Dakota Music Tour
The city of Mankato, Minnesota lies about 80 miles southwest of Minneapolis. It is a river town, situated on a bend of the Minnesota River, a location that fueled its early history as a transportation hub. It’s also known for a darker episode of the past. Mankato was the site of the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Thirtyeight Native Americans were hung there in a single, public staging, condemned for their actions in the Dakota-American Conflict of 1862. In August of that year, angered by the federal government and nonpayment of funds owed under land treaties, Dakota warriors attacked settlements across the region. Some 800 settlers were estimated to have been killed, and clashes with the military ensued. A total of 303 Dakota men were convicted on charges of murder and rape in military tribunals lasting over a few weeks. The summary judgments, with no witnesses or counsel provided, were widely questioned, and President Abraham Lincoln pardoned 285 of the defendants after reviewing their cases. Lincoln’s intervention was controversial, and didn’t bring an end to conflicts between settlers and the Dakota, who were expelled from Minnesota in 1863. Today the episode is largely forgotten outside of the region. But Mankato remembers. When the Mankato Symphony Orchestra announced plans for a Dakota Music Tour this spring as “a musical response to the events of 1862,” that description didn’t need much explanation locally. “We aren’t proud of it. But by the same token we say, all right, it’s part of our history,” says Sonya Jacobsen, a board member who worked with Music Director Kenneth Freed and Native American composer Brent Michael Davids on tour plans. “It is something that no one else can do, because it is unique to us.” Opinions on historical events run the gamut, says Davids, a member of the Mohican nation whose work was featured on the tour. Some would like to forget it; others are involved in yearly vigils to keep memories of the episode alive. “To even define it is really not the purview of what we’re doing, which is simply putting Dakota people and nonDakota people together on stage, so maybe we can launch some thought-provoking musical event,” he says. Music itself is a dialogue, Davids points out. “You have to listen to everyone else around you as far as tuning is involved, and
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the rhythm, and constantly monitoring what you’re doing as an individual compared to the group.” He cites an example from the tour program: Black Hills Olowan, a work for drum group and orchestra. The Maza Kute Singers, a well-known Santee Dakota group, were incorporated as a section of the orchestra. “It’s composed, to be cued in and out with a conductor, so it’s like following the written music but without the written music,” says Davids. The Maza Kute, who are used to drumming and singing along a different kind of musical arc, learned it by ear. The Dakota Tour began May 22 in Mankato and included stops at the Lower Sioux Reservation in Morton and the Prairie Edge Casino in Granite Falls, which is owned and operated by the Upper Sioux Community. The schedule ended with a concert on June 4 in Winona, Minn., timed to the 8th annual Great Dakota Gathering and Homecoming, an event that attracts Dakota people from across North America. Funding came from Arts Tour Minnesota with a grant that allowed the orchestra to go out further in the region and that fit with the Mankato Symphony’s efforts to move beyond its typical confines—to ask, as Freed puts it, “What can we do for the community, instead of what can the community do for us?” For the past couple of years, the orchestra has been offering a greater variety of concerts in different venues, such as a chamber series at the chapel of a convent and a family series at the local YMCA. Given the area’s history, a tour that could connect Dakota and non-Dakota audiences seemed a natural extension. Conversations beThe Mankato gan well before the Symphony tour’s start. Freed Orchestra is and Davids traveled moving beyond to the Dakota communities to meet its typical with tribal elders, confines— describe what they asking, as had in mind, and Music Director discuss any areas of Kenneth Freed interest or concern. For Freed, a selfputs it, “What described Jewish can we do for boy from New York, the community, the meetings deminstead of onstrated the many what can the lenses through which community do history is viewed, even 150 years down for us?”
the road. In the end, connections were made on more personal notes, as talk turned to the orchestra’s work in music education. (Freed co-founded the nonprofit Learning Through Music Consulting Group in Minneapolis, where he has a day job as a violist with the Minnesota Orchestra.) “Each person is a parent, not just a tribal elder or a local leader,” he says, meaning that they were able to connect on both a personal level and with the political issues of Native Americans and history. “This is not going to be worked out in a historical panel, but with people who talk to each other.” New World Symphony
It’s a Saturday evening in Miami Beach, and nearly 2,000 people have gathered at the new SoundScape park. Mingled in the crowd are families with children; couples with their dogs; restaurant- and club-goers from the nearby Lincoln Road pedestrian mall. Some have been here for hours, settling down on blankets with picnic fare. Others have wandered into the scene as part of a night out. All are here to witness a Wallcast of the New World Symphony: a concert projected in high-definition onto the 7,000-square-foot exterior wall of the orchestra’s new campus home. The performance takes place in real time inside the building, and everyone wants to see what the buzz is all about. There’s been plenty of buzz since the New World Center and adjacent SoundScape Park debuted in January of this year. Suddenly, New World Symphony is visible in a way that it’s never been in 23 years of existence. Credit a design by architect Frank Gehry, working from a vision of longtime friend Michael Tilson Thomas, NWS founder and artistic director, that takes organizational transparency to an entirely new level. The glass-curtain wall of New World Center’s lobby reveals a jumble of white cubes that house rehearsal spaces and a pavilion for public events. The cubes are lit from within at night, and LED screens in the atrium provide ongoing information for visitors inside and out. The center is at once energizing and a little unsettling for New World Fellows. The postgraduate musicians now find themselves coming into contact with the public during nearly every hour of their daily routine. Percussionist Sergio Carreno practices in one of symphony
SUMMER 2011