MA Top 30 Professional: Delta David Gier

Music Director
South Dakota Symphony Orchestra

Delta David Gier is practically a celebrity in Sioux Falls. Between the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s performances last April of Giants in the Earth, a recently recovered 1951 opera by Douglas Moore, he invited journalists to meet him at a local coffee shop. Patrons waved cheerfully at him, his wife, and his daughter, a City of London Sinfonia administrator visiting home for the production. Gier hand-picked a few favorite pastries for us from the display, catching up with the baristas all the while. Everyone seemed to know him—and he knew everyone.

A healthy slice of Sioux Falls probably now knows Giants in the Earth, too. Capacity audiences greeted both showings of this obscure opera—a feat, even in cities many times Sioux Falls’s size. The 1925 novel by Ole Edvart Rølvaag upon which Giants is based is, to most Americans, just as obscure. But in South Dakota, the
story of Norwegian settlers encountering Native communities on the prairie still strongly resonates.

In the centuries since, the descendants of those constituencies have lived profoundly divided lives. Gier—he goes by “David,” rather than his first name—wanted to address that gap. Created under his watch, the SDSO’s Lakota Music Project (LMP) brings together Lakota, Dakota, and non-native SDSO musicians for collaborative
performances and cultural exchange. Last fall, LMP embarked on a 20th-anniversary tour across six  reservations, including stops in Sioux Falls and, on Indigenous People’s Day, at the Crazy Horse Memorial. Even before the tour, over 10,000 people across the state had experienced a Lakota Music Project performance.

When Gier first began LMP, he often returned to advice from a friend who grew up on a reservation. Too often, organizations plan one-off collaborations, then abandon the idea. In order to make an impact, his friend told him, LMP had to “go in for the long haul.” Thanks in part to Gier’s personability and commitment, it has.