Incident at Wounded Knee by Louis W. Ballard | Concert Library

Incident at Wounded Knee

As we approach his centenary, Louis Ballard is very much alive in spirit. An artist and Indigenous intellect, he is remembered for bringing a dynamic to both social change as well as joining ancient and ultramodern musical traditions. In 1974, a year following the 71- day protest occupation on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Ballard was asked to consider the generational impact of Wounded Knee in two separate centuries in a commission by the SPCO and Dennis Russell Davies. The world premiere brought focus to an event that had captured world media attention and had brought the US government to the negotiating table to review the state of 371 broken treaties with Native American peoples, all of which were fresh in the public’s memory.

On December 29, 1890, nearly 300 Lakota men, women and children were massacred by US Army forces in an encampment at Čhaŋkpé Ópi Wakpála, Wounded Knee Creek. Settlers who had recently become aware of the spiritual ceremony known as the Ghost Dance believed that it portended war, and demanded the Army disarm the Lakota people. The result was an act of genocide, and the village of Wounded Knee would become the symbolic location 83 years later for a reckoning and the longest civil disorder in the history of the U.S. Marshals Service, sometimes referred to as the Second Wounded Knee. Minnesota is the birthplace of the American Indian Movement, a major force in the events recalled by this music.

The opening measures of Incident at Wounded Knee are a reminder that this isn’t a programmatic relic of 19th-century music or a romanticized reinterpretation of Native cultures. Ballard made clear that his was an expression of interior realization, rather than an exterior description of events as they unfolded. Incident at Wounded Knee reflects the positive vision of change that Ballard subscribed to and believed in fiercely and finely. Ballard was a student of composers Darius Milhaud and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and an admirer of Béla Bartók’s ethnomusicology, and his mastery, mindfulness and creativity continue to live through the SPCO for us and our children and as an enduring tribute to Minnesota’s upholding of history.

October 21–23, 2022

Performance of Louis Ballard's "Incident at Wounded Knee"

Watch Performance
16:15

Director: Charlie McCarron
Associate Director: Kailyn Grider
Editor: Janet Shapiro
Cameras: Rebecca Beam
Video Technical Director: JoAnn Babic
Score Reader: Jeffrey Stirling
Audio: Cameron Wiley, YourClassical MPR
Executive Producer of Digital Media: Matt Thueson
Assistant Producer for Digital Projects: Erica Beebe
Assistant Producer for Digital Audiences: Kierra Lopac

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