Revolución diamantina
Gabriela Ortiz was born December 20, 1964, in Mexico City, Mexico, and lives there primarily. She composed Revolución diamantina in 2022-23 on commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Gustavo Dudamel, Music and Artistic Director. Dudamel led the world premiere performances November 16-19, 2023, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, California. First BSO performances: February 27-March 1, 2025, Giancarlo Guerrero conducting, with The Crossing, Donald Nally, artistic director.
The score for Revolución diamantina calls for 8 amplified voices (4 sopranos, 4 mezzo-sopranos) plus an orchestra of piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 4 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (5 players. I: vibraphone, almglocken, medium gong, agogos, vibraslap, anvil, bean rattles, bamboo chimes, river stones, snare drum; II. glockenspiel, marimba, metal rattles, vibraslap, shakers, metal shakers, triangles, crash cymbal, tam-tam, wood blocks, temple blocks, cabasa, frame drum; III. glockenspiel, crotales, 2 low cowbells, 3 wind gongs, gong, suspended 2 small metal blocks, cymbal, bongos, cabasa, snare drum, bass drum; IV. crotales, xylophone, 4 pipes (untuned pitches), 4 cans, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, 2 shakers, guiro, flexatone, claves, wood block, tambourine, teponaztli (low log drum), zurdo (floor tom), V. crotales, 4 thai gongs, low gong, tubular bells, triangle, hi-hat cymbal, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals, guiro, sand block, vibraslap, whip, claves, snare drum), harp, piano, celesta, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
On August 30, 2022, Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964, Mexico City) was inducted as a member of El Colegio Nacional, Mexico’s preeminent academic cluster of artists and scientists—akin to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but with only 35 active members at any given time. This was a historic occasion for many reasons. For one, only three musicians had been members of this esteemed body: Carlos Chávez (a founding member), Eduardo Mata, and Mario Lavista. Ortiz was not only joining a very exclusive club, but she was also the first female musician to have been chosen for membership. The historical significance of the occasion does not stop there. When we learn that she was not only the first woman to be elected in the field of Arts and Letters, but also one of only eight women to have been inducted to El Colegio since its founding in 1943, it becomes clear that Ortiz’s election marked the breaking of a very real glass ceiling.
In fact, Ortiz has made a career out of pushing boundaries and challenging conventions. In Mexico, she is one of the leading voices of a generation of composers who broke away from the artistic constraints imposed by avant-garde aesthetics and the modernist dogmatic pursuit of originality that dominated their peers in the 1960s and 1970s. Bringing back elements of tonality and repetition to her music may have led some misguided critics to describe her work as conservative. If one only pays attention to superficial aspects of style, this assessment might hold water; however, when one considers Ortiz’s work in relation to the larger trajectory and transformations of Western art music over the last 200 years, it becomes clear how the topics she engages with and the musical ways in which she addresses them transform tradition in deeply meaningful ways.
For Ortiz, defamiliarizing musical conventions meant using traditional forms and compositional techniques and refashioning them through references to materials and practices that her avant-garde mentors would have considered anathema. Thus, her music is a utopian sonic space in which allusions to mass-mediated popular culture, the mysticism of Indigenous spiritual worlds, Latin American folk music traditions, and the sound of Mexican classical composers coexist with a mastery of counterpoint and orchestration, creative use of new technologies, and the assimilation and productive adaptation of avant-garde techniques. The result is a sound that is as genuinely local as it is profoundly cosmopolitan. Ortiz’s voice—whether in her operas, orchestral and chamber music, or electroacoustic works—is both eclectic and highly personal. Her style is recognizable in the powerful rhythmic drive of Concierto candela (1993), the sound bricolage of her video-opera ¡Únicamente la verdad! (2008), the virtuosic hypnotism of Fractalis (2020), and the playful sound environment of La calaca (2021).
Ortiz’s music the local and the global dance, intertwine, and mate, giving birth to a mixed aesthetic that simultaneously reflects both cosmopolitan aspirations and the humble, vernacular imaginaries that inform that powerful fantasy we call identity. There is nothing like Ortiz’s music to inspire us to ponder the place and value of our sense of self in the globalized world we inhabit.
Because of its unequivocal connection to the frantic and spellbinding world we live in— both reflecting it and reflecting on it—music journalists have described Ortiz’s richly polystylistic and boisterously heterogenous approach to composition as “postmodern.” From the perspective of someone embedded in the linear and sequential understanding of history that prevails in Western culture, this makes sense: if something is no longer modernist it must be whatever comes after, and postmodern seems like a reasonable label. Nevertheless, in the case of a composer like Ortiz, raised in a cultural environment like Mexico’s—where inhabiting many different and contradictory worlds at once is often the norm rather than the exception—the term loses its explanatory potential. Rather than speaking about a world in which the narratives of modernity are in crisis, Ortiz’s music instead offers a glimpse into the flipside of modernity: the hidden, contradictory, and unspoken stories that make our narratives of modernity possible. The development of this revealing compositional style was a natural outcome of Ortiz’s unusual upbringing.
Gabriela Ortiz was born into a middle-class family of intellectuals and artists. Her father, Rubén Ortiz, an architect, and her mother, María Elena Torres, a pianist and psychoanalyst, were founding members of Los Folkloristas, one of Mexico’s most influential bands devoted to the research, performance, and recording of Latin American folk music. The band was one of the leading ensembles of the so-called Nueva Canción Latinoamericana (New Latin American Song), an international movement of musicians that kept some of the most famous Latin American folk singers and songwriters involved in the life of the family. Thus, Ortiz grew up around legends like the Argentine Mercedes Sosa and Atahualpa Yupanqui, the Uruguayan Daniel Viglietti, and the Chilean Inti Illimani and Víctor Jara.
Simultaneously, Ortiz’s parents’ interest in music and the arts led them to enroll their daughter in a progressive elementary school that emphasized artistic creativity as part of its curriculum. There, under the supervision of Mario Stern, a well-respected composer and the school’s music teacher, Ortiz began to “invent,” organize, and orchestrate her first melodies and rhythms. It was at that early age that she decided she would become a composer. After graduating from high school, Ortiz began taking composition lessons with Mario Lavista, one of the most influential Mexican composers of the late 20th century— Carlos Chávez’s heir at the National Conservatory and at El Colegio Nacional. Rather than schooling his students into a particular musical aesthetic, Lavista provided guidance for them to find their own creative voice. After her undergraduate education at Mexico’s National University, Ortiz moved to London to study with Robert Saxton at the Guildhall School of Music before enrolling at the University of London, where she studied with Simon Emmerson and received a Ph.D. in composition and electroacoustic music in 1996. Upon her return to Mexico, she was appointed professor of composition at the National University, her alma mater.
Gabriela Ortiz is arguably the most successful Latin American composer in today’s classical music scene. No other composer from that region can boast of having their music championed and programmed with such assiduity by orchestras and ensembles like the Berlin Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the London Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, the Chicago Lyric Opera, the Kronos Quartet; conductors including Esa-Pekka Salonen and Gustavo Dudamel; and such soloists as Zoltán Kocsis, Dawn Upshaw, and Pierre Amoyal. In the 2024-25 season she also holds the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. In February 2025, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel’s recording of Revolución diamantina won three Grammy Awards, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
Ortiz’s undisputable international success is proof that the arguments for her induction to El Colegio are grounded in merit: her unquestionable talent, the extraordinary quality and international influence of her work, and the impeccable and exemplary trajectory of her artistic career. Nevertheless, the timing of the event, which took place at a moment in which Mexican women have taken to the streets to demand equal representation for their work and the end of normalized everyday gender violence, also serves as a tacit recognition that the exclusionary patriarchal values that have supported these types of national institutions are undergoing a long-overdue process of profound and thorough revision.
During her acceptance speech at El Colegio, Ortiz reflected on a basic concern she has had since she started composing: “Through my creative work, how can I contribute to generating change in the issues that are meaningful to me?” Although her engagement with pressing topics such as racism, migration, intolerance, borders, and misogynistic violence in chamber, orchestral, operatic, and new media works like Río Bravo (2009), Altar de luz (2013), Téenek (2017), Luciérnaga (2018), or Yanga (2019) provides convincing answers, one may find an equally persuasive response in the words of novelist and poet Cristina Rivera Garza (b.1964, Matamoros, Tamaulipas).
When Rivera Garza was inducted to El Colegio, just eleven months after Ortiz —the first female writer to be awarded this honor, itself a scandal in a country that has seen its share of prodigious female writers, including Elena Garro, Josefina Vicens, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, and Carmen Boullosa, among many others—she said, “Only by unlearning can we tell old stories, stories we think we know well, in radically new forms, incorporating other experiences and, with some luck, different endings.”
That Ortiz and Rivera Garza, two trailblazers of 21st-century Mexican culture, helped open the gates of such an illustrious institution for women to walk through cannot be considered a mere coincidence. Just about a year before Ortiz’s selection to El Colegio, the composer and the writer began a collaboration that led to the composition of the ballet Revolución diamantina (2023). Ortiz was deeply moved by the loud activism against gender violence and femicides that took over the streets of Mexico City in 2019, and Rivera Garza had just published El invencible verano de Liliana (2021, Liliana’s Invincible Summer), a novel/testimony/memoir/biography in which she told the painful story of her sister’s murder at the hands of a former boyfriend, a femicider who was never brought to justice. (Following its English-language publication in 2023, Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and was a finalist for the National Book Award.) It was as if their creative encounter for a ballet celebrating the emboldening of women to demand their rights was meant to happen. In hindsight, their acceptance speeches at El Colegio offer a powerful explanation of the cultural labor they expect their ballet to do: to use the affective and emotional power of music to unlearn the ways in which this feminist movement has been represented by the media. If Revolución diamantina retells this story in a radically new form that helps us empathize with the urgent demands of women who experience a quotidian violence—violence that is at once systematically neglected and rendered invisible—then, if we are lucky, we may be able to collectively begin to imagine a different ending for it.
Alejandro L. Madrid
Alejandro L. Madrid is a writer and musicologist, and Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music, Harvard University. His books include Tania León’s Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life, Music in Mexico, Nor-tec Rifa! Electronic Dance Music from Tijuana to the World, and In Search of Julián Carrillo & Sonido 13.
Program note (2023) by the composer
The 21st century will be remembered as a time when the women of the world sought out and conquered the standing they truly deserve. Glitter Revolution is a sonorous premonition, a ritual in motion that provides a glimpse of this urgent social transformation, one that will doubtless be characterized as the most gradual, imposing, important, and inevitable revolution of the current era.
—Alejandro Escuer
I have always wanted to compose a ballet. So, when the Philharmonic of Los Angeles enthusiastically embraced the idea a little over a year ago, it was like a dream come true. In order to make that dream a reality, I threw myself into the task of exploring thematic connections that had to do with earthly matters—with humanity in all its complexity, but from a subversive, feminine point of view. The world we live in suffers from a broad array of issues, such as mass migration, economic inequality, joblessness, social decay, racism, climate change, and violence, just to name a few. Self-reflection as a form of creative feedback amid this milieu has constituted one of my most powerful obsessions. And of course, somewhere amid all this lies the subject of feminism.
Previous works of mine such as Rio Bravo and Liquid Borders dealt with the subject of femicide in Ciudad Juárez. However, I had not yet had the opportunity to analyze the feminist movements that started to emerge in the 1990s. These movements have tackled issues sexual harassment, condescension, the wage gap, forced maternity, romantic love, sexual education, and the recognition and legal classification of different crimes related to gender; specifically, those crimes related to different forms of violence. All of this, driven by a need to eradicate the patriarchal system in order to attain true gender equality.
The increase in feminicide has been, without a doubt, a fundamental reference point for this mobilization, but the protests have also marched hand in hand with many other grievances and modalities of gender violence that women increasingly find inacceptable and intolerable, especially the new generations of young people who feel constantly threatened in their day-to-day lives. This is how three recent events related to feminism caught my attention and became my main concern as I started to approach this ballet.
1. In the month of August, 2019, the Glitter March was held in Mexico City: such is the popular name bestowed on an incident where protestors threw pink glitter at the Chief of Police in order to denounce the lack of response and impunity that ensued following the rape of a woman by local officers. This mobilization unleashed an intense reaction and polemic among members of society due to the amount of graffiti left behind in public spaces, particularly at the so-called Angel of Independence, as well as the damage caused to infrastructure at the Insurgentes Metrobus station and political actions that included damaging and setting fire to the police station on Florencia Street.
2. On March 8, 2022, also in the capital, a contingent of female police officers from the Secretaria de Seguridad Ciudadana led by chief “Andromeda” marched together with other feminist groups on International Women’s Day, raising their right fists and shouting out the following slogan: “Policia consciente se une al contingente,” or “Woke police will join the contingent.” The empathetic gesture of protestors toward these women in uniform was accompanied by shouts and applauses in recognition of their hard work. In an unprecedented event, police officers and protestors came together in a single cry for justice and respect for women’ s rights: “Mujer escucha, esta es tu lucha” or “Listen up, women, this is your struggle.”
3. Starting in 2019, it intrigued me to see this crowd of young women with green bandanas and eyes covered with black kerchiefs, dancing and chanting to what has become today a worldwide anthem and symbol of performatic struggle against all gender violence. This song of protest was created by the Chilean feminist collective Las Tesis based on the texts of Argentinean writer Rita Segato. Their objective was to provide visibility to women’s marches by taking to the streets with the idea that their message would continue to be sung around the world.
Hoping to conceptualize and delve deeper into these issues within the context of a ballet, I approached Cristina Rivera Garza, whose name was recommended to me by my friend, the Mexican writer Juan Villoro. Fortunately, Cristina accepted. That was how we started an exchange of ideas that would work both musically and in terms of the project’s dramatic structure.
To that end, with enormous sensitivity, Cristina developed a poetic dramaturgy that touches on the utmost essential fibers of feminism, passing through various transformative contexts and tracing a dramatic line to be conveyed from both a corporal and sonorous perspective. It was up to me to imagine the music by using not only aesthetic languages already known to me, but by taking risks, learning, and experimenting with new tools. In this ballet, it has been my hope that the audience will explore different pathways that radically alter how they listen, feel, and perceive.
The ballet is divided into six acts that traverse various scenarios related to feminism: harassment and a lack of security in public spaces, the confusion between the language of romantic love and practices of manipulation and control that, all too often, can lead to lethal forms of violence against women; solitude and a lack of sense of belonging; the voices of the disappeared; a blind march that makes its appearance on the horizon of a nonsensical place, the intimate terrorism that goes on between couples, as well as its stages and consequences; street protests and their cries for justice; and finally, the aspiration that only by walking together will we be able to find a way out, because even though we may have only indirectly experienced much of what has been described here, their cause is also our own: that of all of us, women and men and people.
Gabriela Ortiz
Gabriela Ortiz provides the following acknowledgements in her score:
To Cristina Rivera Garza, for developing the backbone and foundational pathways of this Ballet. Thanks to her, I have been able to explore unknown territories that I would perhaps never have imagined on my own.
To my brother, the artist Ruben Ortiz, my accomplice in a variety of interdisciplinary projects, who initially came up with the idea of working on a Ballet that would approach feminism and its current implications.
To Maria Valverde, for her support of my concept and for enriching our dialogue with new focal points and perspectives regarding what it means to be a woman today.
To the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Meghan Umber, and Gustavo Dudamel for their unconditional support and for giving me the freedom to create, imagine, and develop what once seemed impossible.