Styles blend in concert collaboration
Peter Harriman • pharrima@argusleader.com • May 20, 2009
The Dakota Chamber Orchestra plays its part of "Black Hills Olowan" - horns, winds and strings playing short, sharp sounds, making dense music.
How is this going to work, one wonders?
Then, introduced by a flourish of jingling bells from the percussionist, Melvin D. Young Bear answers with a melodic wail, joined by the Porcupine Singers.
The sound rushes like an avalanche, carrying an audience along with it.
It suddenly is clear the orchestra is a counterpoint, a resistant base to the Pine Ridge drum group, and the contrast shows off both musical traditions.
A listener blinks and thinks, "Wow!"
The Lakota Music Project, a collaboration four years in the making, will come to fruition this week when the Chamber Orchestra and Porcupine Singers tour South Dakota.
The impetus for this occurred shortly after South Dakota Symphony Orchestra Maestro Delta David Gier came to Sioux Falls in 2004 and began inquiring about how the symphony could do outreach unique to South Dakota.
"Early on, it became evident the issues to be addressed were Native American," he says.
Barry LeBeau, liaison officer for the United Sioux Tribes and a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, introduced Gier to Lakota music and to the prominent Pine Ridge drum group, the Porcupine Singers.
At Eagle Butte in 2007 and at Pine Ridge in February last year, orchestra musicians met with members of Lakota drum groups and listened to them play. The musicians also talked about their respective traditions.
In a previous year, members of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate also had performed a dance for orchestra musicians who played a concert on the reservation, and they invited the orchestra members to join in.
From this background, the collaborative Lakota Music Project took shape, aided by a National Endowment for the Arts grant.
The concerts across South Dakota recognize that both the orchestra and the drum group are keepers of respective musical traditions, Gier says. To that end, Ronnie Theisz, a faculty member at Black Hills State University and a member of the Porcupine Singers, suggested each group explore four themes in the first part of the concert. The themes are courtship and love; warriors; death and mourning; and joy.
During a rehearsal Tuesday at Augustana College, the drum group and orchestra began to hammer out the nuts and bolts of their collaboration. The fact that the orchestra works from printed music and the Lakota singers from an oral tradition meant the Porcupine Singers have to accommodate somewhat to the traditions of orchestra music.
But while Brent Michael David's "Black Hills Olowan" composition initially highlights distinctions between the two musical styles, there comes a point where they merge and follow the Lakota lead. The woodwinds and strings echo the lyrical keening of Young Bear, Theisz, Emmanuel Black Bear, Tim Black Bear and John Mesteth. The sound soars, seems ready to float the roof off the rehearsal room and crumble the cinder block walls.
Gier, conducting this, says to the musicians at the conclusion, "When the winds were cooking with them, that was in a groove. That was really nice."
Young Bear is delighted to have his voice and the other singers' become orchestral instruments.
"To me, I thought this would never happen. It is awesome to be part of this project. Words can't describe it," he says.
The Lakota Music Project does more than highlight the respective musical traditions on display, according to Young Bear. Listening to the orchestra has given him musical insights as to "how rhythm, melody and tone come together."
He says the collaboration is helping the Porcupine Singers lead the way to a new dimension of traditional drum group music.
Within the orchestra, the percussionists are a direct analog to the Lakota drum. In "Essays on American Indian Music," Tony Isaacs of the Indian House record label points out the drum has a sophisticated relationship to the vocal beat, preceding it and varying it slightly.
When this is written for the orchestra, "you can be misled by looking at the printed music," percussionist Craig Spangler says.
"Our role is different than it normally is," adds Bob Kramer, assistant tympanist. When they play with the Lakota drum "we're trying to make authentic sounds," he says.
As the musicians weave their respective traditions into a common music in the rehearsal, they approach what LeBeau says about Lakota music. It "can be haunting, melancholy and hair-raising in force. When melded with the same orchestral sounds, you get the feeling that you understand what the piece is saying. In Lakota, it is 'Mitakuya Oyasin,' we are all related."
What Young Bear would like South Dakota audiences to take away from the collaboration this week is this: "The healing from the heart, the healing from music. Close your eyes, put your head back and listen to the music."
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