The Prairie Wind Casino and Hotel is a couple of modest buildings just inside the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of South Dakota. On a recent morning, the hotel, surrounded by vast expanses of rolling land, was almost empty, but the low-ceilinged banquet room was filled with music.
Nine members of the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra and their conductor, Delta David Gier, were working on a piece with the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa. They were figuring out how Akipa, who doesn’t read music, could be cued for a new section.
Emmanuel Black Bear — the keeper of the drum, or leader, of the Creekside Singers, a traditional Lakota drum and vocal ensemble — was huddling with the composer Derek Bermel in the hotel’s lobby. Bermel had transcribed some Creekside recordings, arranging a part for the symphony players to join with the Native musicians. One challenge: Black Bear and his group don’t commit in advance to a given tempo when they’re performing their richly wailing songs.
“Sometimes we get excited and want to sing it fast,” he said of one song. “Sometimes it’s lullaby-ish. It’s not set in stone.”
This was a day of colleagues and friends making music together, working through obstacles like those in any rehearsal process. But since the artists involved were part of the orchestra’s longstanding Lakota Music Project, the goal was far greater than just getting ready for a concert: This collaboration between Native American and Western classical artists aimed to address a whole history of racial tension.
“Racism and prejudice, how do we counteract that?” Black Bear said in an interview. “I’ve always said it’s through music. If non-Native people can see us in our natural way of life — music and dance and ceremony and prayer — maybe their minds will change about who we are. Not every one of us is the stereotype. We’re not all drunks and druggies.”
Classical institutions like to talk a big game about making social justice a part of their mission, but the South Dakota Symphony and the Lakota Music Project — which commissions works for combinations of Native and non-Native musicians and tours the state — have committed more deeply than most.
“It’s not just a publicity stunt,” Black Bear said. “We’re feeling it. There’s a lot of hope in this project.”
The collaboration has persisted for nearly 20 years through hurdles both artistic and financial. It’s no easy matter for musicians to come together from cultures in which fundamentals like tuning, notation, pitch, tempo and notions of beauty are so vastly different. The orchestra, with a yearly budget of $2.8 million, hasn’t had the resources to consistently support the project, so commissions and tours — like one planned for this fall — go forward sporadically, when the money can be raised.
But under Gier, the orchestra’s music director since 2004, the ensemble has made the effort a priority, on par with its performances of Mahler and Brahms, its venturesome new-music programming, and its advocacy for lesser-heard gems from the past.
When Gier arrived in South Dakota two decades ago, he was on the lookout for outreach opportunities. He considered doing a program with works by Black composers for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and raised the idea with a young Black woman active in the civic life of Sioux Falls, where the ensemble is based.
She more or less laughed in his face, he recalled in an interview, telling him: “If you want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, it’s not me. You need to talk about Native Americans.”
In other words, a Martin Luther King Jr. Day concert might have been perfectly fine, but it wouldn’t have spoken to the specific needs of South Dakota, whose reservations include some of the poorest areas in the country.
“I have a conviction,” Gier said, “that an orchestra should serve its unique community uniquely.”
The South Dakota Symphony hadn’t entirely ignored the state’s significant Native population before Gier’s time. Players had done residencies on reservations, performing classical standards and showing off their instruments at the urging of music teachers. But he thought something more ambitious might be possible — something that would involve Native artists.
Gier and the orchestra invited Lakota and Dakota leaders to lunch. Some distrust was in the air. Native groups were sensitive to their culture being used for a veneer of multiculturalism or to tick an identity politics box, rather than for a sustained partnership or true exchange.
“It was my first lesson in how to listen,” Gier said.
Crucially, he met Barry LeBeau, an actor and tribal and arts lobbyist, who was intrigued by the idea and offered to help. The two crisscrossed the state again and again, meeting with tribal elders and cultural leaders and slowly building support for some kind of shared endeavor.
A few years passed before the Lakota Music Project produced a single note, and there were some false starts and frustrations. Then, in the middle of a blizzard, a group came together at the Boys and Girls Club in Pine Ridge for a gathering that began awkwardly. “What are we doing here?” Gier recalled thinking.
Then Melvin Young Bear, the keeper of the drum of the New Porcupine Singers, another traditional Lakota ensemble, led a song he had written in honor of his granddaughter. “We sing the old songs,” he told the group. “We hope to pass this tradition on to the next generation.”
Gier felt a flash of connection. “Bingo,” he announced. “That’s what we do, too. That’s what classical music is.”
“When we figured we could focus on traditional musics as a connection between our two cultures,” he recalled recently, “we could start to talk about, if we were to make music together, what it would look like, what it would sound like.”
A jam session began, with each group playing for the other. This eventually inspired the model for the Lakota Music Project’s tours — the first was in 2009 — which go to unassuming spots like school gymnasiums and community centers, both on and off reservations, presenting concerts free of charge.
At these performances, the Native musicians and symphony members play separately, but the selections are chosen to illuminate shared themes, like love or war. Then all come together for works that have been written for the collaborative group, including pieces by the Native composers Brent Michael Davids and Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate and a moving arrangement of “Amazing Grace.” (An album compiling five of these works was released in 2022.)
“For a long time it was really difficult for me,” said Akipa, the Native flutist. He pointed to fundamental differences between his conception of making music — imagining the melodies in his mind and taking inspiration from his feelings at a given moment — and that of the symphony players, who are mostly occupied with executing technical demands.
“I asked the musicians from the orchestra, ‘What are you thinking of during a song?’” he recalled. “They said, ‘We’re counting.’”
How can orchestra musicians who depend on written music play together with artists who don’t employ notation? “We use muscle memory,” Black Bear said. “We don’t go by sheet music.”
“At the beginning, it was completely new,” said Magdalena Modzelewska, a South Dakota Symphony violinist. “Understanding the scales Lakota music uses. The music is very rhythmic, but it’s hard to understand where the beat falls. And the intonation is very fluid.”
Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s principal oboe and a composer who’s written for the Lakota Music Project, including the piece with Akipa for the coming tour, said, “It’s hard to get a whole ensemble of classical musicians to figure out how to play music not in fixed time or tempo or pitch.”
At the workshop at the hotel in Pine Ridge, Paul spent time with his colleagues working on the more flexible elements of his score, encouraging their Western instruments to bend toward the differently tuned scale of Akipa’s cedar flute. Using aural cues, like a jazz group would, brought more flexibility to the rhythms: It was about feeling the music, not simply counting.
“Bryan will improvise around letter H in the score,” Paul told the orchestra’s flutist, “and then we’ll come in and integrate with him.”
The Native artists have bent a bit, too, including approaching their traditional songs outside of a ceremonial context. “We have a little bit of musical freedom to go out of our normal way of doing structure,” Black Bear said. “It’s kind of like when Kiss took off their makeup. We have a chance to compose some music that’s different than we would normally perform.”
But challenges remain. As Bermel listened to the group rehearse in the banquet room, he struggled with how to convey the subtle swing of the Creekside Singers’ chanting in the orchestral instruments.
“Our notation is not going to cut it,” he said.
For the Creekside ensemble, more than tempo changes based on mood — so does pitch, meaning that Black Bear finds it difficult to match a note from the symphony players. “I’m chaotic,” he said. “That’s kind of how my voice is.” During a performance of “Amazing Grace” a few years ago in Washington, D.C., the orchestra’s cellist ended up singing along with him while playing to make sure Black Bear didn’t veer from the pitch.
“Emmanuel didn’t mind it,” Modzelewska said. “He welcomed it with a spirit of musicianship, even coming from a completely different culture. There would certainly be reason for him and the others to have grievances. But we can do this together.”
With trust and experience now built over years, it’s become easier to bridge the cultural gaps. “That felt a lot better than what we’ve done in the past,” Black Bear said as the workshop ended.
For Bermel and the others, there were still decisions to be made: Should there be a dance component? Would a text by a Lakota writer frame the music? And would the symphony musicians be amplified to give them more presence alongside the booming drum?
But the workshop had been a valuable opportunity to listen, and to give each side a sense of the other.
“It was important for the orchestra musicians to understand the structure of a Lakota song,” Bermel said, “and for the Lakota musicians to understand deeply what the orchestra musicians are playing. For both of these ensembles to see the strength and limitations of the collaborative force. To trust each other.”
For some longtime participants, the project’s significance has been personal, and profound. “For me, it’s not about cultural healing,” Paul said. “It’s just friends making music. That’s all it is, and that’s everything.”
But aspirations toward a larger impact are hard to ignore. “At first I was just along for the ride,” Black Bear said, “but I got more involved when my firstborn son was born. Then my thoughts were, What am I going to do with my time in this world to make it better for my son?”
“We all have our music,” he went on. “It’s our common ground. It’s not what makes us different, it’s what makes us similar.”
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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