Composer Louis W. Ballard.
In Monday’s (3/17) New York Times, Zachary Woolfe writes, “More than 50,000 spectators filled Kennedy Stadium in Washington on Nov. 27, 1977, for a football game … The entertainment before and at halftime [was] an enormous spectacle of Native American music, dance and history…. At the center of the event was the National Indian Honor Band—150 students chosen from 80 tribes in 30 states—which played four pieces by Louis W. Ballard. With tens of thousands of listeners, this was probably the most prominent platform a Native American composer had ever had. The performance was a career highlight for Ballard, a pioneering figure who paved the way for the broad upswing in Native composers over the past few decades. He was among the first to negotiate issues that younger artists still face: melding Native and Western classical traditions; the role of his music in social and political activism; expressing his community’s deep history and culture in a modern way…. A composer as well as a pianist, conductor, filmmaker, writer, teacher, compiler of Native songs and national curriculum specialist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Ballard had his music performed throughout the United States and Europe…. But Ballard has not gotten his due. Only a limited amount of his work was commercially recorded, and even less remains in print.”
Read Symphony’s recent article about contemporary Native American composers at https://symphony.org/features/indigenous-composers-in-the-spotlight/.
