Life Outside the Golden Cage: Composer Gabriela Lena Frank in profile (The Michigan Daily)
Dayton Hare, Senior Arts Editor, The Michigan Daily
October 11, 2017
To a certain extent, creation is, at its very core, a synthetic act. Not synthetic in the sense of artificiality or fakeness, but rather in the sense that the product of creation is nearly always one of synthesis, the coming together of disparate elements to form some greater, compounded whole. Artists, like all of us, wander through life picking up the scattered pieces of the things that come to form their identities, borrowing influences and welding ideas together in endless cycles of combination and fusion. In many artists, this manifests itself subtly, but for others it can take on a more overt appearance. For some, it’s as if they take up the mantle of synthesis as a kind of mission.
More than most, perhaps, the composer Gabriela Lena Frank personifies this particular ethic. Born in 1972 in Berkeley, California, Frank came into being in a country (and city) that was flooded with the tumult surrounding the Vietnam War protest movement and humming with the residual energy of the ’60s. In a certain sense, she is the daughter of both immigrants and the optimism of that decade.
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