Life Louis Wayne Ballard was born on July 8, 1931, in Devil's Promenade near Miami, Oklahoma. He was Quapaw and Cherokee. On his mother's side, he was related to a prominent medicine chief of the Quapaw Tribe, and on his father's side he was related to a principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. His Quapaw name, Honganozhe, translates to "One Who Stands With Eagles."  After graduating, Ballard frequently attended the Aspen Music Festival and studied composition privately with notable musical figures such as Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Carlos Surinach, and Felix Labunski. He also studied applied percussion with George Gaber. During the summer, as a faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival from 1957 through 1972, he taught private lessons in percussion performance and participated in various concerts held during the festival. Louis Ballard met his second wife, Ruth Doré at the Aspen Music Festival in 1963. She too was a concert pianist, and would later become Ballard's manager and publicist. At this time, both Louis Ballard's marriage to Delores Lookout and Ruth Doré's marriage to her husband, Robert Sands, were rapidly deteriorating. By 1965, Louis Ballard divorced Delores Lookout, and was soon remarried to Ruth Doré. Doré came from a family with wealth, and with her personal and financial support, Ballard was able to pursue composition on a full-time basis. In addition to spending his summers at the Aspen Music Festival, Ballard also served as the music director for the Institute of American Indian Arts based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1962 to 1968. "Scenes from Indian Life" was originally a three movement orchestral work which premiered in Rochester, New York, and was conducted by Howard Hanson in 1964. The same piece with an added a fourth movement, "Feast Day," was performed by the San Jose Symphony as a part of its "Voices of America" program in 1994 along with Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" and Leonard Bernstein's Symphony no. 2, "The Age of Anxiety." In 1969, Ballard's Ritmo Indio, a three movement work for woodwind quintet, won the first Marion Nevins McDowell Award for American Chamber Music, and was featured as the opening work at the Gala Quintet of the Americas concert, "Discovering the New World: A Quincentennial Event," at Carnegie Hall on January 9, 1992. The first movement of Ritmo Indio, "The Soul," was also recorded on two of the Quintet of the Americas' albums: Souvenirs, and Discovering the New World. Ballard began experimenting with other mediums and ventured outside the chamber ensemble format when he composed two works for ballet. The Four Moons, written in honor and celebration of Oklahoma's sixtieth year of statehood in 1967, was performed both in Tulsa and in Oklahoma City. It was also featured at the Tulsa Ballet's New York debut performance in 1983. His second ballet, Desert Trilogy, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Another popular and critically acclaimed composition is his chamber orchestral work, Incident at Wounded Knee. Incident at Wounded Knee was inspired by a stream of daily newspaper reports that were covering the court proceedings related to the 1973 conflict that occurred between the FBI and members of the American Indian Movement on the Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. This was also the site of a massacre of three hundred Oglala Sioux by the United States military in 1890. Commissioned and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the director of the St. Paul Chamber Symphony Orchestra in 1974, it was performed in New York at Carnegie Hall in 1999 at the American Composer's Orchestra's opening concert of the season, "Protest." While Incident at Wounded Knee is not a programmatic work, it represents the customs and emotions of the American Indian peoples. In 1976, Portrait of Will Rogers, Ballard's choral cantata, was premiered by the Kansas City Symphony with Will Rogers, Jr. as the narrator. Ballard's works have also been premiered at prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1999, he was the first American composer to have a complete concert dedicated to his music at Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany, and he was featured as a guest artist, in 2000, at the Salzburg Mozarteum. In 2004, Louis Ballard was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame making it the first time that a symphonic composer was inducted in tandem with pop music artists. His music has been featured on radio networks around the world including National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio France, Deutsche Welle, and Saarländischer Rundfunk. Ballard, himself, has been awarded with two honorary doctoral degrees, one from the College of Santa Fe, and the other from William Jewel College, and he has received the National Indian Achievement Award four times. In addition, he was awarded with several more awards in honor of his contributions which include: the Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Central Office of Education, a citation in the U.S. Congressional Record, a Lifetime Musical Achievement Award by the First Americans in the Arts, and the Cherokee Medal of Honor. He was also awarded with several grants that allowed him to continue his work. In addition to a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1969, and a Ford Foundation Grant a year later, he has received a total of five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  In the years following 1990, Ruth Ballard was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and her mental health was declining. As a result, she had to relinquish her responsibilities as Louis Ballard's manager and publicist. In 2001, Ruth was institutionalized due to her progressing condition remaining under the guardianship of Louis W. Ballard. While working on a newly commissioned piano concerto, Louis W. Ballard died at the age of seventy-five on February 9, 2007, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a five-year-struggle against cancer. His body was cremated, and his ashes were placed on his mother's grave in Miami, Oklahoma. After Louis W. Ballard's death, guardianship of Ruth Ballard went to his son, Louis A. Ballard. She would later pass away on January 30, 2015 in Santa Fe, New Mexico . She is buried in the Jewish section of Rivera Cemetery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Regardless of the fact that she was not observant, nor was she affiliated with any synagogue, Louis A. Ballard felt that, because of her Jewish ancestry, she deserved a burial ceremony that was as close to a traditional Jewish burial ceremony as possible. Ballard left behind the following credo: "It is not enough to acknowledge that Native American Indian music is merely different from other music. What is needed in America is an awakening and reorienting of our total spiritual and cultural perspectives to embrace, understand, and learn from the Aboriginal American and what motivates his musical and artistic impulses."
Early life Louis Wayne Ballard was born on July 8, 1931, in Devil's Promenade near Miami, Oklahoma. He was Quapaw and Cherokee. On his mother's side, he was related to a prominent medicine chief of the Quapaw Tribe, and on his father's side he was related to a principal chief of the Cherokee Nation. His Quapaw name, Honganozhe, translates to "One Who Stands With Eagles." Composer and educator After graduating, Ballard frequently attended the Aspen Music Festival and studied composition privately with notable musical figures such as Darius Milhaud, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Carlos Surinach, and Felix Labunski. He also studied applied percussion with George Gaber. During the summer, as a faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival from 1957 through 1972, he taught private lessons in percussion performance and participated in various concerts held during the festival. Louis Ballard met his second wife, Ruth Doré at the Aspen Music Festival in 1963. She too was a concert pianist, and would later become Ballard's manager and publicist. At this time, both Louis Ballard's marriage to Delores Lookout and Ruth Doré's marriage to her husband, Robert Sands, were rapidly deteriorating. By 1965, Louis Ballard divorced Delores Lookout, and was soon remarried to Ruth Doré. Doré came from a family with wealth, and with her personal and financial support, Ballard was able to pursue composition on a full-time basis. In addition to spending his summers at the Aspen Music Festival, Ballard also served as the music director for the Institute of American Indian Arts based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1962 to 1968. "Scenes from Indian Life" was originally a three movement orchestral work which premiered in Rochester, New York, and was conducted by Howard Hanson in 1964. The same piece with an added a fourth movement, "Feast Day," was performed by the San Jose Symphony as a part of its "Voices of America" program in 1994 along with Aaron Copland's "Lincoln Portrait" and Leonard Bernstein's Symphony no. 2, "The Age of Anxiety." In 1969, Ballard's Ritmo Indio, a three movement work for woodwind quintet, won the first Marion Nevins McDowell Award for American Chamber Music, and was featured as the opening work at the Gala Quintet of the Americas concert, "Discovering the New World: A Quincentennial Event," at Carnegie Hall on January 9, 1992. The first movement of Ritmo Indio, "The Soul," was also recorded on two of the Quintet of the Americas' albums: Souvenirs, and Discovering the New World. Ballard began experimenting with other mediums and ventured outside the chamber ensemble format when he composed two works for ballet. The Four Moons, written in honor and celebration of Oklahoma's sixtieth year of statehood in 1967, was performed both in Tulsa and in Oklahoma City. It was also featured at the Tulsa Ballet's New York debut performance in 1983. His second ballet, Desert Trilogy, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1971. Another popular and critically acclaimed composition is his chamber orchestral work, Incident at Wounded Knee. Incident at Wounded Knee was inspired by a stream of daily newspaper reports that were covering the court proceedings related to the 1973 conflict that occurred between the FBI and members of the American Indian Movement on the Sioux reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. This was also the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of three hundred Oglala Sioux by the United States military in 1890. Commissioned and conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, the director of the St. Paul Chamber Symphony Orchestra in 1974, it was performed in New York at Carnegie Hall in 1999 at the American Composer's Orchestra's opening concert of the season, "Protest." While Incident at Wounded Knee is not a programmatic work, it represents the customs and emotions of the American Indian peoples. In 1976, Portrait of Will Rogers, Ballard's choral cantata, was premiered by the Kansas City Symphony with Will Rogers, Jr. as the narrator. Ballard's works have also been premiered at prestigious venues such as the Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. In 1999, he was the first American composer to have a complete concert dedicated to his music at Beethovenhalle in Bonn, Germany, and he was featured as a guest artist, in 2000, at the Salzburg Mozarteum. In 2004, Louis Ballard was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame making it the first time that a symphonic composer was inducted in tandem with pop music artists. His music has been featured on radio networks around the world including National Public Radio, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, British Broadcasting Corporation, Radio France, Deutsche Welle, and Saarländischer Rundfunk. Ballard, himself, has been awarded with two honorary doctoral degrees, one from the College of Santa Fe, and the other from William Jewel College, and he has received the National Indian Achievement Award four times. In addition, he was awarded with several more awards in honor of his contributions which include: the Distinguished Service Award from the U.S. Central Office of Education, a citation in the U.S. Congressional Record, a Lifetime Musical Achievement Award by the First Americans in the Arts, and the Cherokee Medal of Honor. He was also awarded several grants that allowed him to continue his work. In addition to a Rockefeller Foundation Grant in 1969, and a Ford Foundation Grant a year later, he has received a total of five grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. While working on a newly commissioned piano concerto, Louis W. Ballard died at the age of seventy-five on February 9, 2007, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a five-year-struggle against cancer. His body was cremated, and his ashes were placed on his mother's grave in Miami, Oklahoma. In the years following 1990, Ruth Ballard had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and her mental health was declining. As a result, she had to relinquish her responsibilities as Louis Ballard's manager and publicist. In 2001, Ruth was institutionalized due to her progressing condition remaining under the guardianship of Louis W. Ballard. After Louis W. Ballard's death, guardianship of Ruth Ballard went to his son, Louis A. Ballard. She would later pass away on January 30, 2015 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and is buried in the Jewish section of Rivera Cemetery . Though she was neither observant, nor affiliated with a synagogue, Louis A. Ballard felt that, because of her Jewish ancestry, she deserved a burial ceremony that was as close to a traditional Jewish burial ceremony as possible. Ballard left behind the following credo: "It is not enough to acknowledge that Native American Indian music is merely different from other music. What is needed in America is an awakening and reorienting of our total spiritual and cultural perspectives to embrace, understand, and learn from the Aboriginal American and what motivates his musical and artistic impulses."
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