World Premiere: October 9, 2021
Last HSO Performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings
Duration: 7 minutes 

Winning a Grammy Award is a highlight in any musician’s career. Winning multiple awards over several years marks the artist as an estimable and enduring presence. (Beyoncé has 35 Grammys. Sir Georg Solti is next with 31, and other classical Grammy stars include John Willams with 27, Pierre Boulez with 26 and Vladimir Horowitz with 25.) The extraordinary achievement of winning multiple Grammys in consecutive years is a verification of exceptional creative ability, one that Gabriela Ortíz achieved in 2025 and 2026.

At the 2025 Grammy Awards ceremony, the first recording entirely of Gabriela Ortíz’s works — which includes the violin concerto Altar de cuerda, the orchestral Kauyumari and, with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the album’s titular Revolucíon diamantina — won awards for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and conductor Gustavo Dudamel for Best Orchestral Performance and Best Classical Compendium and, for Ms. Ortíz, Best Classical Contemporary Composition for the title track. The following year, Ortíz won the Grammy for Best Classical Composition for the cello concerto Dzonot, written for Alisa Weilerstein, while Dudamel and the LA Phil and LA Master Chorale won Best Choral Performance for her Yanga on the same release. 

Among Ortíz’s other rapidly accumulating honors are two Latin Grammy nominations, recognition as the 2026 “Classical Woman of the Year” by the NPR program Performance Today, National Prize for Arts and Literature (Mexico’s most important award for writers and artists), induction into the Mexican Academy of Arts and the Colegio Nacional, and grants and residencies from the Civitella Ranieri Center (Italy), Guggenheim Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Fulbright Fellowship, Banff Center for the Arts, Curtis Institute of Music, and Spain’s Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León. In 2022, Ortíz was appointed by Gustavo Dudamel as Curator of the Pan-American Music Initiative with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; during the 2024-2025 season she also held the Debs Composer´s Chair at Carnegie Hall.

Gabriela Ortíz was born in Mexico City in 1964 into a family of musicians in the folk music ensemble Los Folkloristas, which was founded to preserve and perform the traditional music of Mexico and Latin America. Ortíz studied composition at the National Conservatory of Music and National University of Mexico, and won a British Council Fellowship in 1990 to study in London at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama; she completed her doctoral work two years later at the City University of London. Ortíz now teaches at the Mexican University of Mexico City and has also served as a visiting faculty at Indiana University. She has composed, often on international commissions, for opera, ballet, orchestra, chamber ensembles and film in a style rooted in classical, jazz and traditional Latin American music. Her work frequently focuses on gender issues, social justice, environmental concerns, racism, technological development, and mass migration. Notably, her operas are framed by political contexts of great complexity and continuing relevance, such as the war on drugs in Only the Truth, illegal migration between Mexico and the United States in Ana and Her Shadow, and the violation of university autonomy during the student movement of 1968 in Firefly.

Ortíz wrote of Kauyumari, composed in 2021 for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Pan-American Music Initiative, “Among the Huichol people of Mexico, Kauyumari means ‘blue deer.’ The blue deer represents a spiritual guide, one that is transformed through an extended pilgrimage into a hallucinogenic cactus called peyote. It allows the Huichol to communicate with their ancestors, do their bidding, and take on their role as guardians of the planet. Each year, these Native Mexicans embark on a symbolic journey to ‘hunt’ the blue deer, making offerings in gratitude for having been granted access to the invisible world, through which they also are able to heal the wounds of the soul.

“When I received the commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic to compose a piece that would reflect on our return to the stage following the pandemic, I immediately thought of the blue deer and its power to enter the world of the intangible as akin to a celebration of the reopening of live music. Specifically, I thought of a Huichol melody sung by the De La Cruz family — dedicated to recording ancestral folklore — that I used for the final movement of my piece Altar de Muertos (‘Altar of the Dead’), commissioned by the Kronos String Quartet in 1997. I used this material within the orchestral context and elaborated on the construction and progressive development of the melody and its accompaniment in such a way that it would symbolize the blue deer. This, in turn, was transformed into an orchestral texture that gradually evolves into a complex rhythm pattern to such a degree that the melody itself becomes unrecognizable (the imaginary effect of peyote and our awareness of the invisible realm), giving rise to a choral wind section while maintaining an incisive rhythmic accompaniment as a form of reassurance that the world will naturally follow its course.

“While composing this piece, I noted once again how music has the power to grant us access to the intangible; healing our wounds and binding us to what can only be expressed through sound. Although life is filled with interruptions, Kauyumari is a comprehension and celebration of the fact that each of these rifts is also a new beginning.