On November 27, 1977, over 50,000 spectators filled the Kennedy Stadium in Washington, playing a soccer match between two bitter rivals, the Washington Redskins and the Dallas Cowboys.
The game had drama and both teams were looking for a playoff berth, but more unusual was Halftime and Halftime: a huge sight of Native American music, dance and history. The Washington Post reported that it was “part of a new movement to reestablish American Indians as top-class citizens in the United States.”
At the heart of the event, 150 students, selected from 80 tribes in 30 states, performed four works by Louis W. Ballard. With tens of thousands of listeners, this was perhaps the most prominent platform that Native American composers have ever had.
This performance was the highlight of Ballard's career, a pioneering figure who paved the way for a wide ascendant of native composers over the past decades. He was the first to negotiate the issues young artists still face. His music's role in social and political activities. He expresses the deep history and culture of his community in a contemporary way.
“Ballad was the grandfather of a Native American composer,” said Jerod Imphichchahahaha Tate, one of the next generation of artists. Conductor and teacher Tim Long reiterated the feelings. “He is the father of all of us, who are indigenous peoples of classical music now.”
A composer, pianist, conductor, filmmaker, writer, teacher, native song compiler and national curriculum specialist at the Indian Affairs Bureau, Ballard has made his music perform in America and Europe. He studied with Darius Milhoud and brought Stravinsky to the ritual deer dance in New Mexico.
But Ballard has not got his deadline. Only a limited amount of his works are commercially recorded and printed on even less. When he died of cancer in 2007 in 1975, he had no obituaries in the New York Times or other major publications. His works are rarely performed.
This is part of the sustainable invisibility of Native Americans and their cultures. CBS says that the 1977 halftime performance is to be included on national television, but that was not the case. (And yes, today, that this game is a showdown between the Cowboys and the Redskins is triggering eyeroll.
At the beginning of his career in 1960, Ballard wrote: In many ways, that wait continues.
But there has been a encouraging interest in Ballad, especially since George Floyd's murder in 2020 attracted attention from the artists of a long and diligent background that have led many in the cultural world to become.
Ballard's family has started a website that provides valuable introductions to his life and music. In 2023, the Naxos label album provided an unusual hearing for some of his orchestral works. And at an event that attended an audience at Lincoln Center last summer, more people voted for the 1974 burning 1974 film “The Injured Knee” than Haydn.
The 15-minute “Incident” is a good place to start with a ballad, but it is only widely accessible in an archival video of the 2022 performance by the St. Paul's Chamber Orchestra.
The title refers to the 1890 Native American massacre by the Army at the injured knee Creek on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. However, this work was written in 1973 after the two months of occupation of Pine Ridge. This is a protest over terms of reservations.
Ballard “split up to really address this subject,” then St. Paul's conductor Dennis Russell Davis said in a recent interview on the orchestra's website. This work is rhythmically angular, as is often the case with Ballard's works. This is a mood that stimulates the mood of a kind of stylized violence that has been broken by a serious episode of sadness.
The second movement, “Prayer,” begins with elegy for the cello and oboe. The next two sections are punchy and hard, but in the fourth “ritual”, the ferociousness increases at the moment on the cliff before backing up. Ballad had a pacing instinct.
Like his general philosophy, he avoided quoting traditional melodies in “the incident.” “Indian music today is extremely difficult to authenticate, and composers make the mistake of trying to mimic themes and melodic bacteria,” he wrote about a decade before composing the work. “What I'm looking for is the reincarnation of the character and spirit of Aboriginal music in standard notation.”
“An incident on a wounded knee” is a distinctive feature of a ballad. The style is modern, but not strict. He had a flavour with even the gorgeous, melodramatic effects, which led some critics to compare his work with exaggerated film music. “Incidents” is written for standard chamber orchestras, but many of his works combine traditional native instruments, especially percussion and flute, with Western instruments.
His inspiration was often written and native history, but he argued that he didn't want to clearly portray these stories, but instead used both native and western tools to convey his sense of experience and heritage in a more abstract way.
“What I'm trying to do with music,” he wrote.
Although Ballard's biography has not been published, there are useful materials, including a 2014 paper that was thoroughly investigated by Carl Eric Ettinger. Ballad was born on July 8, 1931 on the Capoe Reservation on the northeast corner of Oklahoma. His mother was Quapoe. His father was the Cherokee.
His early musical experiences came from attending ritual powwows with his father and taking music lessons from his mother. When he was six years old, he was sent to a government-run boarding school that had severely suppressed students who expressed their native language and culture. Music has become a permanent shelter.
“The piano became my surrogate mother and father,” he said. “I could trust you. It was always there.”
He excelled in school through the University of Tulsa. After graduating he found work at church and as a music teacher at school. He had made so little money that he had planned to start at Tulsa Technical College and become a mechanical draft. Morrily, he returned to the University of Tulsa for his master's degree.
His early works established what became his standard practice. He adopted a “corrected tale” (unlike pure Schoenbergian continuity), a strong rhythmic profile, and a combination of instruments from the “two worlds” in which he lived.
“In my music,” he wrote, “I tried to blend these worlds, because I believe that artists can reach the centre of culture through new forms of foreign to that culture.”
“Peyote” (1960) was one of his first attempts to combine native elements with Western compositions. Written for the trumpet, French horn, trombone, piano, two native percussion instruments, water drums and gourd rattles. His short but bold four American piano preludes, stylishly recorded by Emmanuel Alciuli, alludes to the performance of native drumming, singing and flutes. After Ballard finished them, Milhoud told him, “Louis, you are the composer now.”
In 1965 he married pianist Ruth Dore, who became his strong-willed manager and rare public relations officer. Two years later, for the 60th anniversary of Oklahoma, he wrote the ballet “The Four Moons.” This was danced by a quartet of important ballerinas in a native descent from the state.
The section “Cacéga Ayuwípi” (Suic “Decorative Drum”, written in 1970) was inspired by the rhythms of various tribal songs. Instruments include turtle shells, glass, skin, and haida, hopi, yaki rattle made from metal, ute and apache bulls, whip of eagle bones, whip of eagle bones, and notched sticks.
Ballard was relieved in the informal position he had envisioned later in his life as a mentor and role model, a regular presence at concerts by young native artists. “He knew how important it was,” Long said. “He was always there as a steady support for us. Just seeing him in his wheelchair gave us a real sense of safety.”
In the 1980s, his works began to focus more on Western instruments. His piano pieces robbed the talent of a composer who is also a master player, especially the talent of the “city” works that began with the “silver city” of “silver city.”
These three works deserve a place in the concert stage, and you should also hear his six “Fantasy Aboriginal” works. Perhaps Ballard's most important and well-traveled success “Accusation at the Wounded Knee” is in great need of widely available audio recordings decades after it was written.
The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra went on many outings, including tours in Europe. Not only that pain, but also the sense that mutual respect and cultural encounters can forge a better future in the arousal of survival, also summons Ballard's hopes for his country.
“The fact that I had a bow on stage with a white American orchestra and conductor,” he recalled that European tour.
