I stumbled upon a beautifully articulated answer to one of our industry’s biggest questions, in Carena Liptak’s interview for Noisey with Gabrielle Herbst. Gabrielle is a singer and composer; she’s a member of the band GABI, and her first opera, Bodiless, had its premiere last year at New York’s Roulette.

The question posted was simple: “How do you deal with making an archaic form accessible?”

I love Gabrielle’s answer so much.

“I think in all kinds of music it’s a constant question: how to relate to people. Of course you want to connect to people, you don’t want to just be in your head—you want to relate to people who are alive now. But with the opera, I just had a vision and I saw it through. Honestly, in New York, I know there’s lots of talk about cross-pollination between the different music scenes, and there are definitely certain instances of that, but I do feel that the worlds are pretty separate. The new music/classical world does have some crossover with electronic music, but the worlds feel pretty different to me. In classical music, there are so few opportunities and so many interesting composers. I don’t really know how panels work, but from what I’ve heard they’re often kind of random. It’s a super hard field. I’ve always been more interested in carving my own path, anyway, and not fitting into whatever path is laid out for me. I was on track to go to conservatory, but I think it’s helpful in this day and age to just do your own thing.”

Click here for the full interview, with clips of Gabrielle’s work.