Born
September 26, 1972
Country
United States of America
Gabriela Lena Frank is an American pianist and composer of contemporary classical music.
Frank’s father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. She grew up in Berkeley, California. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s.
Frank received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rice University. She earned a Doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan in 2001. She has studied composition with Paul Cooper, William Albright, Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, and Samuel Jones.
Frank’s work often draws on her multicultural background, especially her mother’s Peruvian heritage. In many of her compositions, she elicits the sounds of Latin American instruments such as Peruvian pan flute or charango guitar, although the works are typically scored for Western classical instruments and ensembles such as the symphony orchestra or string quartet. She has said, “I think the music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am.”
Frank is a member of the Silk Road Ensemble under the direction of cellist Yo Yo Ma. Her composition Ritmos Anchinos appears on the Silk Road Ensemble’s album Off the Map (World Village & In a Circle Records, 2009).
In 2017, Frank founded her own school, the , for emerging composers to work with renowned performers. In 2020, she received the 25th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities for her work “weaving Latin American influences into classical constructs and breaking gender, disability and cultural barriers in classical music composition.”
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