There are very few places in the world where one can listen to a violin and a cello played alongside a Lakota drum and singers.
In October, the Lakota Music Project will travel South Dakota for its Shared Vision Tour and give communities across the state a chance to hear just that.
The Lakota Music Project, an initiative of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, began as a “conviction” of Delta David Gier, music director of the symphony. Just six months after he started that role in 2004, he began to think about the community that the symphony served. When he first started reaching out to Lakota musicians, he was met with skepticism.
“It was surprising, but it was my first lesson in learning how to listen,” Gier told News Watch. "Barry LeBeau, who was working with United Sioux Tribes in Pierre, said, 'You're crazy, but I'd like to try to help you.'"
Gier eventually started conversations with Lakota musicians across the state with the help of LeBeau. That led him to Melvin Young Bear, of the New Porcupine Singers, a drumming group from the Pine Ridge reservation.
"We've been doing this for so many years that a lot of us have become good friends with each other. We have that trust between us, so we're able to come together with music." – Emmanuel Black Bear
Gier eventually started conversations with Lakota musicians across the state with the help of LeBeau. That led him to Melvin Young Bear, of the New Porcupine Singers, a drumming group from the Pine Ridge reservation.
It would be four years after that meeting that the orchestra and the singers would play a single note on a stage together.
"There was a pivotal moment of a snowy evening in March in Pine Ridge. It must've been about 2007 and it was our principal string quartet, our principal woodwind quintet and the New Porcupine Singers," Gier said. "It was really awkward like, ‘What are we doing here?’ But we just started playing music for each other. Then (Young Bear) said, ‘Our hope is that we will pass on this tradition to the next generation.’ I said ‘Bingo. That's exactly what we do, too.’”
First Lakota Music Project tour was in 2009
Now, the Lakota Music Project has been performing new programs since the inaugural tour in 2009, which saw performances on the Pine Ridge, Santee Sioux and Rosebud reservations.
The model, a concert split into two parts with individual performances from both groups followed by collaborative performances, has remained largely unchanged. The Creekside Singers, from the Pine Ridge reservation, now work in collaboration with the orchestra.
Emmanuel Black Bear, current drum keeper of the Creekside Singers, has been involved with the Lakota Music Project since its inception. He told News Watch that much of the work the group does is on building understanding alongside rehearsing and performing music.
“If we focus solely on our differences, we will probably never get along. So we have to focus on our similarities and how we make this work and how we do it in a positive way,” Black Bear said. "We've been doing this for so many years that a lot of us have become good friends with each other. We have that trust between us, so we're able to come together with music."
And there are plenty of differences between traditional Lakota music and traditional symphonic music.
Differences in the music
Orchestras typically play with sheet music, and Lakota musicians typically do not. The way that a piece begins will vary greatly between the two groups, with orchestras starting on the same note every time and Lakota singers following the lead of the drum keeper.
Gier said the project has been successful not only in its national prominence – the project has played at the Museum of the American Indian in Washington and for lawmakers in Pierre – but in how it has connected two musical communities in the state, which for most of history have never interacted with one another.
Stu Whitney
“There's been a lot of tears in rehearsals, not out of frustration but out of joy. You see how hard we're working to fuse these two traditions together to create something beautiful that people will be able to understand and come away with a sense of possibility,” Gier said.
This year, Derek Bermel, a composer from New York, is premiering work with the tour.
Bermel has worked in music composition alongside a variety of cultures, from West Africa to Belgium. His work with the Lakota Music Project was the first time composing music from a Native American perspective.
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"I wanted the musicians in the Creekside Singers to feel comfortable. As long as I was focused on them feeling comfortable, I felt that the audience would also feel comfortable," Bermel told News Watch.
"I heard this very powerful sound and I recognized that they were great melody writers. They were brilliant melodists, and that was the core. They produced these melodies that were like iron. They were solid. They were perfectly constructed. Like a tree trunk, they couldn't be broken."
He worked alongside the Creekside Singers and the symphony to write orchestral accompaniments and notate music that the singers gifted to the project.
“You keep trying to get closer to something that's inevitable, which is this shared space between these two cultures musically,” Bermel said. "The most important thing was to understand the way they think about their music from a structural perspective."
Tour aims to reach underserved communities
The program's tour will take the music to six locations in South Dakota, three of which are on reservations: Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Wagner Community School on the Yankton Indian Reservation and Lakota Tech High School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The tour begins Oct. 13 at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the southern Black Hills and move east through the week, ending Oct. 18 at the LSS Multi-Cultural Center in Sioux Falls.
The concerts are free to attend, which is essential to reaching all members of the community, Gier said.
The performances at schools will be particularly meaningful to Black Bear, whose role as drum keeper requires that he not only protect the sacred drum but the tradition of Lakota music itself. He frequently works with youth programs to pass on critical cultural skills and ideals.
Stu Whitney
“When we talk about preservation of cultures, preservation isn't the recording of things. It's the teaching on. If we teach on, we’re preserving our culture, our language,” Black Bear said.
While the tour will primarily make its way through many Native communities across the state, Black Bear said that the goal – to connect communities across cultures – remains the same no matter who's in the audience.
“If my people can see the message, we've done it,” Black Bear said. “If non-Native people can see the message or hear the message, we've also accomplished what we're setting out to do.”
This story was produced by South Dakota News Watch, an independent, nonprofit organization. Read more stories and donate at sdnewswatch.org and sign up for an email for statewide stories. Investigative reporter Molly Wetsch is a Report for America corps member covering rural and Indigenous issues. Contact her at molly.wetsch@sdnewswatch.org.
