Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part Five: On Being in the Public Eye and her Best Pieces

Fifth of an eight-part interview by YoWangdu’s Yolanda O’Bannon

YO: You've mentioned career pressures. What are they?

GLF:  A successful composer is one who is played at Carnegie Hall all the time, is getting the top commissions in major orchestras, major awards, a lot of recordings. I don’t think it’s that much different than any other field. As many reviews as possible, never out of the limelight. All of that stuff strikes fear in me, you know. I find the limelight really exhausting for the most part. I’m totally comfortable with talking in front of large groups of people – that has never been a problem. It’s not that. I'm a little wary of the media in general – though there have been some reporters that I think are very good. I'm a little wary because they reduce you down to this very convenient sound bite and it’s like they write what they would have written anyway if they hadn’t even met you. For me, it’s always the deaf Latina/Gringa composer. And it’s like augggghhhhhh. The same old thing.

YO: They saw that in your file…

GLF: Yeah, the problem is that there is a lot of false information out there, so they repeat this stuff, so they will say for example I’m born in Peru. I’m not, I’m born here. They’ll say I’m completely deaf. I’m not – there’s a huge difference. I’m not completely deaf. Oh, my father likes to collect all the bad things, mistakes like that. Like I’m Japanese-Peruvian. Well my great-grandfather is Chinese, he’s not Japanese. Like my first language is Cantonese…

YO: Of course it is. [laughing]

GLF: Yeah, or that I was born in Cypress. There’s another one that says I dedicated the piece to my new-born son Aaron [both laughing]. When I saw that one…I said where did that come from?! My mother called me up, “Gabriela! You didn’t tell me you had a new born son!”

YO:  Does having a public life make it hard to connect to people? Are you still able to connect in an authentic way?

GLF:  That’s my job. That’s my job, you know. I have to get over it. I can bitch and complain, but that’s my job and that’s the nature of putting it out there. I’m in the business of subjecting what I do for other people to consider, and I could find ways to protect myself, which is turn down some travel. So that I can recover at home with really good friends. You have to be very honest, and not try to claim more expertise than you have, or more glamour than you have. With the ISO thing, the Indianapolis Symphony thing, I was getting a lot of press outside Indianapolis for how daring I was for going in to talk to undocumented people and I was like… it’s not like a safari hunt. And I get that for my time in Peru, it’s like glamourized, and I have to lay that to rest right away, saying, all I’m doing is getting on a plane, hanging out with my cousins, that’s it! It’s not exotic, it’s nothing more than that. Don’t tell people I’m traipsing in jungles, I’m not. So it’s very important for me to always be very honest about it. The thing I get a lot is  -- oh, she’s so down-to-earth, she’s so this, and I’m like, I could see why you would say that, you’re used to “successful people” not being down to earth, but I have to do this to survive, that’s my main reason. The other thing also to keep in mind is that it’s success in the minds of a very few people. For the most part I'm just some Joe Schmoe, you know, walking down the street. It's not this big thing. Only a few people in classical music have gotten onto the radar generally speaking. Pavarotti, Yo Yo Ma, maybe, just a few people. Composers? I can't think of one. So it's performers: Joshua Bell, maybe Midori, other people.