Louis Wayne Ballard: The Four Moons
Naxos American Classics

The Four Moons is a special recording for a number of reasons. To begin, conductor John Jeter and Arkansas's Fort Smith Symphony have honoured Louis Wayne Ballard by presenting sterling world premiere recordings of four of the composer's pieces. Even more notably, in releasing the material they're bringing attention to a composer whose importance shouldn't be overlooked, much as they did to Florence Price in their recordings of her material. As Ballard, whose Quapaw name was Honganozhe (“Stands with Eagles”), is recognized as the first North American Indigenous composer of concert music, The Four Moons stands as an invaluable document of the work he created, and its integration of Indigenous content into a Western symphonic context is striking.

The piece initiating the album, Devil's Promenade, is also the name of the northeast Oklahoma place where he was born to a Cherokee father and Quapaw mother in 1931. Ballard earned his Master of Music degree in composition at the University of Tulsa in 1962, and from '62 to '68 he was the Performing Arts Director for the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During that tenure he learned that many of the young Indigenous North American students he met were unfamiliar with the songs of their own tribes and so dedicated himself to addressing that lack by teaching Indigenous North American songs and lecturing about them. After receiving many honours for his efforts and accomplishments, Ballard drew his last breath, fittingly, in Santa Fe in 2007.

As critical to his development as a composer was his formal education and exposure to the classical canon. At Tulsa, he was taught by Béla Rózsa, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg's, and had lessons with Darius Milhaud and others. Consequently, while his works reflect his Indigenous heritage, they also draw from classical traditions and twentieth-century innovations. It's not unusual for a powwow rhythm to appear alongside symphonic writing that veers from tonal to atonal. To that end, it's possible to hear moments that suggest some degree of kinship with Prokofiev or Bartók. As mentioned, the release includes Devil's Promenade, a commission from the Tulsa Philharmonic in 1973, as well as music from the ballet The Four Moons, Fantasy Aborigine No. 3, “Kokopelli” from 1977, and Scenes from Indian Life, whose first three movements were premiered in 1964 and whose fourth was added in 1994.

In keeping with Devil's Promenade's history as a ceremonial dance ground for the Quapaw Tribe, the eleven-minute piece opens with a rapid drum pulse and woodwind flourishes and maintains its urgency with a percussion arsenal driving the material. Sounds of seashell rattles, a Seneca cow-horn rattle, and water, war, and Dakota drums are added to the traditional orchestra for a blazing expression that's equal parts overture, lyrical evocation, and fanfare. Consistent with his compositional vision, Ballard incorporated into the central section material from a Sioux Ghost Dance song.

The orchestral fantasia “Kokopelli” was created with the Hopi culture of the Southwest in mind. Similar to Devil's Promenade, the work incorporates a number of arresting percussion sounds, including hide bundle and gourd water drums, sea shell rattles, a cricket clicker, and a Hopi rasp stick resonator and Hopi gourd rattles. It also, like the opener, follows an aggressive intro with a comparatively contemplative episode and integrates native rhythmic and melodic details into its panorama.

The Four Moons, Ballard's third ballet, stand for four Oklahoma ballerinas of Indigenous North American descent: Moscelyne Larkin (Shawnee), Rosella Hightower (Choctaw), Marjorie Tallchief (Osage), and Yvonne Chouteau (Cherokee). It's during this eight-part presentation that we encounter an audible juxtaposition between rhythms associated with the native tribal dances of the ballerinas and traditional European dance forms. After opening with unaccompanied bassoon, “Overture (Land-rush, Statehood, Pow-Wow)” makes its dynamic presence felt with an array of melodic gestures and orchestral effects. Animated by bright flourishes, “Dance of the Four Moons” sets the stage for the four variations that follow, the first, Shawnee, calling a little bit to mind Stravinsky's neo-classical style and the Choctaw second twisting an early minuet into the kind of contemporary shape one might expect from a Bartók or Richard Strauss. By comparison, a hint of Copland emerges in the gentle folk flavourings of the Cherokee variation.

Ballard composed the mock-satirical work Scenes from Indian Life after witnessing two locals, one Navajo and one Taos, building a wall in front of his Santa Fe home. In a programmatic gesture, their greetings to one another appear as motifs played on clarinet and trombone at the start of the four-part work. As the two continue their wall-building, onlooking Indian friends determine that the well-intentioned bunglers aren't doing a great job and pitch in to get the job done. Concluding the hour-long set on a light-hearted note isn't a bad choice when a great deal of what's come before is intensely dramatic.

January 2024