Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part Six: On Working with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO) and a PBS Documentary

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

Gabriela with the Indianapolis Latino Youth Collective

YO: What led you to partner with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO)?

GLF:  A lot of the motivation is that I have always felt lucky to be doing what I do. And I could support myself with it, and I enjoy it. It's a lot of work, but I always felt there was something slightly selfish about it, that I wasn't giving back to the a larger community.

Largely, classical music consist of audiences that can pay tickets. Its a certain kind of repertoire, from the past, from Europe. That has been naturally changing when people from more diverse backgrounds fall in love with it and then start feeling uncomfortable with it. So one of the things that has happened is either you bring in cultural sounds from other cultures into the Western form...

YO:  Which is what you do...

GLF:  Which I started doing. Or try to set up more outreach, real outreach, that has an impact. But I'm such a nomad. I usually go in and I have a gig, and then I leave, and I don't really get to know the community. That takes years of living there.

So in the ISO experiment, which was not even my brainchild, what happened was that this woman in the ISO education department had an idea when she saw the possibility of getting a big grant from an arts organization that serves middle America. She said, we need to find a composer that would be interested in doing something for our community  -- in Indianapolis -- in making some music that would reflect the growing Latino community in Indianapolis.

They have a huge, huge Latino contingent there -- it was a big surprise to me. So they asked if I would be interested. I said yes because I liked her spirit. I've said no to other things because I could tell that what they wanted was no real interaction -- just something to make them look politically correct. Now I've participated in a couple of those things that left a really bad taste in my mouth. And it's not like I'm hurting for work, so I can be pickier and pickier about the things coming my way.

So when this came about we had the assistance of a really wonderful organization in town called the Indianapolis International Center. It's kind of a welcome center for immigrants in Indy. It's a cultural center for all ethnicities -- all nationalities. They hold celebrations for people getting their citizenship papers. They gave us a Rolodex basically of people to contact in the Latin community. It could be all-Spanish-speaking congregations in churches. It could be one nurse from Guatemala who cooked tamales but also handed out contraception papers in the streets.