Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part Seven: Best Compliments

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

YO:  What’s the best compliment that you’ve gotten? What’s the thing that has most touched you?

GLF:  I can think of three right off the bat. Two came up at the same concert. It was my graduating concert at Rice, when we were leaving Rice, my Master’s concert. And my family came. For six years I was off doing music training  and they never heard anything from me. And they came, and listened to a concert where a bunch of student musicians were playing my stuff, and where I played a little piano also. They saw the whole school get excited and it was very successful and the teachers were promising a great future. My father, he’s getting it, and my mom’s proud, and my older brother was there.

My older brother and I did not grow up that close – there’s a five year age difference – some rivalry there but mostly the age distance, being male and female. We didn’t hang out with the same people, we were never in the same grade at the same time. He did do piano lessons for a while, but he doesn’t have the music bug -- he has the visual artistic bug, like my mom. When he came to the concert -- and he’s not a demonstrative person --  his eyes got watery in the concert. My tough, macho, muscular older brother, and I was the kid sister who was always following him around, pestering him, bothering him. I was a crybaby and I would tattle tale… terrible, terrible. So I remember, his eyes got watery, and he got emotional, oh my god, and afterwards he came up to me and he put his hands on my shoulders, and he said, I just wanna say that I’m so proud to be your brother, and I went wah, wah. We’re talking years and years ago, you know, but he could get it, you know.

He described, also, this one moment in the piece – very dissonant, very craggy – nothing Latino in it at all. This was before I was even at that point, I was knocking out stuff just to knock out stuff. It’s a piece that’s really virtuosic, non stop, and dissonant, and there’s this one moment when I’m playing something and then I come back, and I do the same loop again and I come back, and I take one little pivot and it puts me somewhere else. And he got, he could hear it. He does have a very astute ear in many ways, and I remember when he described that I thought, shit, he heard that, and he said that that’s how he thinks about his experiments. He’s a scientist – and he was able to make that creative translation, and gave me the first inkling I had of this very common practice behind the outward discipline, whether it’s music or athletics, just the creative habit – it’s the same. We just have different manifestations of it.