May 14, 2004: Headlines: COS - Peru: Music: The Florida Orchestra: Gabriela Lena Frank's folk influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s
Peace Corps Online:
Directory:
Peru:
Peace Corps Peru:
The Peace Corps in Peru:
May 14, 2004: Headlines: COS - Peru: Music: The Florida Orchestra: Gabriela Lena Frank's folk influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s
Gabriela Lena Frank's folk influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s
Gabriela Lena Frank's folk influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s
Composer draws on folk influences
Gabriela Lena Frank reached a turning point in her education as a composer when a piano teacher gave her the music of Bela Bartok and Alberto Ginastera.
"Until then I was writing imitation Bach and Beethoven, but Bartok and Ginastera opened me up to the idea of bringing in folk influences to my music," Frank said Wednesday. She had just heard the Florida Orchestra rehearse her Three Latin American Dances, which is on this weekend's masterworks program, Susan Haig conducting.
Frank's folk influences come from her own polyglot background. Her mother is Peruvian, her father is descended from Lithuanian Jews, and she grew up in Berkeley, Calif. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps worker in Peru in the 1960s.
Bartok, whose concert works reflect the folk music of his native Hungary, became a role model.
"Bartok is my hero," she said. "When I started traveling in South America I took a book of Bartok essays with me. I was trying to do what he did. There's a timelessness to Bartok."
The second movement of Three Latin American Dances alludes to Bartok. Frank's notes to the score also refer to the Argentinian composer Ginastera, Leonard Bernstein's dances from West Side Story and Illapa, a Peruvian-Inca weather deity. The third movement has punchy brass and castanets that would sound right at home in Carmen.
The 16-minute work is being performed for just the second time. The Utah Symphony, with Keith Lockhart conducting, premiered it in April. "I'm trying to get across three striking personalities in three very different movements," Frank said. "It's almost a piece about the different terrains in South America: the coastal plains, the jungle, the mountains."
Frank, 31, studied for a doctorate at the University of Michigan under composer William Bolcolm, whom she calls "a fantastic model for fusion - cabaret, music theater and American song with classical."
Bolcolm made it possible for Frank to take her first trip as a student to South America, which she had known only from childhood family vacations.
"When I started traveling in South America, in some ways I felt very gringa - I'm used to the comforts of the United States - and in other ways I felt very much at home," she said. "One of the things I love about writing this music is it gives me an excuse to keep going back to South America and asking this question: How Latina am I and how gringa am I?"
Frank, an excellent pianist, will give a free performance- presentation on folk influences in classical music at 10 a.m. Saturday at the St. Petersburg College Music Center.
"My job as a composer, if I want to evoke another culture, is to try to make symphonic instruments sound like pan pipes or some type of Latin American percussion instruments," she said. "I want to see if I can make you forget that you're listening to a symphony orchestra."
When this story was posted in February 2005, this was on the front page of PCOL:
| The Peace Corps Library Peace Corps Online is proud to announce that the Peace Corps Library is now available online. With over 30,000 index entries in over 500 categories, this is the largest collection of Peace Corps related reference material in the world. From Acting to Zucchini, you can use the Main Index to find hundreds of stories about RPCVs who have your same interests, who served in your Country of Service, or who serve in your state. |
| Make a call for the Peace Corps PCOL is a strong supporter of the NPCA's National Day of Action and encourages every RPCV to spend ten minutes on Tuesday, March 1 making a call to your Representatives and ask them to support President Bush's budget proposal of $345 Million to expand the Peace Corps. Take our Poll: Click here to take our poll. We'll send out a reminder and have more details early next week. |
| Peace Corps Calendar:Tempest in a Teapot? Bulgarian writer Ognyan Georgiev has written a story which has made the front page of the newspaper "Telegraf" criticizing the photo selection for his country in the 2005 "Peace Corps Calendar" published by RPCVs of Madison, Wisconsin. RPCV Betsy Sergeant Snow, who submitted the photograph for the calendar, has published her reply. Read the stories and leave your comments. |
| WWII participants became RPCVs Read about two RPCVs who participated in World War II in very different ways long before there was a Peace Corps. Retired Rear Adm. Francis J. Thomas (RPCV Fiji), a decorated hero of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, died Friday, Jan. 21, 2005 at 100. Mary Smeltzer (RPCV Botswana), 89, followed her Japanese students into WWII internment camps. We honor both RPCVs for their service. |
| Bush's FY06 Budget for the Peace Corps The White House is proposing $345 Million for the Peace Corps for FY06 - a $27.7 Million (8.7%) increase that would allow at least two new posts and maintain the existing number of volunteers at approximately 7,700. Bush's 2002 proposal to double the Peace Corps to 14,000 volunteers appears to have been forgotten. The proposed budget still needs to be approved by Congress. |
| RPCVs mobilize support for Countries of Service RPCV Groups mobilize to support their Countries of Service. Over 200 RPCVS have already applied to the Crisis Corps to provide Tsunami Recovery aid, RPCVs have written a letter urging President Bush and Congress to aid Democracy in Ukraine, and RPCVs are writing NBC about a recent episode of the "West Wing" and asking them to get their facts right about Turkey. |
| Ask Not As our country prepares for the inauguration of a President, we remember one of the greatest speeches of the 20th century and how his words inspired us. "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man." |
Read the stories and leave your comments.
Some postings on Peace Corps Online are provided to the individual members of this group without permission of the copyright owner for the non-profit purposes of criticism, comment, education, scholarship, and research under the "Fair Use" provisions of U.S. Government copyright laws and they may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner. Peace Corps Online does not vouch for the accuracy of the content of the postings, which is the sole responsibility of the copyright holder.
Story Source: The Florida Orchestra
This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Peru; Music
PCOL17340
97