Native American saga: Variety in 2024 Early Music Festival's penultimate weekend

Mark Cudek's range as artistic director of the Indianapolis Early Music Festival is especially

impressive as the current festival prepares to pause for a holiday break before ending the weekend of July 12 and 13. 

On Friday, June 28, the festival moved into its accustomed home at the Indiana History Center for a program presented by The Bach and Beethoven Experience, whose artistic director put together a program based on her own family experience rooted in the Chickasaw tribe, one of Five Civilized Nations forced to move from their original homelands to unsettled land west of the Mississippi.

Creator and arranger of the program, Brandi Berry Benson is a violinist who appeared onstage heading six musicians, two others of whom have tribal affiliations. One was percussionist Michaela Marchi (Isleta Pueblo), whose playing idiomatically supported the instrumental ensemble of strings and flute. 

The other was Rachael Youngman, whose tribal affiliation is Chickasaw. She filled a key role as narrator and vocalist in tying together "The Story of Pa I Sha," Benson's ancestor and one of 60,000 Native Americans ordered in the 1830s to leave the Southeastern US for what was to become the state of Oklahoma. 

Benson arranged dance and vocal melodies from the tribal culture as well as tunes from the Western tradition, including a medley of three Christmas hymns set to Choctaw texts, plus "The Wayfaring Stranger," "The Girl I Left Behind Me," and fiddle tunes from mainstream 19th-century American culture.

The script was delivered with clarity and an unshakable feeling that allowed family pride to shine forth amid some details of mistreatment of the populations Europeans encountered here. Those details took their place in a narrative that focused on survival and triumph over obstacles of prejudice and displacement. 

Youngman occasionally sang in Choctaw, lending particular radiance to versions of "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," "O Come, All Ye Faithful," and "Joy to the World" in her native tongue. Yet melodies rooted in Choctaw culture also were linked to their original texts in the soprano's singing, indicating that music wasn't something imposed by white colonialists on a population otherwise bereft of it. 

Using period instruments, the instrumentalists delivered stylistically straightforward arrangements of the music. There was a blending of cultural influences well beyond words in how apt violin, viola, cello, and flutes came across in Benson's arrangements.

The balance of spoken narrative and music had a consistent charm that spellbound the audience. Everyone likes a family story with links to a larger historical narrative, and "The Story of Pa I Sha" supplied that in appropriate musical terms. However much suffering was involved in the forcible exile of native peoples, evidence of resilience has its place and should be part of the American story in which we all have a share. This production makes a worthy and revealing case for continued sharing.