Yesterday, after almost a month of rain and floods here in California -- unreal and biblical -- Jeremy and I enjoyed several hours of very welcome sunshine. What struck us was how much life there was everywhere, a testament to how the earth wants to grow, to exist in health, to be a paradise even after the stresses humans have imposed on it.
Read MoreDear Composing Earthers: Since our last meeting, I’ve been compiling a list of questions that I’ve received over these past 18 months in various interviews, panels, etc., since I began publicly communicating my environmental alarm in earnest, not just casually. I’ll share two such questions I’ve received, one that comes up a lot, innocently, and one that has come up just once, hostile.
Read MoreLast Christmas, I received a beautiful gift from my parents. They were up in Boonville from Berkeley, enjoying our (long-labored) remodel of our central room that all of you know. Christmas was already a day or two past, and I didn't immediately follow when Mom gave me an old shoebox, nonchalant-like. The contents rattling around inside turned out to be Maxwell cassette tapes, the kind from the 70s with the extra boxy cases and orange stripes. When I opened the cases, my editor Dad's handwriting, familiar and precise, electrified me.
Read MoreWhen I finally rolled up my sleeves to get to work, I first wrote what could best be described as a melodramatic soundtrack for a theoretical documentary on fire. Here’s the fire climbing up a douglas fir: Scurrying violins. There’s the ominous ascending column of smoke over hills before it sinks to the valley floor: Horns in sixths to fifths to fourths to thirds to seconds, harmonized to descending bassoons.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
When I’m really under a deadline, and need to get new ideas quickly, I don’t usually listen to music, as some composers do. In fact, I do the opposite: I take off my hearing aids and stay in silence for a few days. In the absence of sound, my imagination goes to different places. It’s a bit like being in a dream when unusual and often impossible events come together, the perfect place from which to compose.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
I was well aware of taking up the time of a man who had been a young soldier in one of the world’s ugliest wars, who later experienced what no parent ever should in losing a young child, and whose own face was startlingly altered after fighting serious illness. You still believed in teaching and writing great music, and that made me even more devoted.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank and Rebecca McFaul
We just can’t catch a break. That’s the thought going through every Californian’s mind in 2020, a truly unbelievable year. In this state, a long-time “contested Eden” of opportunity, Californians have been engaged in an awful feat of juggling: COVID-19, long overdue racial reconciliation, its senator in a brawl of a presidential race, and otherworldly wildfires… Wildfires in canyons, wildfires from freak dry lightning storms, wildfires lining major freeways and incinerating urban neighborhoods, wildfires that cast a smoky dark red glow of alarm over the entire West coast. The haunting rain of ashes—remnants of ruined homes, schools, cultural centers, and dreams—is not entirely filtered by the dutiful face mask encountering virus and soot.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
I still have a tiny speech impediment and if I've not been wearing my hearing aids for a couple of days — like after sequestering myself in my studio to meet a composing deadline — my speech gets pretty funny, like a brown lady Elmer Fudd.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
It is a simply ravishing album, an aptly effective antidote to the more humbling moments of dog ownership. But as I was throwing away soiled paper towels, I felt twinges of unexpected and not altogether pleasant nostalgia.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
In the middle of the day, I can expect that solar lights and car headlights will turn on and the crickets will chirp as if it's dusk on Mars. What is this world?
Read Moreby Rebecca McFaul
….opening hearts and minds is, and has always been, the work of artists.”
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
If ever there was a time for social activism, this would be it: Thus far, 2020 has birthed a planet-wide pandemic, cataclysmic economic decline, and a chilling reckoning with historically-embedded racial violence. In my native California, we also face a predicted worse-than-usual fire season, already made hellish these past three years from climate crisis which ominously predicts more pandemics in the future.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
It's so much to bear. I’ve got nightmares coming back. But we have to eat. Have to get ready."
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
The real impetus for GLFCAM is a hate crime. And I honestly couldn't say those words until recently. I'd been mainly framing this pivotal incident during a cross-country trip with Jeremy as a run-in with an a**hole at a truck stop who suddenly announced his presence with a bodyblow from behind, knocking me down and showing me his gun in MAGA solidarity.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank and Rebecca McFaul
In Boonville, California, a composer wakes from another nightmare, one of many lingering remnants of trauma wrought by two years of apocalyptic wildfires. Having left her native Bay Area to build a permaculture homestead in the rural north, she has missed concerts to stay behind with her husband during fire emergencies, and asked for extensions on pieces due. The two have become regulars at classes at the local fire station, and she watches her spouse toil daily clearing brush and felling trees to mitigate danger. On her mind, always, is Paradise, a nearby city of thousands that became a ghost town in a matter of hours in the Camp Fire of 2018. She, too, worries.
Read Moreby Gabriela Lena Frank
At the time of GLFCAM’s founding, I didn’t anticipate that one day, environmentalism would become a crucial part of its mission, that I would tie the activities of music-makers directly to Mother Earth.
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