Program Notes: Louis Ballard, "Four American Indian Piano Preludes"
A recording of 4 American Indian Piano Preludes can be found here (Emanuele Arciuli, 2017)
Louis Ballard’s Four American Indian Piano Preludes (1963) were written while studying with composers such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Darius Milhaud at the Aspen Music Festival. Upon being presented the pieces, Milhaud exclaimed that Ballard was “now a real composer”, indicating how success in the classical music world was (and is) based on being incorporated into the existing canon. As the title suggests, these pieces originated in Ballard’s desire to synthesize Indigenous ideas, motifs, and sounds within a European format, using a Western piano and Western notation to invoke Indigenous sounds, melodies, and cultural experiences. Each of the four preludes looks to represent events or scenes from Indigenous experiences and is titled with a corresponding Quapaw word.
The first prelude, “Ombáska”, translates to daylight, and the piece as a whole is largely drawing from Plains tribal powwow songs in terms of its melodic and rhythmic structures. Ballard’s use of complicated rhythms in the right hand serves to obscure the Western meter and imitate the melismatic, largely ornamental nature of Indigenous flute playing. As the piece continues on, rapid percussive sixteenth notes in the right hand increase tempo and bring the movement to a forceful climax, invoking rhythms from drum playing at powwows.
Following this comes “Tabideh”, translating to the hunt. The frantic and reflexive nature of hunting an animal is clearly articulated from the top of the movement, making use of a brisk tempo, a forceful pounding “fist” in the left hand, a frantic twelve-tone row in the right hand, and the frequent use of perfect fourth and diminished fifth intervals to askew the perception of a key center. Ballard’s use of the piano as a percussion instrument truly comes through in this movement and in his notation: a section of the piece in ⅝ time features a tapping left hand with fingering notes to ensure that the performer maintains the rhythm in a way that echoes the complex rhythmic structures of Indigenous dance music.
"Nekátohe”, translating to “Lovesong”, largely contrasts the sporadic “Tabideh”, utilizing counterpoint between the left and right hands to reflect the interaction between two lovers. Ballard met his second wife, Ruth Doré, while at Aspen; she received a Fulbright scholarship to study piano and Ballard was enamored with her playing ability. It makes sense, then, that this movement is dedicated in her name, and the call-and-response of melodic material between the left and right hands mimics a dialogue between two lovers.
These pieces conclude with “T’ohkáne”, or “Warrior Dance”, which, per Ballard, “represents mankind‟s kinesthetic release in the structured interplay of powerful rhythms and disjunct intervals to heighten his perception of self.” Ballard tactfully uses the piece’s meter to accentuate syncopated beats, developing an energetic dance pulse into a steady ostinato that ends by again devolving into quick and brash rhythmic gestures. Like “Tabideh”, Ballard includes fingerings for a lot of the rhythmically intense prelude, but he omits them in the end in favor of broader dynamic swells, indicating a desire for the performer to become as deeply involved in the process of rhythm-making as a powwow dancer would.
As a whole, Ballard’s Four American Indian Piano Preludes are representative of many of Ballard’s compositional attempts to imbue the Western idiom with Indigenous themes and sounds. While detractors of Ballard’s significance might see this confluence of Western and Indigenous musical cultures as Ballard bending to the will of the classical tradition, Ballard’s choice to draw from Western instruments and forms shows a skilled manipulation of a Western idea to suit Indigenous music. By working around key centers and indicating rhythmic pulses precisely, Ballard instead bends the classical form to the details and nuance of Indigenous music, twisting the colonialist narrative once present in Indigenous works to center Indigenous sounds and contexts.