Second of an eight-part interview by YoWangdu’s Yolanda O’Bannon
Copyright Sabina Frank
YO: Can you talk a little about what you’ve learned about how to be creative?
GLF: Oh, god, I love reading books on creativity. Sometimes it’s a lot of schlock, but for me what has been most informative has been reading interviews by great thinkers, inventors, athletes, writers, businessmen, people who are very creative in how they find a solution for things. Twyla Tharp has a really wonderful book out called the The Creative Habit and when I read that I saw that all these things I had kind of done for myself, she had made an art form out of it – little ways of getting ideas.
I warm up every morning, you know. The same way pianists warm up with scales, just to get going. Singers go tra la la la… I’ll warm up with composing. I’ll just open a book, read the first sentence, [reading from a nearby book Three Cups of Tea] “What is it Tara, asked, Shhh he said,” Then I have to set that to music. Then I have a little grab bag and I pull out some instruments – and it might be tuba, and glockenspiel and piccolo, and baritone is my singer, and I have to set that. And I just warm up my brain. Then I’ll try to set it again. This time I want it to sound sarcastic. This time I want to do something else. Next, I’ll pick up a score of Mahler, and I’ll look at a random 8 bars and I have to re-orchestrate it, re-score it. Or take the orchestration and turn it into a different melody or something. You get started with something…that’s just one way to turn it on…get some juices going…
YO: That’s amazing Gabriela, I didn’t know…
GLF: It’s great, it applies to anything; it applies to any field. It’s like anybody who’s just in the habit of using their brain to come up with ideas … like people who write ads. A lot of it is just reading the paper, just noticing trends. You think, how does that have anything to do with reading about the economy? But I do get symphonic ideas by reading about the economy. In some way, I distill it, because that’s what music is, really, just distillation of history and culture and ideas, in sound, just figuring out a way to do it in sound.
So I’ll warm up like that, and I’ll have a lot of spillage left over, music that winds up on the editing floor, good ideas that just don’t work in that piece. I’ll put it away in a binder. I rarely start with a blank piece of paper now – it’s all yeast, for bread, coming up. And there’s a bit of magic there – it came from something live, it didn’t come from a dead place. It came from something moving, so I know it can come back to life again if I just blow on the flames. It just needs the right piece. And over the years categories have emerged for my binders. And I have retired some categories – things that don’t interest me so much. So one category could be: Orchestra music with a lot of brass, maybe too white sounding. That was the name of a binder [laughing]. I don’t mean that in a bad way.
YO: So what are your themes? What are the things that tend to spark you?
GLF: Oh, gosh, I have so many – I don’t know how much sense they’ll make. One thing is that usually my themes address something I consider a weakness, and I want to make sure I keep putting fodder on that…
YO: A musical weakness?
GLF: Another binder is actually notes from recordings that I made. These could be recordings I made in Latin America – laughably bad recordings. I am not an ethnomusicologist though I have been described as one, or a musical anthropologist. I’m not… I have too much respect for those people.
YO: What kind of recordings did you make?
GLF: Of musicians, across a variety of different fields… indigenous, folkloric. Some of the recordings are of little charlatan touristy stuff – it’s all fascinating to me. I have a video of a class I walked in, in Chincha — a very Chinese, black town in coastal Peru. My mother and I walked into an afro-aerobico class – and the aerobics was being taught by this black guy with these Peruvian women and they were doing afro-aerobico, so it was very african in a musical sense, with live cajon players. It was unbelievable – I have video of this. I still have that and it inspires me, how alive it is, how much a part of their daily lives. They’re getting a workout, damn it! To watch their girlish figures – it’s beautiful, beautiful.
So I have binders that are notes from transcriptions – things that I like that happened in the music, that I want to do something with at the piano now. That give me an idea for how I can translate it. Others are binders – reactions to things, articles by real ethno-musicologists who have gone and traveled and they say something and I question that – I’m not sure I agree with it. I have the luxury of poo poo-ing a lot of the scientific work. I’m in a speculative field where my job is just to speculate and imagine the next step of the culture. You can’t call me right or wrong for the most part. You can call me a charlatan if you don’t detect something authentic, but that’s really hard to quantify – it always is. I read articles saying, well this has so many notes in this scale, and these instruments have so many pipes, and they don’t say anything about the music – it’s just data, about how many minutes did this last, or it’s always done with three men. They don’t go beyond that – that’s my job, to go beyond that, and then maybe go see this stuff for myself in Peru, or to try and make use of it.
Not all scholars are this way – the nice thing about ethno-musicology is that it tends to be less rigid and more fluid than other musicology fields that are looking at Bach or Beethoven, or medieval music. Those tend to be very quantified and very regimented. Many academics don’t do anything except write articles whereas in ethno-musicology, many of the scholars are performers, many of them actually really have to make it breathe in real life, and I think that gives you a whole different perspective, where you have to see how it connects to other people. You’re not in a safe little community of other very smart but rarified and disconnected thinkers. So that’s another binder of looking at what scholars of many different backgrounds have written.
I have stuff that I’m sure is an orchestral idea as opposed to a choral idea, as opposed to a solo piano idea, so there are different binders for that. I have stuff that I think can’t be used literally, that has to be reworked. There’s something there but I haven’t dug it out yet, there’s a lot of mud around it. It’s something there, I have to clean up.
YO: Are these scores – sheets of music…
GLF: Usually scraps of music. Sometimes it’s like pictures – pictures from National Geographic that I cut out and put in the binder with a couple of words, though sometimes I don’t remember what those words are supposed to mean [laughing]. There’s one that says, “Can of tuna,” and I’m thinking, like, what?
YO: So, when you start making something, you have your binders and you’re pulling pieces from them, typically?
GLF: Sometimes. Sometimes I’m ready to go without them. Sometimes just by the act of saving it, I remember it and it’s in there. And I don’t really have to go there. Sometimes I will if I’m being lazy and I just want something handed to me. Yeah, and I just kinda look. Sometimes the project that I have to work on is so new that I know nothing’s going to apply.
It’s pretty haphazard. What you want though is you want to be able to be haphazard because it’s so rich. Whatever you bump into is going to yield something. That takes time, and when I talk to young composers, they haven’t even written enough to have any spillage. Everything has just been poured into the mold – if that’s their third or fourth piece they’ve ever done. They have to be doing it for a while, and that’s why I despair when I see composers that are not writing. It’s so much more than just writing that one piece. That one piece is going to produce the next five. That’s how much you get from writing each one.
In Part 3, Gabriela discusses the process of creating a composition.
