NEW YORK, NY.- In a bustling public square in Mexico City on a summer day, as hummingbirds feasted on honeysuckle and candle sellers hawked remedies for broken hearts and anxious minds, the composer Gabriela Ortiz stood in the shadow of the San Juan Bautista church and closed her eyes.
Around her in Plaza Hidalgo in the Coyoacán neighborhood, there was cacophony. In one corner, a man in a beret cranked out a fun-house tune on a barrel organ. In another, two young men performed a song in son huasteco style, their falsetto voices rising above the lunchtime chatter. Near a park bench, a woman with long flaxen hair and a karaoke machine sang “Yesterday Once More” by the Carpenters: Every sha-la-la-la.
Ortiz, who grew up in Mexico City playing Haydn on the piano and Latin American folk music on the charango, a mandolin-like instrument, opened her eyes and smiled. Then, after offering a few pesos to the organist, she headed down a cobblestone street in search of a cappuccino.
“There is no quiet place in Mexico City,” she said. “Everyone has something to say. And music is how we say it.”
Ortiz, 59, who will be Carnegie Hall’s composer in residence this season, has spent her life channeling the sounds and sensibilities of Latin America into classical music. For most of the past 40 years, this has been a lonely pursuit. Teachers said her works were too exotic. Critics bristled at her sprawling sonorities. Top orchestras passed her over in doling out commissions.
But now, after a series of big breaks, Ortiz is thriving.
Her music is being performed by leading ensembles in Berlin, London, Los Angeles and New York. She has won a stack of awards and secured representation by a prestigious publishing house. She has produced works of striking variety, including a ballet about violence against women in Mexico; a choral piece inspired by the story of an African revolutionary leader; a work honoring the composer Robert Schumann and his wife, Clara Schumann; and an ode to the “sound world” of coral reefs.
As her profile has risen, Ortiz has emerged as a prominent voice for change in classical music, arguing the field has been focused for too long on European masters.
“Why is it always that Europe is the one dictating the future of music?” she said. “We have amazing composers in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Mexico. But nobody knows about it.”
She has found an eager partner in the superstar Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who helped reignite her career when he led the premiere of “Téenek — Invenciones de Territorio” in 2017 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Dudamel, who has premiered seven works by Ortiz, called her a “natural genius,” comparing her to giants like the Mexican composers Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas. Dudamel has brought her music to concert halls around the world, and he recently recorded her ballet score, “Revolución Diamantina,” named for the glitter thrown at the police by protesters denouncing violence against women in Mexico in 2019.
A milestone came last year in Germany, when Dudamel performed “Téenek” with the Berlin Philharmonic. It was the first time the ensemble had played a work by a Latin American woman in its 141-year history; Dudamel compared the atmosphere to a rock concert.
“People were screaming,” he said. “Gabriela has the power to create these colors, these worlds, these emotions.”
Now Ortiz is entering a pivotal chapter of her career. At Carnegie, she will unveil a series of new works, including a concerto for the cellist Alisa Weilerstein; a choral piece for the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth; and a chamber work for the Attacca Quartet.
Ortiz, who only a few years ago was printing and mailing scores to clients, sometimes forgetting orders, said she was still getting used to the surge in demand for her music. But she said she was ready for this moment.
“I’m not writing music anymore because I have to,” she said. “I’m writing because I want to.”
Born into a middle-class, cosmopolitan family in Mexico City, Ortiz grew up reading fairy tales and dancing flamenco. Her father was an architect and her mother a psychoanalyst. But her parents had another side: They were dedicated musicians who played in Los Folkloristas, a Mexican folk band popular in the 1960s and ’70s.
In their home, Beethoven and Mozart mixed with mariachi. Ortiz studied Bach and Schumann on the piano, but she also played the bombo drums, charango and guitar.
From an early age, Ortiz’s musical ambitions were clear. In sixth grade, when a teacher asked students to compose a theme together, Ortiz took charge, assigning her peers instruments like the xylophone and the maracas and telling them what to play.
“I discovered that just by playing and experimenting,” she said, “we could create a song.”
As the popularity of Los Folkloristas soared, Ortiz joined her parents on tours across Mexico and Europe. A parade of famous Latin American artists passed through their home, including Chilean singer Victor Jara, an activist who was later murdered by men under the command of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Jara, who was killed when Ortiz was 8, became a role model for Ortiz. His photo hangs in her studio, and she still has a guitar case he gave her.
As a teenager, Ortiz became a devoted pianist, spending nights and weekends practicing. Her father, an aspiring composer, encouraged her studies. She fell in love with the frantic rhythms of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and the folksy swing of Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos” piano pieces. She was so focused that a boyfriend called her a “piano parlante” — a talking piano — and her mother pleaded with her to choose another career.
But Ortiz persisted, and with the help of renowned Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, who had heard her play one of her pieces at a party when she was 17, she went to Paris to study music. After just a year, though, she returned home to donate a kidney to her mother, who had fallen ill. She stayed in Mexico City, enrolling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and studying with Mario Lavista, one of the country’s foremost composers.
Lavista, who became a mentor, encouraged Ortiz to deepen her studies of the classics. (“You need to know the traditions,” he told her, “if you want to break the traditions.”) But as Ortiz began composing, she ran into an obstacle: The school lacked a full-size orchestra. Frustrated that she could not hear her first orchestral piece, “Patios,” she marched into the offices of the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra. Her score in hand, she told the music director that she needed to hear it so she could learn. It worked: A few months later, the ensemble performed “Patios.”
In 1990, Ortiz, then 25, went abroad again to study electroacoustics in London. Her peers there were well versed in postmodernism and serialism but less familiar with Latin American music. It wasn’t just her classmates. In the library, Ortiz consulted a reference book about music since 1945. She found only a single entry on Latin America: a definition of conga.
And when a professor encouraged Ortiz to strip her music of a rhythmic pulse, she was adamant.
“Asking me not to use rhythm,” she told her teacher, “is like asking me to cut off one of my arms.”
In 2001, Ortiz received a coveted invitation: The Los Angeles Philharmonic wanted her to write a percussion concerto.
Ortiz had never worked with an ensemble of such renown; the collaboration could be a make-or-break moment. But it came at a turbulent period in her life. She was going through a divorce and caring for her daughter, Elena, then 4.
“My life was falling apart,” she recalled, “and then I got this commission.”
After meeting with the Philharmonic’s leaders in Los Angeles, Ortiz was anxious and depressed. Her brother, Rubén Ortiz-Torres, a visual artist in California, picked her up from the meeting. He stopped his truck on the highway to deliver a pep talk.
“Everybody in the world has a divorce, a breakup or a disappointment,” he told her. “But not everybody has a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic.”
With her brother’s encouragement, Ortiz finished the piece, “Altar de Piedra,” which the orchestra premiered under the baton of Esa-Pekka Salonen in 2003. She was pleased to have persevered but felt the concerto had problems — it was overly complex, with three soloists and a wide variety of instruments, including a Peruvian box, Chinese opera gongs, glockenspiel, bongos, congas, slap stick and tuned cowbells. (“This was my moment,” she recalled, “and I wanted to try everything.”)
The work got mixed reviews. A line of criticism in The Los Angeles Times was seared into her brain: “There is simply too much color, what with all the banging of the soloists, so that it often blends into a kind of sonic gray.”
Over the next decade, Ortiz produced ambitious works. “Únicamente la Verdad,” a multimedia opera about drug traffickers with a libretto by her brother, premiered at Indiana University in 2008. “Altar de Fuego,” an orchestral work about the Mexican revolution, had its first performance in Mexico City in 2010.
But she felt she had missed her chance in Los Angeles.
“You have one shot with a major orchestra,” she said. “One shot.”
In 2016 — more than a decade after their first collaboration — the Los Angeles Philharmonic came knocking again. Dudamel, the orchestra’s music and artistic director, was looking for ways to elevate composers from Latin America. The ensemble commissioned a piece from Ortiz as part of a festival celebrating Mexican music.
“I told myself, ‘This is my second shot,’” she said. “‘This time, I cannot fail.’”
Inspired by the Huastec people in Mexico and the idea of transcending borders, Ortiz produced “Téenek.” The work was a hit among musicians, critics and audience members. Soon she had invitations from other renowned ensembles: the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony.
“It was the beginning of a new life,” she said.
Dudamel became a champion of Ortiz’s music, and a friend. He helped her get a publisher, the British firm Boosey & Hawkes. When he visited Mexico City on a tour with the Vienna Philharmonic in 2018, he went dancing with Ortiz and Márquez, the composer, at the Salón Los Angeles, one of the city’s oldest halls. (Ortiz, an inveterate dancer, is still a regular at clubs.)
“She shows the Latin soul in her music,” Dudamel said. “Her rhythms immediately bring you back to the place you were born.”
When Dudamel and Ortiz went to Berlin last year, Ortiz was nervous. The last time she had been in Germany for a big premiere, at the Darmstadt Summer Course in 1994, she had faced questions about her Mexican heritage and her use of rhythm.
But the Berlin Philharmonic’s musicians smiled as they played “Téenek,” and they applauded when she came onstage for a bow.
“My music was speaking for itself,” she said. “For me it was like a light — a sign that things were moving and changing.”
During the pandemic, Ortiz suffered three losses. The first was her father, Rubén Ortiz Fernández, who, after breakfast one day, “simply closed his eyes and drifted away,” she said. The second was Lavista, her mentor. The third was Carmen-Helena Téllez, a Venezuelan-born conductor who was a close friend and collaborator.
Ortiz felt she needed to write a “different kind of piece — something profound, something emotional.”
The result was “Tzam,” which Ortiz brought to the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she teaches, this July. The work begins and ends with a fanfare, emphasizing that “everything is a cycle — from life there is death, and from death there is life,” she said.
During rehearsals of “Tzam” with the Sinfónica de Minería, one of the country’s premier ensembles, Ortiz offered feedback from the auditorium. She said that the percussionists should play more delicately in one passage and that the violinists should think of “the sea, as if these notes were waves.”
During a break, the players surrounded Ortiz. “How was it, maestra?” they asked. “How did we sound?” She told them she was confident the performance would turn out “superbién.”
In Mexico, Ortiz has become a cultural celebrity. But she has also faced criticism, with some composers saying her music is too showy or that it disrespects Indigenous cultures.
The conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, who leads the Sinfónica de Minería and has worked with Ortiz for nearly three decades, said she has approached a “deeply combative” arts industry with humor.
“There is no bitterness about her or her music,” he said. “There is only optimism and determination.”
On a stormy summer day, Ortiz was holed up in her home studio, one of the few quiet places she knows in the city. Perched at her Kawai piano, she flipped through recent sketches, including of her cello concerto, which was inspired in part by a recurring dream about searching for an ocean in Mexico City.
A whimsical statue of the mambo master Pérez Prado, one of her idols, looked on from a bookshelf. Her husband, the flute player and composer Alejandro Escuer, and their trio of cats — Saturno, Greco and Suki — were downstairs.
Lately, Ortiz has been thinking about time and mortality. In 2019, when she was writing “Yanga,” about an enslaved African who led a rebellion in Mexico, she was diagnosed with colon cancer. In disbelief, she said to herself: “I have all these concerts ahead. It’s not my time.”
She underwent chemotherapy, and her cancer is now in remission. But the experience has brought more urgency to her life and music. She has visions of more operas, concertos and political works.
“There is so much more that I want to say; so many more stories I want to tell,” she said. “I need time, and I need to be healthy. Music is part of me, and it’s bigger than me. It’s what keeps me alive.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
