by 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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It's so much to bear. I’ve got nightmares coming back. But we have to eat. Have to get ready."
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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.
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