Written by composer, Derek Bermel

Program Notes

Lakota Refrains is a seven-movement work written in collaboration with Emmanuel Black Bear and the Creekside Singers.  Listening to this group of vocalists and drummers from South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation, I was awestruck by their melodies that embodied the power and solidity of the granite rock of the Black Hills.  Born out of newly created songs using vocables—or abstract syllables—Lakota Refrains spins out a series of harmonic, contrapuntal, and formal variations on the structure and cadence of Oglala Lakota music. The groundbreaking ethnomusicological research and recordings made by Frances Densmore, preserved at the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology, also informed my compositional process.

 "I am grateful to the South Dakota Symphony and their music director Delta David Gier, who helped facilitate several visits to study, transcribe, and analyze Lakota music and dance, encouraging an atmosphere of curiosity, collaboration, reflection, and mutual respect.  As Emmanuel Black Bear stated at our first meeting, “This collaboration looks toward our common future.”