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In July 2020, amid COVID-19 uncertainty, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was forced to cancel its upcoming fall season, including an American-themed event featuring the music of 20th-century composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and Florence Price, plus a world premiere — Haillí-Serenata — a CSO commission from the fast-rising composer Gabriela Lena Frank.
“I was very moved to see that they were thinking about programming an all-American concert to occur right after the national election, and that they were bold enough to include me, a disabled American woman of color, for that moment,” Frank recalled recently. “Reading between the lines, I think they wanted to put out a certain vision of the American spirit."
In terms of chronology, Frank acknowledged that the commission was engendered by “something other than the murder of George Floyd,” because that event had not occurred yet, “and my reaction at the time was that it was really forward thinking.” The offer was for a short work, a tuneful, lyrical kind of musical number like a serenade. But historical events did occur, and her gentle serenade would take on some aspects of a prayer.
Frank’s eight-minute work will be heard at last atop concerts Dec. 9-11 in a program led by Andrés Orozco-Estrada also featuring Dvořák’s Violin Concerto (with CSO Artist-in-Residence Hilary Hahn as soloist) and Tchaikovsky’a Symphony No. 5.
Frank’s parents met in the 1960s when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru. Her father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish descent, and her mother has Peruvian and Chinese ancestry. Their daughter was born in Berkeley, Calif., and trained as a composer at Rice University and later at the University of Michigan.
Now 49, Frank has seen her career skyrocket. Although she does have perfect pitch, she was born with a significant “high-moderate/near-profound” hearing loss that went undiagnosed until a teacher suggested that she be tested. Since then, Frank has become one of the most prolific and popular American composers of our time.
As the traumatic events of 2020 unfolded, Frank began to think of a haillí for the CSO commission. “Haillí is not a Spanish word. It’s a Quechua word,” she explained, referring to a language of indigenous natives of the Peruvian Andes. “A haillí is an indigenous form often translated as prayer. I wanted to give my piece a bit more of that feeling because of the high emotions that were expected that [election] week, and so it is still lyrical and songful and tuneful but with a prayerful flavor.”
Frank has been interested in the sounds of the South American people since she was a child growing up in San Francisco and heard the popular music of indigenous musicians. At the University of Michigan, where she studied with William Bolcom, whom she described as a “second father,” and others, she began to take her own Andean heritage more seriously as she noticed how composers such as Bolcom, Bartok and Ginastera were able to mix popular aspects of their own ethnic folk heritage quite freely into a novel contemporary music. She realized, as a mestiza (a mixed-race person), it made sense to incorporate that mix into her music, too.
Still, one might wonder, how can a composer compose music if she’s almost deaf? One of the best explanations was laid out recently in a provocative interview she gave to the New York Times, in which she pointed out that not only Beethoven did write his greatest works while losing his hearing, but also that significant aspects of his artistic development may have been inspired by that impairment.
The increasing preference for higher highs and lower lows in pitches that are struck simultaneously — and for more dissonances and clashes in volume that cause more vibration — were probably more increasingly satisfying to him physically, she believes. That kind of music would have been, as she put it, “a recipe for happiness for a hearing-impaired person, trust me.” As for herself, when utter concentration is required, she often removes her hearing aids altogether, the better to allow her imagination to reign.
“We associate music, as we should, with a fully auditory way of experience. But music is more than a lot of sounds,” Frank said. ”Ït is a way of expressing our emotions. So deaf people can enjoy music, feel its vibrations and dance. And what I can hear is beautiful in its own unique way. My mother was a seamstress, which is how she contributed income to the family, and I remember as a child loving that rhythm of her sewing machine. I don’t think of it so much now, but I do realize there are a lot of things like that which remain in my imagination.”
These days, Frank is one of the world’s busiest composers, although when it comes to premieres, “as you know, COVID just disrupted so much.” Despite her hectic schedule, she found time in 2017 to found the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, which she hosts at her farm in Mendocino County, Calif. Its purpose is to help bring along composers still finding their way, and it’s specifically aimed at those struggling with cultural, gender and disability barriers. Frank is proud of that accomplishment in what has otherwise been a difficult time.
She’s also gratified by how the Haillí-Serenata has turned out. She offered some tips for listening to the work: “The Andes people live high in the mountains, and when you are high up, you become very conscious of breath. So the wind instruments take on an important role, and one of them, the quena, is very close to the Japanese shakuhachi flute in sound. It has similar kinds of colors, and I have always loved those sounds. My job for a piece like this, as a composer trained in the Western canon, is to use my own vocabulary to evoke non-Western sounds I want with the instruments we have, and so I have to get creative with this overlap, using what we have in common.
“You hear a lot of strong guitar-like sounds in Andean music, from little instruments like the ukulele and mid-size ones like a Spanish guitar, for example. And if you play my Andean music on a Western instrument, like a piano, you may not realize it culturally, but what you are hearing are those strong guitar-like sounds that evoke the strumming. So is it Andean? Not exactly. But it’s still me.”
