Interview with Gabriela Lena Frank
Part Two: On her Creative Process

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

YO: Can you talk a little about what you’ve learned about how to be creative?

GLF: Oh, god, I love reading books on creativity. Sometimes it’s a lot of schlock, but for me what has been most informative has been reading interviews by great thinkers, inventors, athletes, writers, businessmen, people who are very creative in how they find a solution for things. Twyla Tharp has a really wonderful book out called the The Creative Habit and when I read that I saw that all these things I had kind of done for myself, she had made an art form out of it – little ways of getting ideas.

I warm up every morning, you know. The same way pianists warm up with scales, just to get going. Singers go tra la la la… I’ll warm up with composing. I’ll just open a book, read the first sentence, [reading from a nearby book Three Cups of Tea] “What is it Tara, asked, Shhh he said,” Then I have to set that to music. Then I have a little grab bag and I pull out some instruments – and it might be tuba, and glockenspiel and piccolo, and baritone is my singer, and I have to set that. And I just warm up my brain. Then I’ll try to set it again. This time I want it to sound sarcastic. This time I want to do something else. Next, I’ll pick up a score of Mahler, and I’ll look at a random 8 bars and I have to re-orchestrate it, re-score it. Or take the orchestration and turn it into a different melody or something. You get started with something…that’s just one way to turn it on…get some juices going…

YO: That’s amazing Gabriela, I didn’t know…

GLF: It’s great, it applies to anything; it applies to any field. It’s like anybody who’s just in the habit of using their brain to come up with ideas … like people who write ads. A lot of it is just reading the paper, just noticing trends. You think, how does that have anything to do with reading about the economy? But I do get symphonic ideas by reading about the economy. In some way, I distill it, because that’s what music is, really, just distillation of history and culture and ideas, in sound, just figuring out a way to do it in sound.

So I’ll warm up like that, and I’ll have a lot of spillage left over, music that winds up on the editing floor, good ideas that just don’t work in that piece. I’ll put it away in a binder. I rarely start with a blank piece of paper now – it’s all yeast, for bread, coming up. And there’s a bit of magic there – it came from something live, it didn’t come from a dead place. It came from something moving, so I know it can come back to life again if I just blow on the flames. It just needs the right piece. And over the years categories have emerged for my binders. And I have retired some categories – things that don’t interest me so much. So one category could be: Orchestra music with a lot of brass, maybe too white sounding. That was the name of a binder [laughing]. I don’t mean that in a bad way.

YO: So what are your themes? What are the things that tend to spark you?

GLF: Oh, gosh, I have so many – I don’t know how much sense they’ll make. One thing is that usually my themes address something I consider a weakness, and I want to make sure I keep putting fodder on that…

YO: A musical weakness?

GLF: Another binder is actually notes from recordings that I made. These could be recordings I made in Latin America – laughably bad recordings. I am not an ethnomusicologist though I have been described as one, or a musical anthropologist. I’m not… I have too much respect for those people.