Sixth of an eight-part interview by YoWangdu’s Yolanda O’Bannon
Gabriela with the Indianapolis Latino Youth Collective
YO: What led you to partner with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (ISO)?
GLF: A lot of the motivation is that I have always felt lucky to be doing what I do. And I could support myself with it, and I enjoy it. It’s a lot of work, but I always felt there was something slightly selfish about it, that I wasn’t giving back to the a larger community.
Largely, classical music consist of audiences that can pay tickets. Its a certain kind of repertoire, from the past, from Europe. That has been naturally changing when people from more diverse backgrounds fall in love with it and then start feeling uncomfortable with it. So one of the things that has happened is either you bring in cultural sounds from other cultures into the Western form…
YO: Which is what you do…
GLF: Which I started doing. Or try to set up more outreach, real outreach, that has an impact. But I’m such a nomad. I usually go in and I have a gig, and then I leave, and I don’t really get to know the community. That takes years of living there.
So in the ISO experiment, which was not even my brainchild, what happened was that this woman in the ISO education department had an idea when she saw the possibility of getting a big grant from an arts organization that serves middle America. She said, we need to find a composer that would be interested in doing something for our community — in Indianapolis — in making some music that would reflect the growing Latino community in Indianapolis.
They have a huge, huge Latino contingent there — it was a big surprise to me. So they asked if I would be interested. I said yes because I liked her spirit. I’ve said no to other things because I could tell that what they wanted was no real interaction — just something to make them look politically correct. Now I’ve participated in a couple of those things that left a really bad taste in my mouth. And it’s not like I’m hurting for work, so I can be pickier and pickier about the things coming my way.
So when this came about we had the assistance of a really wonderful organization in town called the Indianapolis International Center. It’s kind of a welcome center for immigrants in Indy. It’s a cultural center for all ethnicities — all nationalities. They hold celebrations for people getting their citizenship papers. They gave us a Rolodex basically of people to contact in the Latin community. It could be all-Spanish-speaking congregations in churches. It could be one nurse from Guatemala who cooked tamales but also handed out contraception papers in the streets.
The residency was only gonna be two years. I had two years – maybe a dozen visits – in which to somehow help this orchestra consolidate a relationship that would exist once I left. So many times when they bring in a guest artist stuff falls apart as soon as the guest artist leave. So, we got incredible results and along the way, people started to know me because I kept coming back, participating in some ESL classes, you know, things like that, and we had a PBS documentary camera team following us around, which was uncomfortable for me, I’ll say. Though they were very good. The cameramen got to know the people, too. So now people in the Latin community have other relationships that have nothing to do with the ISO, the orchestra.
I got very lucky – everyone was just a quality human being and had a clear role – I write, this person does something, this person is behind the camera. And all these things just developed and blossomed without my being there. So I would come back and I would have to be updated on new developments between visits. Well, we just did this, and we just had this film screening and so forth. And I started getting a little jealous, you know? “You have to tell me what’s going on…” because people would forget about me, which was great.
YO: So what were you doing with the community?
GLF: Some of it was for a while there I was working with a group that was in the PBS documentary, a group called the Latino Youth Collective, that was largely college students, grad students and recent grads that mentor teenagers who are Latinos – teaching them how to make documentaries on issues of social justice. I starting helping them develop a film scoring curriculum, so they can put in sound and music into their little short documentaries. But then I got involved in talking about culture, talking about immigration, and I became like another… another tutor in a way. Not a regular one, nothing like that, but that was one way in which we were able to do something.
Some of the orchestra members were nervous to go into the Latin community. Others were already involved, but it maybe wasn’t that well known to their colleagues that they were doing this. It pushed out of hiding both people’s interest and fear, to get to know a group of people who seemed so scary — with immigration being such a hot topic these days
YO: Was it gang issues, or what were they afraid of?
GLF: Oh everything that you can imagine! All the fear that we have about people that are different, and musicians maybe have one other that non-musicians don’t and that is they feel classical music is not considered cool. They are used to people that know all the Beethoven symphonies, that can know when to clap and know the various protocols – it’s a very regimented discipline. They come out onstage, they take their bow, then the concertmaster comes out, he takes a bow. Then they tune. Then, the music starts. But you go into a typical folkloric concert, a salsa concert – people are talking, they’re eating – they totally know what’s going on, but it’s just a different way of interacting. It’s very different, people expect to move and dance. It’s not this “holy” experience. Although, it is at one level, it just doesn’t look that way. I mean, you go to a black Baptist service and they’re moving, they’re responding. It’s dynamic, and they think you’re weird if you’re just sitting like that.
I knew from the beginning that people were gonna look at this project across the field – other orchestras – and the national league – they are very in touch with what other orchestras are doing and they’re always looking for the next big thing. They’re trying to find new audiences. So I knew as soon as we stepped in that this was gonna go Vhooom!! And people were gonna be watching. So you have to be savvy at the same time that you’re not losing what it’s all about. And so I talked with a lot of undocumented Latinos that were like shadows. Many of them were college students that were quietly admitted by some good soul in the admissions office. A lot of them were born here –don’t know Mexico, don’t know Guatemala. If you sent them back there, they would be a foreigner in their “country of citizenship.” So they really do feel like ghosts. There are laws that people are trying to pass to get them citizenship. These are the people we want to be Americans anyway. A lot of them became really good friends and when I’d talk about them I never referred to them by their whole names you know, I used their initials or whatever, to protect them.
The pressure was on for me to come up with something that honored them, that didn’t play to stereotypes — stereotypes that I carried around too. I had to be very in touch with my own prejudices, my own fears as well. So I came up with something and that’s what the documentary is about. I thought the cameramen did a great, humane, beautiful job of presenting stuff right from the beginning. I was like “You know what, don’t tell the typical artist’s story — of course I’m at the center of it, but keep getting footage of these people.” So there is a lot of time on people that we met, and just letting them tell their stories.
YO: And you were composing through this whole thing?
GLF: Uh, no the composing came toward the end because I went through so many ideas: This? Oh that’s not gonna work. This? Oh that’s not gonna work. I thought maybe I could do something like a trip through Latin American culture, a dance from each country, but that had nothing to do with the Indianapolis community. How is a trip to South America about these people? There was some pressure, all around, not just from the orchestra, but from the Latinos, too, to tell a happy story. So, it could be happy experiences, maybe a lullaby, the mom, you know, rocking the baby to sleep. All heartwarming. Most of the things I learned were hard, difficult stories, but I didn’t want to be all doom and gloom either. Then there was pressure to do something that sounded Latin – why not? It’s a Latin culture. And I wanted to actually educate the Latino immigrant community too. This was my opportunity to kind of stretch everybody’s minds. Not just my own.
View PBS DocumentaryI was going through my own thoughts – Oh my god, how is this gonna work?! So, it’s basically like a tone poem which is when you write music that conveys the spirit or the sound – in some ways a bit like movie music. The music sounds scary or it sounds active or quirky or it can even sound sarcastic – you just hear a pounding rhythm, but it’s done against a very bucolic scene. It’s like, what’s going on here? And it sets a certain kind of mood. It also had to lay really well with every instrumentalist’s instrument. The musicians heard me play, which was key to getting their respect. I played some of my other stuff – various chamber music, and then that was in the piece as well. So I had to use their vocabulary as well. And thank god it all worked out fine.
YO: It sounds like an amazing experience for you. What an amazing opportunity to use all of your parts…
GLF: I needed every day of those two years. And of course I was working on other things too. I also had to accept that, because I didn’t live there, that there was gonna be a limit to how much interaction was meaningful. So I was trying not to do the photo op kind of stuff which I have done before – which is crappy, really just crappy, when you get involved in that kind of thing.
YO: What do you mean, when you’re just kind of coming in and …
GLF: You come in, you throw a little stardust… people don’t even know you, it’s just automatically stardust because they are told that you’re the guest artist and you’re supposedly kinda famous. It’s really meaningless when it’s like that.
In Part Seven of this interview, Gabriela answers a question about the best compliments she has received.
