Cowboy Carter and “Not Like Us” weren’t the only impressive showings at the Grammy Awards last Sunday. A new album by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, featuring Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel and music by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, won three prizes: Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Compendium, and Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
And you should go listen to it, now!
The album opens with Ortiz’s violin concerto Altar de cuerda (String Altar), performed by the twenty-two-year-old Spanish violinist María Dueñas. Ortiz has been writing pieces called Altar for almost three decades: she imagines them as architectural spaces, “places to throw music into relief.” They also evoke the layers of Mexico’s religious history: literal and metaphorical altars built by native religious leaders, by Spanish missionaries, by people today looking for ways to honor and atone for the past.
You can hear both spiky corners and graceful arches in the concerto: Dueñas’s playing has an almost volatile energy that shifts rapidly to match any section of the orchestra. It’s exciting without being hard to listen to, cinematic without being sappy. In a few places, the entire woodwind section puts down their instruments and plays wine glasses instead, creating a whistling wave of sound. A holy glow rising from the altar? The sound of slipping into a memory? You decide!
After the concerto comes Kauyumari, titled after the mythical “blue deer” of the indigenous Huichol people of northwest Mexico. The LA Phil commissioned the piece to celebrate their return to in-person performances after the Covid pandemic, and Ortiz wrote that she “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.” The piece is therefore about both an escape from the material and a return to it: its horn calls and dance rhythms are both earthbound and transcendent. And at just over seven minutes, this is the one to start with if you’re not so sure about this whole “contemporary classical” thing.
Last is the album’s title piece, Revolución diamantina, whose name comes from the 2019 Glitter March in Mexico City. In August of that year, thousands of women took to the streets to protest the lack of judicial response to state and domestic violence against women. At one point in the march, protestors threw pink glitter on a high-ranking police official—hence the name. Inspired by this and other recent moments of feminist uprising, Ortiz and writer Cristina Rivera Garza crafted a six-act ballet that “traverse[s] various scenarios related to feminism,” from “harassment and a lack of security in public spaces” to “the voices of the disappeared” to “street protests and their cries for justice.”
More of an odyssey than the album’s other pieces, Revolución diamantina begins with quiet, unsettled strings and percussion before moving on to bolder—and, yes, more glittery—sounds. The singers don’t so much narrate the story as punctuate it, making their voices heard among the symphonic and social noise.
In the piece’s final movement, all the vocalists together slowly sing the word “Todas”—all, but a grammatically feminine, antipatriarchal all. As Ortiz writes, “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.”
It’s true that classical music has long been an elitist, patriarchal, white supremacist tradition that imagines itself as insulated from politics and social movements. But it has also long been becoming something else, and this something else is worth hearing again and again. I’m glad the Grammy gods agreed.
Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Codera23 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
