Thank you to everyone who subscribes to and supports the DCMP. This January, I will be sharing some of the more popular posts from 2022 and 2023. A new theme will begin in February!
[First published 4 July 2023]
“Every person with disability is an individual.”—Itzhak Perlman
Disabled people have always been seen as less than, as not able to work in particular fields, and as in one way or another diminished. This July, the Daily Classical Music Post will introduce you to the music of composers who have broken barriers and proved that disability doesn't mean inability.
A note: although some musicologists and armchair psychologists are retroactively deeming certain composers from the Classical and Romantic periods as ADHD, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent, I am not going to assume that is the case.
Gabriela Lena Frank - Suite Mestiza for Violin Solo (2017)
The American composer and pianist Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) was born with high-moderate/near-profound hearing loss. She says, “If I don’t wear my hearing aids for a couple of days, my composing ideas start to become more introverted. This can produce music that is more intellectual, more contrapuntal, more internal, more profound, more spiritual, more trippy.” When she sits in silence, she focuses on the feel of the music. As she says, “Sound can take your attention away from the many other factors that go into making music.”
Frank’s Suite Mestiza was commissioned in 2017 through New Music USA’s New Music Connect programme. It is for solo violin, and the composer notes read (in part): “Inspired by the mixed-race cultures of Andean South America, Suite Mestiza for solo violin draws directly on sights and sounds from trips to Perú taken with my mother as traveling companion.”
My classical music post for today is Gabriela Lena Frank’s Suite Mestiza.