Music Is a Fount of Optimism for Gabriela Lena Frank (San Francisco Classical Voice)

Lou Fancher, contributing writer, San Francisco Classical Voice

At home on farmland 115 miles north of San Francisco in Boonville, California, pianist and composer Gabriela Lena Frank is surrounded by and attuned to sounds typical of a rural childhood. On the day and night before a generous, nearly 90-minute phone interview, frogs croak like crazy, clucking chickens provide a constant sonic backdrop, and the steady beat of hammers and other handheld tools can be heard. Indoors, the soft rustle of laundry being folded, fingers rubbing oil on cutting boards, and rare rest periods during which outside sounds continue to ripple through the semisilence are interrupted only by Frank’s listening to work composed by a former teacher, William Bolcom. “Yesterday, I was cleaning house and put on his Songs of Innocence and Of Experience that’s based on the poetry of William Blake,” Frank says.

Bolcom in composing the work took idioms from popular American culture and tied them to voice. Aiming for something similar in the opera she is midway to completing, Frank is careful about what she listens to while composing a new piece. “I look for a reset, for inspiration. I don’t sound like Bolcom, but I can see his episodic unfolding of the poems. I let my mind react to it in an organic, less studious way while I cleaned. It’s a wellspring of experience to draw on.”

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