Louis Ballard

Louis Ballard (born July 8, 1931, near Quapaw, Oklahoma, U.S.—died February 9, 2007, Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American composer and music educator best known for compositions that synthesize elements of Native American and Western classical music.

Ballard experienced—and indeed oscillated between—Native American and Western (or Euro-American) musical worlds from an early age. His Quapaw mother and Cherokee father divorced when he was a young boy, after which Ballard lived alternately with his grandmother on Quapaw tribal territory in northeastern Oklahoma and with his mother and non-Native stepfather in southeastern Michigan. While staying with his grandmother, he was an active member of the War Dance Society of the Quapaw and participated in powwows and other events in the Native American community. Meanwhile, his grandmother obtained a piano for him by leasing mineral rights on her Oklahoma property, and she supported his piano and voice lessons in the Western tradition.

Ballard continued to play the piano while a student in the high-school division of Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. By his sophomore year he had mastered some challenging classical repertoire and had begun to perform in public. After graduating from high school in 1949, he briefly attended the University of Oklahoma (1949–50) and Northeastern Oklahoma A&M College (1950–51) before enrolling in the music program at the University of Tulsa. Ballard sang with the campus Radio Choir throughout his undergraduate studies at Tulsa, and in 1954 he graduated with two bachelor’s degrees—one in music and the other, more specifically, in music education. He then worked as a music director at churches and schools in Tulsa, Osage, and Pawhuska, Oklahoma. In 1959 Ballard returned to the University of Tulsa for graduate study in music composition and received a master’s degree in the discipline in 1962. Following his graduate work, he studied privately with composers Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Carlos Surinach, and Felix Labunski.

When the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) opened in 1962, Ballard joined the staff and directed the organization’s music and performing arts programs through the remainder of the decade. During his time at the IAIA, he composed prolifically and debuted a number of works that were based on Native American themes. Notable among these were the ballets Koshare (c. 1965), which made use of a Hopi creation story, and The Four Moons (1967), which was intended to revive the spirits of four tribes that had come back to Earth.

From his position at the IAIA, Ballard went on to become a curriculum specialist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1969–79). Compositions from this period include Ritmo Indio (1969), a woodwind quintet featuring a Native American flute; the highly regarded Desert Trilogy (1971), an octet for woodwinds, strings, and percussion; and Incident at Wounded Knee (1974), a four-movement work for chamber orchestra commemorating the 1890 massacre of the Oglala Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, and the symbolic occupation of the town by members of the American Indian Movement in 1973. Aside from his music compositions, Ballard published American Indian Music for the Classroom (1973), a boxed set of instructional materials that included recordings of Native American music, music scores, and a teacher’s guide.

Ballard ultimately developed a national presence, primarily through concert premieres across the United States. He also achieved international recognition, most notably through performances of his work at the Beethovenhalle in Bonn, West Germany (1989), and the Salzburg Mozarteum in Austria (2000). Ballard received numerous awards during the course of his career, not only for his compositions but also for his accomplishments as an educator. In addition, he was honoured for his contributions to the Native American community and to society as a whole; in 2002 he was awarded a Cherokee Medal of Honor for his service in that capacity.