>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. ^M00:00:22 >> Anne McLean: Good evening, I'm Anne McLean, from the library's music division and it is my pleasure to welcome composer Gabriela Lena Frank to the Library of Congress tonight and also Harry Christophers, who is the artistic director of the Haydn and -- Handel and Haydn Society. Very, very excited to have you both with us. Thank you for coming. This a very special concert tonight, featuring the famous Handel and Haydn Society and also a new work co-commissioned by the Society and the Library of Congress. We've been looking forward to this for quite a while. The work was co-commissioned by these two institutions to mark our milestone anniversaries, it's our 90th as a concert presenter since 1925. And H&H, the nations oldest continuously performing arts organization, is celebrating its bicentennial. This is the Washington premier and it was heard for the very first time last June in Boston by a very chorus centric audience at the Chorus America conference. What was that evening like for you? >> Harry Christophers: It was brilliant. I mean, H&H, we hosted Chorus American in Boston and performed in Symphony Hall, a program, a very mixed program of some Handel, I think we did part- we did some Messiah, I believe and Gabriela has a wonderful piece and we also did [inaudible 1:41]. It was a mixture particularly devised for Chorus America and all the delegates and choral conductors and singers there. >> You know, we were looking, I was showing them just now, we have a book, we have a complete run of all the books of pieces collected by the society, and it began in 1815, right? >> Harry Christophers: Yes, the society gave its first concert on Christmas Day 1815 in Kings Chapel in Boston, in which there were pieces by Handel and Haydn, of course. And why it was called that was because Handel was the old and Haydn was the new. Haydn died a few years. So it was very simple. But what's interesting about these pieces and -- do we talk about this volume? That what people don't know is that H&H was a publishing company. And in 1825, 1827, 1830, they published various things, and one of these is called the Old Colony Collection. And I was fascinated by it because I had with my group I founded nearly 16 years ago, we recorded the complete Eaton Choir Book, which dates from, of course, 1490, a few years before. But this, you know, for a young country, this is quite a publication. And it contains choruses from, a lot of Handel choruses from Messiah, Israel and Egypt, Judas [inaudible], Joshua. But then, a whole lot of what I can term sort of late sort of Chapel Royal verse anthems by very well known composers called Kent and Chapel. Does anybody know them? No. Well, not does anybody in England either. But what was amazing is that these people were clearly they were the best, the Howells of the choral world in 1780, between about 1780 and 1800. And there's a piece by Kent we're performing this evening, Hear my Prayer, that was actually very, very popular at that time. Nobody possesses it today in England. There's no cathedral choir that has it in their library. But it was last published in a collection for Durham Cathedral in about 1843, but not performed. But here they are preserved in the Old Colony Collection here. So you'll witness one or two of those pieces. And also, you'll recognize, there's a piece by a person called Mozart two sacred words, and no prizes, I'm afraid, for guessing where the tune comes from, but you'll hear it tonight. >> Anne McLean: You know, you'll have to go backstage in a moment, so we will start with you and ask you a couple of questions. With your own ensemble, the 16, which Harry founded and has an extraordinary reputation around the world, you achieved such an expressive simplicity. And I saw a statement from you somewhere where you said, "We shape the phrases according to the architecture of the time, allowing the music to have the freedom that it did then." Supplied so beautifully that this program, all the programs, you're doing new work, old work. >> Harry Christophers: Well, I mean, so much of the work I do in England is [inaudible] music, and of course, that's sacred music that the composers of the day wrote the music with the buildings in mind just the same as the building, builders, of those wonderful cathedrals all throughout Europe built the cathedrals with the music in mind, there were definite ratios that were going on. And so, you know, to fit that is lovely. And when we talk about architecture, I mean, architecture music, the whole idea of the arch phrase, goes right through from [inaudible] through Baroque right through to early classical, and really I suppose and with Beethoven, etcetera, things began to change. But really we can use that idea of architecture and shape of phrases right through certainly into early Mozart and Haydn. >> Anne McLean: It's wonderful to have Gabriela's piece on this program. We are pleased to have been working with [inaudible] and with the Handel and Haydn Society for two years in the past years to make this possible. And have had a number, of course, discussions about it. It's string quintet and full chorus of 26, right? And tell us about the text. We were talking about this earlier. Ralph Waldo Emerson. >> Harry Christophers: Well, it was interesting, wasn't it? Because having a commission bicentennial, we really pondered a lot about what to do with the text. And I said, it's got to be something that was really relative to Boston. And somebody said, well, there's this amazing thing called the Boston Hymn. I'd never heard it, but it's incredibly long, isn't it? I mean, it's by Emerson. What, it's about three pages long. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Something like that. And I remember in our initial discussion, that I led a very good team on board, very first [inaudible]. I was pulling it up on the Internet in that conversation we had over the phone, there were several of us sharing that. And I remember looking and going, oh my god, and they only want this to be 15, 18 minutes, and I said this is -- plus you know, possible instrumental interlude. We were already tossing out our wish list of attributes that could to go into the music. So I remember thinking, okay, you know, I'm an editor's daughter, so I should be able to get into this text and be able to pull out salient elements. But doing just a simple surgical exerting wasn't going to really do well because the text, if you know it, is very linear. So if you have to just remove a verse, it suddenly doesn't make sense. So what you need to do is go to each one and distill it down a little bit more, and then it actually makes sense. If you get rid of some of the details that trip you up and just get it down to the bare-bones. And then it's also a bit of a sermon. Now, sermons don't necessarily lend themselves well to song, but lyrics do. So was there a type of lyricized sermon that I can make so I preserve that sense of foretelling the future when you get away from tyranny. I mean, it was very, very important to keep that sense of grandeur and that sense of awareness of the past that Emerson had, but also the optimism that he had for the future. So we worked out something where I was able to distill the text down. And then to give a very prominent role, you'll see, to the instrumentalists. They tell the story I think equal to the singers. >> Harry Christophers: Yes, and actually what Gabriela's done is achieved a wonderfully -- to say it's an archaic sound with the singers isn't quite -- it sounds very colonial, it really does capture, I just feel, you know, as soon as the singers come in, it captures something about 18, the early 1800s and it's amazing. [inaudible] there are no kings and that sort of stuff, which is good. >> Anne McLean: About the text itself, it's very compelling. It doesn't refer, it refers to slavery and that of course is a very important issue of the day of his, Emerson's day. What, what were the phrases, I want to ask you about the recitative-like quality. Somebody had noticed that there were certain moments that have that quality and the diction is incredible. I heard the recording of the premiere. Well, that's what you're known for, that's what, among other things, that's what the Society is known for, is carrying the word so beautifully. Are you thinking of recording it, perhaps, at some point? >> Harry Christophers: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to see. We'll have to see if it's in the future. I think it's -- something you mentioned, just about the words, I mean, the fact that this text, of course, is so, is so powerful and so powerful to America. And, one of the things of this concert is just after Gabriela's piece we have pieces by William Byrd, which of course, are incredibly powerful to, you know, it's from the, you know, era of the of, of post-Reformation in England when Catholics lived in fear of their life. And you'll see that actually what I, there's a modest elegy to Thomas Tallis by William Byrd. But then I've also, for the [inaudible] you'll notice I, I've just had, I will have four singers, just at the side of the stage, singing this in a very intimate way because they -- and Byrd wrote those masses for private use. They weren't for singing, well, they weren't allowed to be sung in the bigger theaters because they were in Latin, of course. But they would have been sung in, in a private house, Rectors and Catholics, getting together, worshiping in private and if Thomas Cromwell had knocked at the door, their heads would have been cut off. I mean it's, it's, it's, you know, this was powerful stuff. So just in the same way that your piece in the Boston Hymn is very powerful, we know we can reflect that way back 400 years to, to England. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: I remember, what I wanted to convey too was a real fine line. I wanted to celebrate and to be glorious when we get to that moment. But to also count, to hint that the tyranny that he is referring to. So there is some rather dark writing and dark harmonies, and you have to go there as a player, you can't eschew that in the drama as much higher as a result. It may not be that obvious when you look at the sermon. And it was when I distilled it that I saw the jewels and these lines that were coming out. And I was like, this is really high, it's almost operatic. It's just high drama. But he had that kind of feeling. So that raised the bar when I saw that, that there's a lot of levels to this. So can I come up with music that likewise has those kinds of levels. >> Anne McLean: I was thinking, you mentioned earlier that the writing for the voices at some point I saw something referenced to low voices and high voices, would you expand on that a little bit. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Well, for me a choir is an orchestra. It's not just voices and it's not just [inaudible]. There's the color blend. We talk about sopranos and we talk about altos, and yes there's a slight [inaudible], different color, that's very important. And of course, a woman can sing a note that a man sings the exact same note at the same octave and it's a completely different color, one that's instantly recognizable by anyone. So the interplay of low and high is an easy way to separate verses. You can just assign now girls, now boys, now boys, now girls. But then you can also blend. So there's an innate kind of drama of teaming up and separating that can be very effective. And Emerson has that too, there's certain lines that are higher drama, other lines that are almost like a Greek chorus, that are commenting, some lines advance the plot, others make the metaphorical elusion to something in nature. It's expensive when you make an elution to nature to make the lyrics pretty, but if they can also double up and advance the plot at the same time, for me that's almost like combining high and low voices. So you can see how he's orchestrating with colors and intentions at the same time. So I like, you know, symphonically when I write for the choir, and some people say I write vocally for the symphony, so I think you find that common ground. >> Harry Christophers: It's interesting because actually also you're cast writing, the string writing is very, very different, is it? And it's very -- I mean, there's kind of the sort of folk elements that come into it, which where did they come from? >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Yes. And if you've read anything in my bio, you'll know that I'm not from Boston, and I have a Jewish Lithuanian forebears, Chinese forebears, and Peruvian forebears. And then I was born in Berkeley in 1972, and hit Berkeley, you know, hippie hay day. So I am very I represent a lot of Americans in my generation. And in my life as I have studied musica Indian, Indian music, of Bolivia, Equador, Peru, and looking at the colonial music too that has come over, I've also made a study casually, very casually, of folk music of the world, of other cultures. And there's certain gestures that just seem to be of the people that come up. There's a kind of lift, there's a kind of grace note phrasing that seem to lend themselves well to flutes. And we have flutes everywhere. And I mean, this is a very general observation, and even people listening to music of mine that is not Indian, this is not an Indian work, they still see the things that I like to do in my ostensibly Indian influence works. So one of the things I noticed the folkloric groups, there a lot of solos. There's something about the intimacy of the three other players backing off and one player coming forward. And have that in this kind of writing. There's something vocal about the line. And you have a lot of that in the string writing, where one player just starts going off and just got this very expressive feeling. For me that is of the people, it's something very much of the populace mindset, expressing yourself that way. The harmonies, sort of, sort of, open harmonies. Dismisses are usually inflected folkloric music. A lot of people think the harmonies are very simple, if you only look the primary notes of the melodies. But if you look at all the little notes, they do getting into the main notes. Instead of going [note sounds], they might go [note sounds]. All the little notes that are characteristic of one region over another. They're often not that consonant, and that's what enriches the music. Actually, for me, it's a bit like seeing a very nice sweater and it comes with that tag, and saying that, you know, the variations in the fabric are not blemishes, it's what makes it interesting. Yet it's still a sweater. But the so-called blemishes I think are the most interesting aspects of folkloric music. And there's plenty of that. I write it out, I don't leave it for the player at their discretion to inflect as you would with folkloric music. I mean, I'm a bit of a control freak, so I just make sure everything is in there. But you also want to bulletproof the music. If you don't have such skilled players as the H&H musicians, you really need musicians that need everything spelled out so then they can emote and feel comfortable. That's another reason why, if you're making folkloric allusions, you try and use the notational vocabulary of classical music. >> Anne McLean: Was this your first work for chorus? >> Gabriela Lena Frank This one? Oh, no, oh, no. This one I only earned because I wrote about a dozen or so. I mean, you work your way up. And in fact, your former director heard me speak on a panel at a previous Chorus America conference and then followed-up, she sounds very interesting. Follow-up and listen to choral music. This was a very careful considered search on their part for something like this. And I have more choral music in my future. I have a requiem that I will be writing for, the Houston Symphony and their large choir. And I only have one requiem in me, so I really have to do well with this one. I have an opera coming up, and the opera will also have a chorus. So it's interesting, the choir is very portable. You can taken it into many different kinds of environment. It can be a capella, the Kings Singers, so that's one kind. [inaudible] children's choirs, very, very different than if they are steeped in tradition, as you guys are, but still looking to the future, completely different animal from the opera. Or a symphony's own choir is not the same as an opera's own choir. I went to school with singers, so I understand these very strange creatures that we call singers. I understand their culture, and I love it. I really I love art song too. And sometimes I try to write choral music that sounds like art song in the tradition of Schubert or Shuman, when you have one singer and one piano and that's it for the evening. There's something very beautiful about that, and I try to bring that into choral writing as well. >> Anne McLean: I remember that one of your interviews said your piano teacher used to play art songs for you when you were a child, which is sort of unusual to be introduced to them that early. But that inculcates a lot of your writing. And I was thinking too about your comments about the opera. I was curious about, well, I was thinking about this work, this Emerson text and the work that you've just written, which is almost like a sacred work. And thinking about the fact that H&H was formed to perform sacred music. But it has this strong element in it. And I was just thinking about the society too, and your plans. Do you ever have mixed evenings as you used to do in the early part of the history, when you would have a Beethoven symphony alongside a piano concerto, and you know? >> Harry Christophers: Oh, yes, we do. I mean, the thing is, now it's a period orchestra. So when Chris [inaudible] was made assistant director in the early '80s, and Chris turned a brave move, I mean, a very brave move that time to sort of complete transition. Change the orchestra into paired orchestra, and which has grown and grown and grown. And it's a very interesting subject because, of course, it's changed the so-called mission statement of bringing of being old and new. But in my book, actually, by having paired instruments, what we're doing is quite simply making the music of the past sound new. I mean, it's fascinating hearing a pair of orchestras play Bach, play Haydn, play Beethoven. You hear things you've never ever heard before, especially baroque music, you hear tone colors of instruments that just don't exist today, and that I think is so wonderfully beautiful. And I'm afraid today and I can't hear a modern orchestra play baroque music, I really can't. It's just so it's just not -- we've learned so much. I mean, the thing is, when the paired music movement started, Chris [inaudible] formed his own group in England, Academy of Ancient Music, all those years ago in the very early '70s. I remember because actually I sang at Westminster, after I left Oxford, I sang at Westminster Abbey for six years, I sang professionally for six years before I gave up, I didn't sing anymore. But I sang in Chris Hawkwood's very first creation. And I remember, oh my goodness, the orchestra playing was well, it was not brilliant. Because these people were, you know, these players were sort of learning on the job, they were learning all about these wonderful instruments. They were trying to get sounds out of an oboe, an early clarinet, and you know, the horns were -- it was [inaudible]. But bit by bit, these players now understand it, at the Juilliard Movement, the Juilliard program in New York, it's staggering. We're getting fantastic players coming through that are really good in their own right, and it's very exciting, it's very exciting times. And I think the result is that paired music it's really coming alive. And if ever you get the chance to come to Boston and hear H&H live in the symphony hall, it's an experience. The vitality and physicality that's being produced by the music-making. And not only that, it's the communication. These players and singers, they love what they do. They know so much about their instruments and what they're singing about and the text. And I'm very text-ive and I'm not interested in a choir making a beautiful sound and doing the breaths and singing perfectly in tune and the words are sort of a compliment, sort of syllables are an appendage to the notes on the page. It's not about that, it's about, you know, anybody writes for the voice, you're writing text, text, text all the time, the text has to live. And in my book, I mean, they get very bored by me saying, look, you just go back to [inaudible], he said, sing as you speak, and that's the dictum that you can use for everything. And the musical will come alive and it won't be false. That's what I think, anyway. >> Anne McLean: Such a rich history. And it's so exciting to see how you do this very old music you're speaking about with new composers too, and that's pretty amazing for us to contemplate. I was reading about you the society tried to commission Beethoven, and that was kind of fascinating. And I looked up a bit here and there about it, but he wasn't able to accept it. But just the fact that you went after him, as they say. >> Harry Christophers: It's amazing, isn't it? I mean, in society, you look back over the history, that H&H premiered not only Messiah, Haydn's creation, Bach's Matthew Passion, [inaudible]. Don't worry, I'm not going to do that, don't worry, I'm not going to play that here. But anyway, it's an immense legacy to this country, and it's fascinating. And what was the lovely thing in the bicentennial is that we were revisiting pieces that we hadn't done for years. I did a performance of Handel's Jephtha, which H&H last performed I think in 1858 or something. It was amazing. >> Anne McLean: Now that you've come through this extraordinary celebration period, do you have a new trajectory for the next few years? Because you've really guided this whole bicentennial. >> Harry Christophers: Yes. I mean, in many ways it's more of the same. My great love is Handel, so every season we will close with a Handel oratorio. This year we're closing with Handel's Saul, his first oratorio, which is immense. It's a phenomenal piece. Next year we'll do [inaudible], the two secular, the two oratorios that were a disaster in his lifetime because god forbid, you couldn't have, you know, the word oratorio had to be sacred. And the profanity of something like a story of sex and lust as a simile, you know, it's not for the audiences of those days, but it's a brilliant piece. And we'll carry on to do I'm planning to do Theodora and Susanna. Wonderful music. Handel, he just has this incredible insight into characters, and all those amazing Old Testament stories which he just brings to life. And we see we now see so many of them being done on the operatic stage, which I think is brilliant. We need to look back to Theodora and Peter Sellars as amazing production that sort of set Handel alight really. So yes, I mean, it's sort of continuing the same. We have big acts on Haydn's symphonies. Haydn for me is just a phenomenal symphonic writer. I can't remember which, I think it was [inaudible] or somebody said, somebody asked him why do you never, why do you never perform Haydn? He said it's too difficult for the modern orchestras. It is difficult, and you know, and he has this sort of, you look him up in a textbook and he has this adage, the grandfather of the symphony. And it sort of makes people think, oh, he must be a bit boring. But he's not. He's full of wit, emotion, drama, charm and I just say to the players every time, you know, Haydn every day he could, he went for a walk and he took a notebook with him and he wrote down in that notebook things about the colors of the leaves, what animals he saw, what he was feeling like, what the color of the sky was, and had all his symphonies, his creation, everything, everything he wrote, it's all pictorial. And you just have to have imagery behind you and think up ideas the whole time. >> Anne McLean: I didn't know about these notebooks, that's fascinating. It's like [inaudible] album leaves, you know? And, yeah, so say a bit more about those. >> Harry Christophers: Well, I mean it's, I mean, it's amanchor [phonetic], of course, did a lot of research and amanchor's, of course, recordings of Haydn are just second to none. They are wonderful, what he gets out of the composer. I think what it, what it just gives us an insight into what Haydn was thinking the whole time. And, you know, we don't -- there's a tendency, well, there's been a tendency with period music and the whole historic [inaudible] performance to get bogged down in academia and that to sort of rather overload our performance of it. And, so that, that's why when I'm rehearsing Haydn I invent ideas and just imagery. It may not be what Haydn was thinking but it might have been. But I'm sure Haydn would be pleased that actually we're doing that and we're thinking about, you know, how to interpret this particular phrase and everything's important, just some things are more important than others. And, we go into a lot of detail and hopefully then it will come to life on stage. >> Anne McLean: It's fascinating what you say about the natural world being such an influence on him. Does this also play a role in your work? And also, I wanted to ask you too about, I read somewhere that you have a practice of waking up and warming up as a composer. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Yeah, actually, I'm also a pianist, although I didn't get any degrees as a pianist in school. I was lucky enough to attract the attention of very, very good teachers and I played a lot and one of my old schoolmates here, Wendy Olson's, in the audience, is somebody I accompanied her in playing all the works of Bartok [inaudible], from violin and piano for her recital. So, I was very active in that way and, in doing so, I picked up some really good habits as a pianist that also work for composing. So, performers do exercises. They do scales, they do arpeggios, but they don't perform those scales and arpeggios for you. You wouldn't pay money [inaudible] to listen to them go up and down on those. But, the scales and arpeggios, the ideas that they're embedded in everything they do and even to practice, it's not just technical and musicalizing your scales, making them very musical, your arpeggios, is a very good one for performers. In most compositional training programs, we don't come up with the analogy of this. And I started doing this really on my own, coming up with exercises that I can do as a composer. So for instance, something that's embedded in every piece are transitions. And transitions are notoriously difficult for especially younger inexperienced composers to master, how do you get from something that's really high drama and then clunk, you're in the soft section and clunk, it's just high drama all over again. And some composers are difficult because they don't give you much transition time, maybe two measures to try smooth everything out. You can see the performers putting the brakes on. It's a bit like a plane trying to take off with only a little bit of land to run from. And if the composer is very distinguished, they just accept it. So you can practice transitions. And something I do often is I will take something like perhaps eight bars of the Handel Messiah, and then I will take eight bars of Muller Six, and I have to join them. And it is great fun because you're working with fabulous material, first of all. And you're getting in there, and you really understand something about Handel when you see he could have done this, but he went here instead. You're inside the forest rather than just looking from the outside, and you're touching the trees and you're getting in there. Or you could do something like Shostakovich, and take a string quartet and go to Bartok, another quartet. So now the instrumentation is the same, you have to get into it in a different way. It's not just bleeding in the instruments smoothly, it's actually understanding what makes this Russian, what makes this Hungarian, what makes this two different gentlemen. So because that situation, the Handel to Muller, the Shostakovich to Bartok, it's going to come up in my own music, the parallel. And when it does, I'm ready. In fact, I'm filled with ideas. So often I'm asked, how long did it take you to write something? And that's a hard question for me to answer because when I sit down and I assemble all the transitions I played around with over the years, because I keep everything in my binders, in my studio. And I have maybe 40, 50 binders of just material that has surfaced over the years. Are inflammable, and creativity went into that. So it doesn't take me long to take something and get started. And they took time. So assembling everything together, writing new music, hiding my tracks so you wouldn't be able to connect it to the notes, and really coming out with something that doesn't sound like Frankenstein, may only take a month to six weeks, but doesn't take into account all the time I put into each and every little bit that winds up in the binder. So the exercises are a really good way to keep you in shape. I can't imagine a performer not staying in shape and trying to learn from ground zero each and every work. >> Anne McLean: Like your long tones and your scales. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Yeah. >> Anne McLean: And all the things. You said that composers are storytellers, and this, of course, applies to all the composers that you were performing with, the society and all composers today. And you talked about -- I love this phrase, you said, composers are storytellers uniting a lot of different things, coating it in music in order to give our impressions of the world. I'm just thinking, there's so much to be said, I want the audience to have a chance to ask you both some questions. We talked -- I want to mention one or two other things. One was that the society commissioned Amy Beach. And we own 300 of her works here, so that's an interesting thing for us. And that she was only 22 when she wrote the mass that the society premiered. And it was very seldom done after that. But she also had a symphony performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So I wanted to just ask you to touch on the issue, this reminded me, to touch on the issue of diversity and inclusion of composers broadening the canon of composers. And by this gesture, this is a wonderful thing to have this commission out in the world for a major choral society like this. What is your thinking today on how to mentor this and how also for you how to open this up, how do you open this dialogue? >> Gabriela Lena Frank: We could talk about this in a seminar over a week, how to adjust and the issue of diversity in the arts. I have thought of myself primarily as a one-woman show. As a freelancer, I don't have a nonprofit organization. I haven't worked in the public schools where we are bereft of our arts programs in a way that we weren't before. In many ways I'm kind of a plug-in, like going and I do what I can. And when I get invited like to work with you, that is one statement. If I'm invited to work with the Sphinx Organization, the founder, Aaron Dworkin, won the MacArthur Genius Grant. He was actually a schoolmate of mine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He was a young multiracial African-American violinists, already going after repertoire by African-American composers. I remember myself looking at the repertoire thinking there wasn't enough that reflected my kind of history, and I had to do something about it. So I set the bar high. I started to see myself in a way that really put me, you know, as needed by the world but needed in a high-quality way. I really have to pay my dues. I have to be great at what I did, I couldn't just be a messenger. So now I have found a lot of, as I'm getting older, I turn 44 this year, I am old enough when I go into the colleges that I could be their parent, and they look me as a role model. And I can see their eyes get big. I just left DePaul University, a week there, and the women composers and actually the men composers too, they can welcome diversity as well. This is something that's an issue for all of us. So it just means I can't walk away, I have to keep going. There aren't very many women composers yet, it's much better. This is a similar issue for women conductors as well. I actually think they are a little bit behind the composing maybe because it's more public. You know, most composers were away, and then for events like this, we come out of the closet and we actually have there's a face to us. But it comes about through the efforts singular as well as an aggregate of what we can do collectively. I mean, you guys heard me on a panel, and I was kind of an out-of-the-box selection for this great honor, this great commission. But it takes -- an endorsement like this is very powerful, is very powerful. >> Harry Christophers: Yes, I think it's very interesting because I -- one of the reasons Gabriela came out of that box because actually we found your music challenging, which I certainly felt the vocal music. You know, I find -- I've got a bit bold statement here, but I find a lot of choral music that's written today is just not challenging enough. People are falling into this sort of mold of what is something that is beautiful sustained is going to be they can meditate to or, you know, it's going to be a fail. To me it's wallpaper music, and I want something that's challenging. I'm not going to name any of those composers. But you know, for me, I mean, in England there's a Scottish composer who I have immense respect for, James MacMillan. He wrote a big Luke Passion that was co-premiered, co-commissioned between the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. You know, his music's challenging and it's rewarding. We need to only look back to Britain, Tippett [inaudible], people like that. You know, you know, the music was challenging but it, you know, there's something rewarding about it. And one can slip into a very [inaudible] in particular can slip into something that is just easy or, you know, just makes a pleasant sound. And it's sort of, in a sense, it's the way that I think many, many choirs operate, you know, they're intent on being beautifully in tune, beautifully together, the breaths have no part of the music and it's just, it's what I call pastel shades. You see, I want, I want a vibrant oil painting. I don't want any pastel shades. And, that's what you, you know, [inaudible] because that's what you've given us, you've given us something that's vibrant, that we have to work at. And the reward is great in the end. I mean, it's interesting about a composer, I mean, we have a, in England we have a lot of, a lot of very fine female composers, who are writing in all repertoires, I mean, like you know, think of Judith Weir, Sally Beamer, straight off who are writing for all sorts of genres. And it's brilliant and, yeah, more of it. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: More of it. >> Anne McLean: Have you both here at the same time, I wasn't sure we'd have the pleasure of having you. But this is great. And I want to ask if there's anybody who has questions before Harry has to go backstage. Questions, anybody? No. I have a question. ^M00:36:37 >> I'm just wondering, I'd like to know more about the opera that you're writing and when it's going to be premiered and where? >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Well, the last couple -- now I can start talking more publicly about it. You know, opera is a very hard come-about, this has been in the works for about nine years, when I really think about the first, you know, murmurs of something happening. There's a consortium of several opera companies so that a lot of planets have to be in alignment. They work out who gets to premiere, what singers, their own singers, are they going to share the production design. For the composer [inaudible] team, we are the smallest part of the equation. Maybe, you know, for posterity, our name is on the score. But wow. So my writer is Nilo Cruz. He has the distinction of being the first Latino to win a Pulitzer for his play in 2002, Anna in the Tropics. And I believe that was the first off-Broadway play to be awarded this. And he's a wonderful, fantastic writer, great imagination. And like me, he has a penchant for imagining a what-if for his characters. He may take actual events and they may be the backdrop, but then he paints a different story. So even though he talks a lot about political topics in Cuba, he's Cuban-American, that's not what the story is really about. And I sometimes feel like I do the same thing where there is the influence of my mother's culture, but it's not per se I'm not trying to make a string quartet sound like a band of some poignant panpipes. I'm trying to infuse the essence and take it into my own way. So our story is we will be revisiting Flee that Diego Rivera. But there is an existing opera that tells the arc of her story already. And it's a difficult dramatic arc to make work theatrically. She dies inconveniently and things aren't resolved. So we decided we want to be able to do more and there are sounds that we wanted to go after, fantastical sounds, and we need to make this story fantastical. So we're welding it with the El Dia de los Muertos festival, the day of the dead. So we know that Freda died three years after Diego. What a lot of people don't know is that Diego accepted Catholicism right at the end of his life. And he was a communist, but he accepted it fearful that, you know, his time was up. And he was calling for Freda. There's a little letter where he says this. And we said, that's it, so Frida's a spirit in the underworld and she comes back to reminisce. So this way we can have spirits, we can have the villagers that come in, but we have a third pivotal character and that is Catrina. She's the Centinela, or the keeper of the spirits. She is a trickster and a prankster. She gets to decide which of the spirits go back every year. So maybe Antonio, this year, you know, the diabetic, you can go back and here's some candy for you. Or this Salatino, the old man, you know, who broke his neck, here's your cane. And so and there's between Frida and Catrina. Two strong women, you know, the past, that is hinted at Catrina, how did she get to be in this position, you know, what is going on here. So she watches as Freda and Diego reminisce, and it is absolutely wonderful, really glorious. So we are looking at the 18, 19 season. And I've been on my phone a lot, yes, no, yes, no, with contracts and working out the details of instrumentation. We believe that Catrina will be a high soprano. We think that Frida will possibly be a mezzo. And we want to high baritone for Diego because he is avuncular, so he's got to have some of the lows and that sort of gravitas. But he also is heroic, but can't just make him a tenor. So we need a high baritone. That's what the opera is about. >> Is it going to be in English or Spanish or Spanglish or both? >> Gabriela Lena Frank: It will be Spanish with the possibility of an English version later. But, you know, English is my first language and Spanish is my second. And I believe that there was a place of imagination I can go to when I go into the Spanish, because it's different. I have to have to leap for it. And I cut my teeth on very lyrical Spanish too. Even when I start speaking Spanish, I started getting very musical in the way I speak it as well. And so we always knew we wanted to go into Spanish. The challenge for us is trying to get to a Mexican Spanish that's from their time, as opposed to Mexican Spanish that we hear today. I went to school in Houston, so I know [inaudible] Spanish very well, is different. And Nilo is Cuban and I'm Peruvian and my mom has still street slang that she uses that people look at me when I bring up, and they have no idea what I'm saying. So we are interested. It's a challenge, you're right. The element of challenge is very important for artists. And so this kind of challenge, especially even the subtle challenge, rather than a really obvious one, are the most difficult to get. Like the high money note, okay, you know, I'll just practice and I'll get it. But something like, what's the difference between Mexican period Spanish from their time as opposed to what I hear today, as opposed to what I know. So we'll be in Spanish. ^M00:42:09 >> I wonder how much of a role you have in defining the dramatic content of this, and how do you divide the labor of the storytelling with your [inaudible]? >> Gabriela Lena Frank: That's a very good question. So it's different for every composer [inaudible] team and it holds true not just for operas but anytime you have a new text. So Nilo's contributing some of my text for the requiem that I mentioned, but not all of it. I love Britain, so for that particular piece, I'm modeling of the war requiem where he has Owen Phillips plus traditional liturgical text. Owen Phillips being a contemporary poet commenting on World War I, I believe it is, yeah. >> Harry Christophers: [inaudible] That's right. >> Gabriela Lena Frank: Yeah, sorry, that's right. Thank you, thank you. So I'm doing something similar with the requiem, and Nilo was okay with that. Sometimes writers want to do all the words, so then you honor that. So that's another level of their ownership of the storytelling. If you have a good relationship, I can go to Nilo and say, well, you know what, I would really love some sort of text that allows me to do something very musical and nerdy, something a writer wants to do with a choir. I want to do something where I peel away one voice, I replace it with the clarinet, and I'm left with just the highest soprano that drops down to [inaudible]. I said, so what could that be, so, okay, well, that will be when the spirits are becoming the villagers, you know, and Frida passes the note to Diego who feels her pain. So then I'm part of it, but I understand where, you know, the landscape that he painted. Other times, he's been very generous. He says, Gabby, what do you think? Would she be angry here? What is your reaction? Would she, you know, be submissive? Or I'm thinking about making Catrina even sharper, and so then I get to participate. So we began to work out the first act in such a way. And we actually had a residency at a small school in Southern California, Whittier College. And they just paid for us to come there to work with their students and speak in some classes. And we had two weeks which we did nothing but breathe and sleep. I have a wonderful video of the two of us talking, on my iPhone. And Nilo's on my floor in my little kitchenette in my room, and he has down glasses and he turned upside down water glasses, just normal glasses. He put a napkin on each one, and those were the villagers with the white outfits, the campesinos. And [inaudible] nothing to side with the spirits, because you can see right through them. And an upside down teacup was Diego. And then for Frida, he had a little soy sauce bottle [inaudible] with the red hat and is curvy, like this, and that was Frida. And we were talking through the characters, you know, and he was moving them around and brainstorming. Then he went away and he came back and came up with something marvelous. So I'm in there but it's Nilo, Nilo's genius. >> Anne McLean: Oh, maybe just one more and then we have to let them go. >> The question is for Mr. Christophers. Knowing that you are a specialist in many, many things, but baroque music, early music, [inaudible]. I cannot find the right question. I'm very interested in the music from Latino American composers like [inaudible], even the first composer who composed the first opera in America, [inaudible]. Have you been interested in that repertory, first of all, that's my first question. And the second one, do you think -- I'm a conductor also and a choral conductor, orchestra conductor. Do you think the performance should focus on the repertory of our country? For instance, [inaudible] recorded an amazing amount of Spanish music. And [inaudible] focus on Handel, those composers, and we should focus on our repertoire. >> Harry Christophers: Because you're close to it. I think that's -- I mean, I hear folks obviously a lot on the English Renaissance because we have access to all those part books and everything. But I did years ago, actually I did a discourse of music by Padilla, who was early Spanish went to Mexico. But I also remember some years ago, during a tour of Brazil, of basically first-generation Brazilian composers [inaudible]. This was a requiem, which was amazing, actually. It was a little bit poor man's Mozart, but actually it was still worthy of doing. But actually having since doing, and this was about 15 years ago, I did that, but since then, there's been so much more research. And actually I've been approached by somebody in Brazil to look at some what looks really good music. So I'd love to. But, you know, the thing is, there's so much music about and we forget how much music is in the libraries of Southern America. The stacks there just waiting to be researched and looked at. And above all, the problem so often with it is that a lot of people start doing research where the auditions are bad and you have to sort of go back. I remember years ago, in Portugal, the wonderful [inaudible] foundation. They used to produce these fantastic volumes of Portuguese music by [inaudible] all sorts of people. And I performed a lot of it, but we actually have to have it all re-edited. The volumes looked beautiful, but there were so many errors, the pictures were wrong, etcetera. And now, I was over in Portugal recently, and I go back and said, we're now getting all these wonderful old additions by people coming but we've got no money to publish them now. So I've watched it all the way around. But yes. But I think since you're on the spot, you know, you were here, you know, to get research and get an identity, is fantastic. So yeah, let's hear it on CD as well. >> Anne McLean: Thank you for your question. Thank you so much, Harry Christophers, Gabriela Lena Frank. We're looking forward to the premier. ^M00:48:38 [ Applause ] ^M00:48:39 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at LOC.gov.