Intercultural Art Music and the Sensory Veracity of Reconciliation: Brent Michael Davids' Powwow Symphony on the Dakota Music Tour

[...]it examines how the discourse of music's power for reconciliation played out in an a performance of Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids' Powwow Symphony presented as part of the Dakota Music Tour (2010) in Minnesota. [...]I look at the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and bring some of the recent critical literature on its activities into dialogue with ideas about how music's structural and formal properties articulate a politics of their own. [...]I examine how Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids' Powwow Symphony (1998), a work presented as part of the Dakota Music Tour, took part in a reconciliation initiative aimed at addressing the largest mass hanging in American history of thirty-eight Dakota warriors. While it is reasonable to assume that collaboration between musicians of different cultural backgrounds often entails a process of sharing and negotiation that may indeed lessen the suspicion of cultural difference for musicians and audiences alike, it is important to ask precisely what particular methods of collaboration enact a crossing of borders in the first place and how such border crossings effect the everyday lived encounters of those musicians who take part in performance or those audience members who witness the performance. [...]to what extent does the politics of aesthetics expressed by intercultural music impact democratic expression in the public sphere?