Good morning, roastandstir! (What a great handle, ja ja ja!)

I grew up on a Yamaha upright so I have a real fondness for them (SD Opera took a sneaky video of me playing the Yamaha grand from our rehearsals that they put out on social media... I just couldn't resist.). That said, I have a Steinway grand now from the early 1900s, a golden era for their pianos, if you ask me. Wonderful bass.

Piano piece(s) difficult for me to play: Anything from the early classical era. I can down Bartok and much contemporary, but Haydn slays me with just a glance.

Coordinating piano hands at the keyboard: Hmmm... I think an actual piano teacher would give you a more informed answer, but one thing I do when trying to stretch my piano skills is to break up my practice into multiple short sessions through a day. Studies show that this is much more productive to learning than one long session. Perhaps this kind of practice would help you?

Nilo is the BEST. THE BEST... Can I just say... THE BEST.

In all seriousness, he's one of my dearest friends and I love and respect him. When we work together (we've done about a dozen projects now over the years, small and large), the words always come first, but before the words, there's a lot of mutual discussion about the subject matter, often over meals, and spending time talking about our lives, too. We're both storytellers so we have to spend time exchanging stories of all kinds before we focus all of that energy onto a specific tale.

Then, Nilo goes away for a while and comes up with texts. He passes that along to me and I start the musical side of things. I will often move some texts around, or repeat words for musical effect, sometimes ask for more text, or ask him to edit things down, while he has ultimate say on how he wants the texts to go.

Now that I've begun to use a software program called NotePerformer (I've been thus far too impatient to learn Ableton, Logic Pro, etc, which allows the computer to simulate your music), I can actually share with him a pretty good realization of the music before actual rehearsals. I did that with this opera last year, for instance, and it was really helpful.

All this to say -- Discussion-words-music-ping pong back and forth is the order of our work. And even in rehearsals for the opera, just yesterday, we added a line for Diego to sing with Frida right at the very end. This was Nilo's suggestion when he heard the music. The ping-pong, exchanging of ideas is very important for our creative success.

And yeah... censorship seriously sucks. I was shocked and angry how that all went down.

Hi, Wise!

When I first heard the Game of Thrones theme, years ago, I rolled my eyes... ja ja ja... And now, omigod, it's stuck in my brain and I have to admit that it's bluntly effective. I wish they had called me, though. I'd do a lot more with staggered strings, blends of unusual colors, themes reacting to one another, etc. You know, the good stuff. :)

As to how I started to do this... I always enjoyed music and would improvise at the piano, but I didn't know that you could be professional. So, I was scholastically a high achiever and in high school, was studying Russian literature, language, politics... This was the time of Gorbachev, glasnost, the Wall was tumbling in Europe, regimes changing in Latin America. I thought I was going to be a political science major and I was likely headed to law school. But in the summer of my last year of high school, I took a music composition program, and was changed instantly. I fell -- hard -- for composing.

I knew, then, that I had a lot of catching up to do. I didn't know much repertoire and even my music-reading skills weren't the best. But, somewhere inside me, I also thought the world needed me... lol... innocent hubris of my youth and all that... I never looked back, though. I'm very grateful.

Fun question!

Guests:

Mark Twain

Arya Stark

Frida Kahlo

Bela Bartok

Michelle Obama

Dinner: My California-Peruvian fusion of coconut soup with seafood and veggies from our garden. A good local white wine. Huckleberry-lemonade, also from the garden.

Playlist: Afro-peruano music. Seriously wonderful stuff, likely Jolgorio.

Fort Worth: Oh gosh, I really really really really really really hope so! But you know, the composer is the last to know. Perhaps write them?

Next piece: My final work for the Philadelphia Orchestra called "Picaflor" or "Hummingbird' based on Andean creation myths with a strong dash of my own narrative fancies thrown in. Due in a couple of months, so I'm putting a bit of time into it each day even with these concurrent opera rehearsals.

These are all good questions! Often times, when solos are given in these kinds of creative contexts, the soloists can make up music on the spot. There's an understanding between the lead musician (here, Yanni) and the invited soloist that whatever they make up would still be stylistically appropriate while they are exercising a certain amount of creative freedom. So, while it's possible that Yanni is writing down every single note of the solo and the player is just playing that, I would guess that it's more likely they are improvising.

As for choosing to use the conductor -- That will depend on not just the piece of music (is it complex?), but also whether the players have enough rehearsal time to do it without the help of the conductor. Sometimes, the conductor is the lead personality, so it's going to start with that person and even if the music is not super complex or needs the conductor to keep everything together, the vision is the conductor's, so the ensemble will feature that person. It just all kind of depends.

Good questions.

It sounds like you've already started developing a process -- This is all very detailed!

I admit that my brain works differently when it comes to composing, a kind of "guided/assessed mental improv"... For instance, if you and I were to have a conversation, while we're hopefully connecting and speaking on the same subject, we're also improvising our words. We're not reading from a script, in other words, but coming up with spontaneous responses to one another. Yet, our words are also guided by the subject matter as well as the specifics of language, grammar, etc.

So, in contrast to what you're describing above, I compose more in this vein. It's a pretty perfect marriage of intuition and intellect that seems to work well for me.

Yes, TOTALLY. Just accept that floundering around will likely be a part of the process, especially at first, but you absolutely can start composing at age 30. Without a doubt.

Honestly -- and this will sound ridiculous -- I still have to pinch myself even after all of these years that I really do have this career. And in my thirties, when things began to kick into gear professionally, I didn't trust that the momentum would last, in part because there were so few people of color around me in the profession. I felt exceptionally alone at times. I actually started to feel more secure with holding onto this job when others around me with similar backgrounds began to show up and become successful, too. It demonstrated that the values of classical music were beginning to shift and I wasn't just "flavor of the day" if that makes any sense. I would say that was in my early forties (and I just turned 50 recently). It's been a long journey, and I feel very grateful.

PS -- I hope you enjoy the opera!

What a great question.

I'm actually tearing up a bit as I think about this... Music opened up the world to me, literally and metaphorically. It's given me the vehicle to inquire, to witness, to process what I see and rewire/retell in my music, developing my character. And in the actual creative habit itself, as I push myself to take risks, to create stamina to not put paper and pencil aside when I'm frustrated or afraid to commit to the process, I learn how courageous I am, how disciplined I am, how imaginative I am. It's helped me to get closer to myself, to become this Gabriela that I would like to be.

Wiping away a tear, ja ja ja. That's gratitude for what music has given me.

That's a great question. I likely have to mull on this for a bit to parse out all the ways it's different and similar. But, off the top of my head, the specificity of the words is paradoxically both defining (sometimes even confining) and liberating. On the one hand, the very shape of the lyricism has to wrap around the syllabic shape of the words, unless you're thwarting that for a meaningful expressive reason. On the other, my librettist Nilo Cruz has an unbelievable imagination that takes me into worlds I could never originate myself. So, I come up with music I never would have come up with otherwise, and that's liberating for me. It leaves me a better composer... So, that's one important thing that vocal music can do for me as opposed to instrumental music without another writer's words.

Great question.

I love the Please Touch Museum! I used to take my nephew there when my brother was still teaching at Penn.

Thanks for the kind words!

You know, over the years, there has been a lot of material that has wound up on the cutting room floor, stuff that doesn't make it into the deadlined piece on hand but still have some creative fire in them. So, I save all of that stuff into a huge library of binders I keep in my home studio. Now, when I start a new piece, I don't worry about staring at a blank page. If nothing's coming to me, then I can go consult my binders (and over the years, different categories have emerged, such as "good for vocal music" or "When you need the gnarly" or "symphonic ideas"). Sometimes this stuff will just help me to light the match to entirely new ideas, or they are completely transformed to something unrecognizable, but they can still be an essential part of the puzzle.

I also keep in shape... I don't just work on the music that's contracted, but I do the composerly equivalent of shooting a hundred baskets on the court each morning, or scales on an instrument. I might warm up in the morning with one of my favorite exercises, for instance, which is a "transitions" exercise... say, connecting eight bars of music from a Bartok string quartet to eight bars of another composer's music. I'll give myself a few minutes to play around with that. By doing stuff like this, your brain is busting with ideas, "warmed up" for your own work.

By investing creative time like this, you won't be bereft for ideas, from a narrative or musical standpoint. I do improvise, but don't need that skill so much anymore; and I usually can hear everything in my head but sometimes, I'll use NotePerformer (a new tool for me) for some playback from the computer, too.

Oh, this means so much to me, Moose. Thank you for these kinds words. While I write my pieces for "the ages," who am I kidding, what's eminently real to me is what the performers think... :)

I've always thought that if aliens land on our planet, they would both marvel at our arts and feel great disappointment at our political tensions and enmities... I might very well play them your performance of Pachamama Meets an Ode, what with its message about centuries-long cross-cultural tensions and their correlating harm to the earth. The piece ends on a telling question tinged with hope; I'd hope for any outer galactic intelligent species to glom onto that and give humanity a chance.

Definitely English! Although I'm one of those where my accent is good so people think I'm a native speaker for the first couple of minutes of conversation, just not from their country, ja ja. They didn't know I needed hearing aids when I was born so learning to hear and speak English properly when I was fitted (around age 5) was a laborious endeavor for several years with speech therapists, etc. We just didn't put that kind of effort towards Spanish later, so English remains my most comfortable language.

As Philadelphia Orch's composer-in-residence, you are right in that I don't actually live there. I just go there to work with the symphony.

As for chickens that I raise in Mendocino County, my husband likes to call them Mendo-mestizas (with mestiza meaning "mixed race"). We started off with Cream Legbars and silkies, and have been breeding blends of these ever since -- Lovely, friendly birds that go broody so we have built-in nannies/moms when it's time to hatch another flock of chicks. Good layers, too, not really meat birds.

Hi ooru -- See above (tiranog22) for some of your answers!

For the rest: My husband is into reggae so I've been educated in this whole sphere. Lately, it's been Burning Spear. I retain a very warm fondness for 80s music, and a bit of 90s, soundtrack of my youth.

AI-generated music: Oh my GODDDDDDD... Is that happening already? My mother, a retired stained glass artist, is having a lot of fun on her ipad with AI-generated art, and I'm frightened at how good some of its creations are...

It freaks me out, to be honest. Am I going to be out of a job? Can it write operas?

Thanks for the kind words, much appreciated!

I had this unexpected opportunity to contribute an opinion piece for the NY Times a couple of years ago talking about the very thing that you ask. May I point you to that article? (Let's see if I can add links here):

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/arts/music/beethoven-hearing-loss-deafness.html

Good morning, Courtney!

I almost didn’t start watching House of Dragons because I’m among those that were bitterly disappointed in how the whole GoT series ended... like a symphony that starts with good themes, colors, form and then has a terrible “ta-dah!” finale. (sigh) So, my investment was cautious initially in HoD, and I nearly didn’t get through the first episode with the rather exploitive (IMHO) death of the first queen. I’ve stayed with each episode and I thought that once the first time jump was made, not only was the violence more carefully focused (while still graphic), but the slow burn started to pay off. I do think the casting is generally excellent, and my husband and I discuss each episode for a couple of days afterwards. So that must mean something, eh?

This is a loaded question. Do I have to answer? ;-)

Ennio Morricone all the way... I grew up on those spaghetti westerns...

I've been dancing around this question for the past hour... Having an incredibly difficult time coming up with just five names... I'll keep working at it...

Hiya Adam XVII:

Oh, I HAVE to plug the up-and-comers (and a few are now firmly established) that attend/attended my Academy... Check out these beautiful souls here:

https://www.glfcam.com/composer-fellows

Honestly, I have become a better artist for opening up my life to the next generation of talents. I started my Academy a few years ago from a place of genuine alarm to see how culturally and politically divisive the US had become. A few years later, even with everything going on in the world, these emerging voices have filled me with resolve and optimism.

Thank you for the kind words, Adam. :)

That you would pay money to hear me play? Only one, piano. I can bleat/beat/bow notes on nearly most instruments of the orchestra and a few indigenous Andean instruments but I'd have to pay you to listen.

I just did a quick search on "conductor motions" on YouTube, and a bunch of promising videos came up. Try that?

And for your six-year-old -- That's awesome he's into music! Have you tried looking up kiddie concerts in your area, either through your local orchestra or other ensembles? These tend to be shorter, encourage clapping at frequent points for that physical release for kids, etc. I'm also wondering about getting your kid some music lessons on his chosen instrument, or into a local little kiddie choir? Sounds like there's talent there for a proud daddy to cultivate! :)

Ohhhhh yes. My mentee composers laugh that I'm constantly using food and cooking metaphors.

I grew up in Berkeley eating "chifa" or Peruvian-Chinese food. When my mom was growing up in Piura and Chimbote, Perú in the 40s-60s, this was the food that her Cantonese-Chinese father wanted to see cooked in their household. So, the model of delicious cultural-fusion certainly normalized cultural fusion in my own music today.

It's pretty unbelievable. As a composer, I'm about the internal story and what the ear receives. Adding in the theatrical element with costumes, set design, staging and the correlated technical challenges of writing for an orchestra in a pit (as opposed to out on top of the stage) is FASCINATING. I've fallen in love with this world (the singers cast, including the understudies, and the chorus are awesome) and hope that this is not the only opera project I'm offered.

Thanks for asking!

I generally like what I see getting developed these days -- A lot of exciting stuff. In other words, there's a lot of good music being produced for the most skilled players, incorporating all kinds of influences and drawing on cultures around the world.

This is wonderful, and yet, I'd love to see more attention for music for youth and/or young musicians, not just the elite high-level players. In classical music, young musicians tend to mostly play rather standard rep when they should be exposed to ALL of the riches out there. At my Academy (www.glfcam.com), we've started some initiatives where my talented mentees, who come from a lot of different demographics and draw on a myriad of different aesthetics, are composing music for pre-college kids to address this. I think valuing our kids would go a long way to bringing classical music firmly into the 21st century.