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During her formative years in the ’90s, Gabriela Lena Frank didn’t know of “any other composers or piano soloists who looked like her.” Three decades later, not much has changed.
“I am a disabled woman of color who is middle-aged,” said Frank, 48, a California native of Peruvian, Chinese and Lithuanian descent, who was born partially deaf and later, due to Graves’ disease (an immune system disorder), lost most of her sight in her right eye.’
“There should be many more middle-aged women of color writing music," said Frank in a recent interview with the San Diego Union- Tribune. "The last few years have given me the opportunity to hang in there and not let the many doors that were closed to me be daunting — and to see the many more doors that are now open.”
Frank’s works have appeared on CSO MusicNOW programs in recent years, and in December, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will perform the world premiere (and CSO commission) of her Haillí-Serenata. Also on the Dec. 9-11 program, conducted by Andrés Orozco-Estrada, will be Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, with CSO Artist-in-Residence Hilary Hahn as soloist, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.
Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Frank has been dubbed “a musical anthropologist.” Her compositions often reflect and refract her studies of Latin American folklore, “incorporating poetry, mythology and native musical styles into a Western classical framework that is uniquely her own.”
Frank likes to quote a Bartók aphorism: “Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.”
She views those words like “a call to arms, this goal of using simple means to convey something that is authentic from the people,” she said. "It takes a great deal of skill to elevate its authenticity, and that was the goal Bartók set up for himself.”
