Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part One: Identity, Discomfort and Not So Classical Music

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

The first time I heard Gabriela Lena Frank’s music live – with Gabriela herself improvising on a piano at an intimate gathering in Berkeley, California – I was surprised and a little embarrassed to find tears streaming down my face. I know next to nothing about contemporary classical music, and I often find it too dissonant and challenging to truly enjoy, but that evening, Gabriela’s music just knocked me out. Of course, I’m not alone. The Los Angeles Times calls her work “luminous… bursting with fresh originality” while the Washington Post notes its “unself-conscious craft and mastery.”

In 2009, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Latin American Grammy for “Inca Dances,” and was featured in a PBS documentary on her collaboration with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. Clearly, Gabriela is an artist in the full bloom of her creative powers, and one of the major new musical voices of her generation.

She is also a wonderfully rich, realized human being, without a zot of the pretention or preciousness that could easily accompany her rare musical gifts, as you’ll see for yourself, in this conversation with Gabriela over a long dinner at my home in Richmond, California, in July 2009.

GLF: I think a lot of it comes from discomfort, and discomfort with accepting my training in music, accepting the vision that other people had for me, of music. I didn’t disrespect my teachers necessarily. For a long time I thought I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t fit in in a certain way. Then, I started to start to live with the discomfort and say this discomfort is good, this is who I am, so I’m in that feeling all the time now and it’s just a rewiring. It’s not changing your feelings, it’s changing your intellectual appraisal of it.

I think it’s very important for teachers to do to young developing spirits, when they’re creative or intellectual -- to trust their instincts and to go deep with it. We all have these ways of bucking the norm, we all have this potential. I got lucky in that whatever risk-taking spirit I have in me – I just chucked the normal path very suddenly, very early, and almost totally. Although I love certain composers in classical music. I’m not a total classical music aficionado, which is a great irony. It’s where I could get the best training, but I had to fit it into a different kind of mold.

My travel in Latin America wasn’t like a homecoming. It was very difficult – because I’m gringa – I was born here. You know, this is my country, the United States is my country. Peru is a tangential country for me. It’s where I find a lot of answers, it’s something that has always held a lot of mystery for me growing up. I had never visited Peru. I didn’t visit Peru until I was 27 years old, so 10 years ago. And it was very much tied to meeting my family, you know my mom’s family … she comes from a family of 14 children, so there’s a huge history there that I never knew.

And I think that a lot of the impulse to keep going with the music had to do with the connection to the family, because it was always Peruvian music that really interested me. You know before I was really thinking about my mom’s family that much as a little girl, I loved Peruvian music. I had a visceral reaction just to that sound – and for me that’s the greatest argument I can make for some sort of genetic memory of culture, that somehow sifted through to this little gringa girl growing up, whose first language is English.