She is a classical composer who is heavily influenced by the folk music and instruments of her native Mexico. Along the way, some teachers and others judged her works to be too exotic.
But at the Grammys this month, Gabriela Ortiz’s “Revolución Diamantina,” inspired by Mexico’s 2019 eponymous “Glitter Revolution” feminist protest targeting gender violence, took home three awards, including one for performance for conductor Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and one for Ortiz herself for composition.
Ortiz, 60, will join Alejandro L. Madrid, the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music, on Wednesday for a conversation on campus about her long career and her latest projects. Ortiz, who just finished a season as Carnegie Hall’s composer in residence, has long dedicated her work to infusing the sounds of Mexico into classical music.
“My childhood was around music all the time, and my parents founded this incredible group called Los Folkloristas, dedicated and devoted to promoting the music of Mexico,” she said. Band rehearsals with folk instruments from across Latin America served as the soundtrack of her home. “I felt very grateful and lucky to be able to listen to this incredible music and to learn how to play it,” she added.
Well-known in Mexico and throughout Latin America and Europe, Ortiz has been active in the U.S., drawing various orchestra commissions in Los Angeles and New York, according to Madrid.
“Arguably she is the most successful Latin American composer of today,” he said. “She’s the one that’s probably receiving some of the most important commissions of orchestras in the United States and in Europe.”
“Revolución Diamantina” was Ortiz’s first full album of orchestral works. She composed the ballet, also her first, in collaboration with her brother Rubén Ortiz-Torres, professor of visual arts at UC San Diego, and Pulitzer Prize-winning Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza, the M.D. Anderson Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston.
“I always wanted to write a ballet. In another life I would have been a flamenco dancer because I love flamenco. I love dance in general. It’s my second passion,” Ortiz said. When she received the commission from the LA Philharmonic, she knew it was her chance to write a ballet about a significant topic.
Her brother’s artwork involving glitter paint led her to think about Mexico’s recent protest movement for women’s rights and legal protections.
“What brought them together was their interest in the feminist wave in Latin America and how it’s manifested in Mexico with this moment that was called the ‘Glitter Revolution,’ where women took to the streets demanding equality of rights and an end to violence against women,” Madrid explained.
The feminist movement began as a series of protests in 2019 after a 17-year-old girl reported she had been raped by four police officers. Demonstrators smashed bus stops, shattered windows of police stations, and painted graffiti on historic monuments. The crowds of mostly women demanded an end to gender violence in a nation where 10 women are killed a day on average and in a region where 98 percent of gender-related murders go unprosecuted.
The revolution earned its name from the fact that protesters showered police officers with glitter.
“I understand that kind of violence because I wouldn’t want to be in the place of the mother that has to deal with a dead daughter,” Ortiz said.
Although working in LA at the time of the marches, Ortiz solicited recordings from protesters and received thousands of responses. “At some point, I wanted to produce something with those recordings,” she said. The recordings would later inform her award-winning ballet, which included a dramaturgy written by Garza.
“Revolución Diamantina” is far from Ortiz’s first project focused on contemporary issues, Madrid said. The composer’s “Únicamente la verdad” (“Only the Truth”) revolves around the mythical origin story of Camelia la Texana, a character in the band Los Tigres del Norte’s narcocorrido “Contrabando Y Traición” (“Smuggling and Betrayal”). Ortiz has also written a choral composition called “Yanga,” about a 16th-century African prince who escaped enslavement and founded a free town in Mexico.
“She’s always writing about things that are very important in terms of our current world, but also in terms of politics,” Madrid said. The music professor is eager to introduce Ortiz to the Harvard community and discuss an upcoming showcase of “Revolución Diamantina” in Boston.
The campus event is being sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of Music, the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures, and the Consulado General de México en Boston.
Madrid hopes students “get a sense that this tradition also belongs to them and there’s a woman who’s composing, is part of this tradition, and is in conversation with all of these artists from all over the world.”
Ortiz has broken many glass ceilings in Mexico, Madrid said; she “has a voice that must be heard.”
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