appendix B. In response to the survey inquiry, “What led you to join Blowco?,” several people shared their experiences of seeing the band somewhere and hearing the invitation “you can join us!” One person said just “watching how much fun everyone was having” was inspiration enough to join. 18% said the HONK!TX festival was what led them to join Blowcomotion, while 5% specifically identified the Brentwood Oktoberfest as the community event that inspired them to join the group. 15% of survey respondents mentioned knowing someone in the band as the main reason for joining; 30% of replies indicated the community or group aspect was a main factor, and 48% explicitly mentioned looking for a place to play music or missing their instruments and wanting to play again. The following word cloud was created based on forty responses to the question asking for five words to describe Blowcomotion:

Looking at this collection of descriptors, it is clear that the main features of the group are that it is a fun, inclusive, welcoming community. Looking closer, it is full of apparent and somewhat amusing contradictions: Blowco is both chaotic and organized, energetic and relaxed, youthful and old, upbeat and laid-back, active and chill. Words that underscore or echo the “fun” include joy, joyful, joyous, as well as silly, weird, raucous, goofy, quirky, flamboyant. Words that relate to the community aspect are camaraderie, friendship, friends, friendly, kind, warm. The inclusivity is echoed in words like welcoming, accessible, acceptance, belonging, inviting, open, diverse, radical. While it is apparently both huge and unruly, Blowcomotion is also apparently therapeutic, spirited, impactful, and a source of both fulfillment and catharsis.

These experiences are as diverse as the people in the group: its therapeutic or cathartic potential is not necessarily top of mind for all, just as the flamboyancy of the group may not be a defining feature of the group for everyone, but for some individuals it is a tremendous draw. For example, one person summed up their love for Blowco: “I like to wear feathers and glitter and bang on the bass drum.” They explained that this was explicitly a space where they were free to be queer, to let go of the identity they have to put on every day at the office and to play with another aspect of themselves. In a post shared on a HONK! community Facebook page, someone posted a screenshot of this honk-related commentary, reiterating the final line in their caption: “There are no genders. Only honk. 🤣” (HONK! Performers, Organizers, & Volunteers 2025a).

Other goose- and honk-themed memes posted in the same month received between 2 and 17 reactions. This post was met with measurable enthusiasm: 17 Likes, 12 Loves, 10 Laughs, and 1 Wow, for a total of 40 reactions, including my own “Love” response. The reiteration of the call for “no genders” and its connection to “only honk” suggests a pleasurable association with the HONK-community as a queering space where gender, age, and other traditional externally imposed markers of identity are perhaps irrelevant, and all that matters is the music. Another group member replied to the post with a second meme:

This reads “no gods, no masters, only honks.” The image of the goose relates the honks back to the sound geese make of course, but to the group, “only honk(s)” is the music. This meme response implies a rejection of not just gender, but of any authority that might distract from the music, including religion. The immediate follow-up from “no gods” by “no masters” suggests an association with the presence or belief in a god as a figure that, like the master, might demand something of the goose other than honks. Asking the goose, or the musician, to do anything other than honk, is to ask it to defy its nature. One of my key interlocutors offered their interpretation of “only honk” as “Nothing else matters… Honk is the most important,” defining the call to honk as both toot horn and also bang drum (Interview B1b). The HONK! organizers, performers, and volunteers have to attend to more than just honk music in their daily lives, yet the joy that the articulation and rearticulation of “only honk” brings to members of the community underscores the importance of making this kind of music together.

In Blowcomotion, each section has developed their own chant at the end of rehearsal, to mark the end of their time together and close the special space that rehearsal holds in their lives with a celebratory exclamation. When I first joined the group in January 2023, only the percussion and woodwind sections partook in these ritual chants. Bev provided some helpful history to explain the evolution of these chants:

Sure enough, in early spring of 2023, another player joined our little horn section, and at the end of that rehearsal, we turned to each other, and Nick spontaneously said, “Horns are the best!” to which this other horn player and I replied, “Horns are the best!” This double chant instantly became our closing ritual. As a fellow Texas Longhorn alumnus, Nick made the longhorn hand symbol [ 🤘] and put it in the center of our little horn circle. The other horn player and I followed suit, and we looked at our “horns” in front of us and then at each other. With giddy giggles, we reiterated our chant while touching fingertip to fingertip in a triangulation of horn symbols. The closeness of our hands felt like a moment of vulnerability, and our looks to each other were an unspoken question: do we lean in or shy away? Needing verbal affirmation and consent, we vocalized the question, “Are we going to touch fingertips?” and making eye contact with each other, we agreed to lean into the intimacy of this physical contact and were vibrating with the glee and silliness of it.

Reflecting on this chant, Nick said it represents “bonding and camaraderie” but lately has expressed moments of doubt about its potentially narcissistic implications. As a college student Nick was in the Longhorn Pep Band, and he continues to be a part of the Longhorn Alumni Band. At a recent Alumni Band event, he noticed all the chants and rituals the band incorporated to reflect and reinforce their identity and community. This prompted further reflection on the Blowcomotion horn chant, and in another conversation about it, Nick shared more of his interpretation of the meaning and motive behind it: “I needed a way to feel connected, to feel like a part of something together. That was my way of connecting with you and Jason at a time when I needed more connection in my life.” Over the past two and half years, the other sections—drums, low brass, and trumpets—have adopted their own chants. In just the past ten months, several new French horn players have found their way to Blowcomotion, and our little section has grown. This growth may have subtly spurred Nick’s second-guessing of what started as a spontaneous utterance. In all other matters of rehearsal, the French horns are part of the high brass section, in which the only other instrument is the trumpets. A horns-only chant thus directly excluded the trumpets, albeit inadvertently. As Nick and I chatted about this, we found ourselves working to understand the impulse as one of identity assertion, not one of exclusion. Nick explained that for many months he had been the only French horn player in the band, and the addition of myself and Jason was more than just growth for the organization; it was an exciting development in Nick’s life, to feel like a part of a section within the band, a more intimate group within the larger community of Blowcomotion: “Oh my gosh we’re a real thing, and it’s not just me by myself!” It was this enthusiasm that caused his exclamation of “horns are the best” to bubble up and out without much forethought to the phrasing; “No one asked for it,” he clarified. He conceded that the chant served somewhat of a self-fulfillment purpose, yet I have enjoyed the feelings and sensations evoked when celebrating our little section of horns. Jason also shares in the enjoyment: “It makes me feel good. I’m a bit of a smartass, and we are boasting to the entire band that we are the best. Plus, it’s absolutely the truth. We play the hardest instrument. Can they… most likely not 🤘” (GroupMe 2025).

While each instrument does have its own learning curve, there are some that are easier to get started on than others. French horn is traditionally considered one of the hardest instruments due to its unique tuning that requires an extremely precise embouchure, or changing the shape of the mouth and the speed of air to generate the right pitches. This is true of all brass instruments, but the French horn has a great deal of tubing with only a few valves to change the amount of tubing through which the air flows. French horn players, therefore, do rely more on subtle changes in the embouchure muscles and airflow to change pitches as well as their “ear” to be able to hear the pitch in the mind before it comes out of the lips and into the instrument (Heilweil 2019). Nick eventually consulted a trumpet player regarding his concerns about the Horn chant, who reassured him it was not perceived as a narcissistic sentiment, rather one of inspiring confidence and believing in oneself: “[be]cause we actually miss a lot of notes (so damn hard to play)...saying we’re the best is kinda like a pep talk” (Interview B1b). Regardless of the instrument’s challenges, having pride in one’s section, team, or group, and celebrating one’s identity as part of it, is a well-studied phenomenon. One collection of essays, Understanding Collective Pride and Group Identity, specifically explores how rituals and symbolic practices generate collective identity and emotions (Sullivan 2014). These essays build on the work of social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1986), intergroup emotions theory (Smith et al. 2007), and cognitive appraisal theories of emotions (Tracy & Robins 2004). The appraisal theories are of greatest interest to me in the context of this research, but the interplay between these theories in Sullivan’s collection offers a unique lens on their role in group rituals, like the section chants discussed above, shaping both group identity and group emotion.

One new group ritual that was started in 2025 is a monthly recognition of members' birthday. The data and software experts who happened to have access to these details proposed it and saw it as a potential for increased community building. 

Several people mentioned their relationship to the group identity of Blowcomotion in familial terms, particularly in response to the question of what role does the band play in their lives: “We have a vibrant community, our in jokes, it’s like another family, another found family” (Interview B7). This person happens to have the best attendance in the group; Blowco is really important to them for the joy it brings to their life, and growing the group is a part of their positive experience: “I like bringing new people in because they find the same joy.” Another person described the process of how Blowcomotion came to not just feel like a family but to become their family. She knows the band members are true friends she can come to for a safe place and for music. For this person, acknowledging the reality of conflict reaffirms how much the group is like a family, and yet nothing is ever too dire to be resolved: “Even if we argue, there’s always repair because we’re always coming from a place of community” (Ibid.).

The safe space for self-expression comes across as another essential feature of Blowcomotion when Frankie says it is “a place where I can be my true self” (Interview B8). For someone whose “aura is glitter,” Blowcomotion is one place she can be free and truly sparkle. She explained the stark contrast between the corporate space and the band space. In the former, she had to wear suit jackets and statement earrings: “I was Francoise and not Frankie. [But] I love being flamboyant. Costuming is a lot of fun. Being from New Orleans… You know you’re from New Orleans if you have a costume closet. I had one growing up, and I have one now.” Blowcomotion’s costumes are all purple themed, purple Hawaiian print shirts, purple zebra striped pants, purple feathers, purple lights, purple sequined hats, and a slew of homemade accessories that incorporate sparkles, feathers, wire, and of course purple. People sometimes start out more conservative in their expression of purple pride, starting with just the royal purple band T-shirt, but as the more gigs they get under their belts, the more outlandish and creative the costumes become. This eccentric expression was on full display within my own section at my third HONK!TX festival. Two of my fellow horn players who identify as male showed up wearing black skirts; one player thought of his more as a kilt because it went past the knees, but the other player’s skirt was very short and worn with fishnet stockings, and I donned a silver stick-on mustache. We each dressed without consulting the others, and the spontaneity of this rejection of gender norms seemed a natural expression of the queer space the group afforded to us. Playing with Blowco offered a chance to express ourselves in a way that we would not feel comfortable in our everyday lives. Regularly scheduled “Crafternoons” hosted by a few dedicated band members offer new and returning members a chance to “glitz up” their costumes and make costume pieces to sell at fundraiser events. As a founding member, it could be said that Frankie’s flamboyance has been a significant force of inspiration for embracing such a level of costuming. Attending the HONK! festivals, though, it is clear that this bold expressiveness goes far beyond Blowco and seems to suggest more about the HONK! community as a whole, which I will explore further in the following chapter.

Blowcomotion has a massive membership, and with this diversity of individuals comes a diversity of reasons for participating. The band does not play the same role in everyone’s lives. For some, it is about making music:

And for others still, the most important factor in the Blowco experience is being together. The varying descriptors of family, friends, and community seem to indicate more about the meaning-making process than the significance in people’s lives. Friends are sometimes thought of as more important than family, or the term community may not even be part of someone’s internal lexicon. The concept of chosen families brings friendships into the realm of family, subverting a perception of biological family as deserving of foremost importance. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, this concept is particularly relevant to the LGBTQ+ community, where biological families may not have offered the safety, care, and acceptance of which people hope to find in a family: “I can talk about real things, hug it out” (Interview B8). Based on my conversations with Blowco band members, “community” is employed often to reflect the neighborly feeling and comfort with the group as a whole; the use of the term friends reflects more the intimacy of specific interpersonal relationships. “Family” is used often to reflect both: there is a larger group to which one belongs, and within such a group there is closeness, there is tension, and there is security in the love and commitment made to each other.

Blowcomotion as a social force has gathered steam and at times feels like a self-propelled machine, even though it absolutely could not run without the labor of the Board and the instructors. “Yeah, it took work and thoughtfulness but also people just kept showing up” (Ibid.). The social aspect was one of the most common responses to my question of what role Blowcomotion plays in people’s lives. “The social aspect is important, just the connection with people and getting out of the house, because I have a tendency not to” (Interview B2). A few people brought up the isolation experienced during the covid-19 pandemic as a contrast to what they experienced in Blowcomotion and as having played a role in why they joined the group in the first place:

Spirituality

In 217 pages of interview transcripts with members of Blowcomotion, there are 117 instances of the word spiritual, yet somehow my impression of the group as serving an explicitly spiritual purpose is muted. Too often discussions of a spiritual component to Blowcomotion were guided by my questions and therefore did not necessarily signify organic reflections of the group members’ experiences. However, there have been a few spontaneous religiously coded comments about the nature of the group.

Naming the musicmaking as a process of communion acknowledges the ritual of a shared act yet overtly calling attention to the potential religiosity of that shared act. One of Blowcomotion’s first directors would apparently refer to the practices as church. The person telling me this had never thought of it that way, but in the space of our conversation reflected on three features that provoked the resemblance to church: 1) the consistency, meeting every week; 2) the community; and 3) the physicality, “feeling the music in your body has a spiritual element to it” (Interview B8). This impulse to identify features that resemble religious structure is fascinating on its own, and even more intriguing is how these elements mirror some of those proposed by religious studies scholars over the past hundred years. Interpreting the physicality of music as a spiritual sensation is a more specific position, on which I initially sought to base this dissertation. For this person, the physical experience of music, vibrating in the body, “feeling a resonance in that body” was something “inherently spiritual” for them. They recognized that it is not the case for everyone, but offered further reflection on what this spiritual component means to them:

In October 2024, Blowcomotion undertook a pilgrimage to the HONK! Boston Festival. With months of planning, tremendous fundraising efforts, and travel logistic coordination, they ventured as a group to the origin of the honk street band movement, joining other HONK! Bands for a weekend of honking through the streets of Boston. Although I was unable to attend the festival, I was present at the first rehearsal after their return. The band was vibrating with a new energy; their connections to each other, the inside jokes, the shared experience, all came across as a perceptible shift in the park. I was not the only person to observe this shift. One person shared this in the email chain following Matt’s shared words: “I had a couple of people mention to me after rehearsal, people that didn't make it to Boston, how they could see the energy that we still had after getting back from our trip. I hope we can keep our energy up for the distant future.” People stood closer, talked louder, and laughed longer. The focus during rehearsal was tight, as people were motivated to make as much music together as possible during the allotted time. I could feel how locked in the sections were, playing the familiar tunes with a new enthusiasm. At the end of rehearsal, the board president shared something he had written for the band. As he read, we cried and cheered, and when he finished, we hugged and clapped and cried some more. He shared his words in an email the next day, which I have reprinted here in their entirety with his permission:

Messages about the impact of the Boston trip continued for several days. One email response shared with the group came from another parent, who would often come with her little boy in a carrier on her front with his noise cancelling headphones on, while she played the drums. She wrote:

Another mother shared the impact of the Boston trip on her family:

Bringing this band into the precious ritual of bedtime, sharing names, recalling joyful memories, reflects the extent to which this community really does become part of the family. And it is not just a one-way impact of the band on the families; the first mom using her child’s percussion instruments to perform with the band shows the reciprocity of influence, from family into band. When my own daughter sees the shade of purple worn by Blowco, she said her first thought is of this band. Its impact on our daily lives, our very consciousness, feels immeasurable. When I started this fieldwork, I was sure I would be able to draw on my own experience to make an argument that the bodily sensations of experiencing music together was a spiritual one. I could still do that, using similar words to Frankie and others who have shared their vulnerability with me in these conversations, like vibrating together, connecting to something larger, feeling overwhelmed with emotion and inspiration. It feels more pertinent, however, to emphasize the positive impact that these experiences have on myself, on the individuals who participate, and even the families of members. Blowcomotion has been a force for good, a train of transformation perhaps, shaping and reshaping lives through joy, music, and connection. This connection is most clearly interpersonal, the labor and love shared between people, to create something together.

The haiku has been a prominent mode of communication in the group chat from time to time over the past several years. Haiku is considered an artistic expression of presence, love, and simplicity, often in reference to nature and how the human condition relates to it; for some it is even a spiritual practice. For Blowcomotion, it starts perhaps with someone’s meditation on a moment with or relating to the band, yet it is not long before hilarity ensues. On the eve of the Boston trip, the haikus started trickling into the group chat. Over the course of the four days people traveled to and from Boston, dozens and dozens of haikus were shared: snapshots of moments of travel, moments of music, of sleep, food, life. I am grateful to the band member who compiled these into a single document for historical preservation that perhaps one day will be part of a Blowcomotion archive. I opened this chapter with one of these haikus, and I will close it with three more. The moments described in these three haikus mark the departure for the pilgrimage equipped with ritual clothes and preparation for sacrifice and the jarring return to everyday life, changed but longing for the special set apart space of a funky purple world.

Austin to Boston
Luggage jam packed with purple
Honk ’till our lips bleed
(Haiku #7)

Touchdown in Austin
Fresh memories of honking
Fueling joyful souls
(Haiku #48b)

Forgot how work works.
Where’s the purple and the funk?
Ugh, the real world sucks!
(Haiku #54)

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