Louis W. Ballard

[blackcrowheart]

Louis W. Ballard
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Louis W. Ballard (b. July 8, 1931; d. February 9, 2007) was a Native American composer, educator, author, artist, and journalist.

Ballard, who was of Cherokee, Quapaw, French and Scottish heritage, was born in the Native American community of Devil's Promenade, located near Quapaw, in northeast Oklahoma. His Quapaw name was Honganozhe, meaning "Stands With Eagles."

Ballard studied music at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Tulsa, where his composition instructor was Bela Rozsa; he later studied privately with Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Carlos Surinach, and Felix Labunski. He moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1962, and became an instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts, teaching there until 1975.

Ballard composed of numerous orchestral, choral, and chamber works, many composed on Native American themes or to texts in Native American languages. In addition, compiled several volumes of Native American songs for classroom use.

Ballard died February 9, 2007, at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 75 years old, and had battled cancer for about five years before his death.

[Okwes]

Famed composer melded Native and classic music

By DAVID COLLINS AND Craig Smith | The New Mexican


LOUIS W. BALLARD, 1931-2007

The man who introduced American Indian themes to Western concert music has died in Santa Fe at the age of 75. Famed composer, author and music educator Louis W. Ballard died at his Old Santa Fe Trail home early Friday morning after a five-year battle with cancer.

A member of the Quapaw Tribe of Oklahoma, Ballard was renowned for melding Native melodies, rhythms and instruments with classic Western orchestral music. His works were not as widely known in this country as those of other American composers, though they were much respected and often played in Europe. Once heard, they were remembered and appreciated.

"Some people called him charismatic," said his son, Louis A. Ballard, a ceramist and college instructor in Champaign, Ill. He added that his father was "very zealous about the music of American Indians -- a zealous protagonist."


Ballard first encountered intertribal music at Depression-era powwows he attended with his father, where members of tribes forcibly relocated to Oklahoma danced, drummed and sang traditional songs, his son said. Ballard's mother, a church pianist, introduced him to Western music. "She played songs for him," said his son. "Sometimes they would transpose Quapaw words into the songs, so early in life he was making up songs with Indian words in them and using the piano."

Ballard attended Seneca Indian School in Wyandotte, Okla., then graduated from high school in 1949 from Bacone Indian Institute in Muskogee, Okla. He taught high school and worked as a draftsman in Tulsa, where he earned a master's degree in music education at the University of Tulsa in 1961. He later received honorary doctor of music degrees from the College of Santa Fe and William Jewel College in Missouri.

He moved to Santa Fe in 1962 and was an original member of the faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts until 1975.

Ballard served as musical educational specialist for Bureau of Indian Affairs schools nationwide from 1974 to 1979. His 110-page guidebook, Native American Indian Songs, remains a standard text nationwide. One of Ballard's last public appearances came in 2004, when he signed copies of the book at Indian Market.

His compositions were often programmatic, telling a Native story or recounting a First Nations legend, and they were championed by major conductors.

In 1974, American conductor Dennis Russell Davies commissioned Incident at Wounded Knee from Ballard for The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and led the world-premiere performances during the group's 1974 Eastern European Tour. Davies gave Wounded Knee its New York premiere in 1999 at Carnegie Hall, conducting the American Composers Orchestra.

In 1989, Ballard became the first American composer to have an entire program dedicated to his works in the Beethoven House Chamber Music Hall in Bonn, Germany. In September 2000, he played his Four American Indian Piano Preludes in Bad Goisern, Austria, as part of a conference titled "Nature-Culture-Civilization."

Other works in his canon include Ritmo Indio for woodwind quintet, the opera Moontide: The Man Who Hated Money, the orchestral work The Maid in the Mist and the Thunder Beings, which was championed by the dynamic American conductor Marin Alsop, and a cantata in honor of a fellow Oklahoman -- Will Rogers: Tribute to a Great American.

Many younger First Nations composers saw Ballard as a leader as well as colleague. "They sort of saw Dad as their spiritual antecedent," said Louis A. Ballard.

Louis W. Ballard was separated from his father at an early age, when his father left the Quapaw reservation to work as a rodeo cowboy. Ballard's son said he in turn grew distant from his father during the troubled 1960s, but that they became close again toward the end of his father's life. At one point, the son asked the father what had inspired his life as a musician and educator. "He told me it was a memorial to his mother," Louis A. Ballard said.

In the 1970s, after high-profile confrontations returned the cultural struggles of American Indian communities to the forefront of public awareness, Ballard toured universities participating in Indian awareness weeks. During those events, he occasionally appeared with Floyd Red Crow Westerman, an American Indian musician, actor and activist recognized by many for his television appearances on Walker: Texas Ranger.

"His contribution to the music was like the beginning of our presence on the national educational level," said Westerman, 70. "That's what he was recognized for: his bringing a national awareness of this kind of cultural knowledge to an institutional level where academics could understand."

Ballard is survived by his wife, Ruth, who resides in a Santa Fe nursing home; by two sons, Louis A. Ballard of Champaign, Ill., and Charles Ballard of Tulsa, Okla.; a daughter, Anne Quetone, of Skiatook, Okla.; and five grandchildren.