Program Notes

GABRIELA ORTIZ
Kauyumari for Orchestra (2021)
Approximate duration: 5 minutes

Gabriela Ortiz grew up surrounded by the folk music of Mexico that both of her parents played. Her education took her from Mexico City to Paris and London, and commissions from around the globe have made Ortiz a leader among Mexican composers today.

She wrote the following program note.

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 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 which 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.

— Gabriela Ortiz

ARTURO MÁRQUEZ
Fandango for Violin and Orchestra (2021)
Approximate duration: 32 minutes

Taking after the many professional and amateur musicians in his family, the Mexican composer Arturo Márquez has always rooted his classical compositions in the folk music and popular dance styles of his homeland and the broader region.

The following is excerpted from the program note he wrote for the premiere of Fandango in 2021.

The Fandango is known worldwide as a popular Spanish dance and one of the fundamental parts of flamenco. Immediately upon its appearance in Spain, the Fandango moved to the Americas where it acquired a personality according to the land that adopted and cultivated it. Today, we can still find it in countries such as Ecuador, Colombia and Mexico, specifically in the state of Veracruz and in the Huasteca area.

In 2018 I received an email from the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, where she proposed to me the possibility of writing a work for violin and orchestra that had to do with Mexican music. The proposal interested and fascinated me from that very moment, not only because of my admiration for her musicality, virtuosity and courage in proposing a concert so out of the ordinary. I had already tried, unsuccessfully, to compose a violin concerto some 20 years earlier with ideas that were based on the Mexican Fandango. I had known this music since I was a child, listening to it in the cinema, on the radio and listening to my father, a mariachi violinist. Violin was also my first instrument when I was 14 years old.

The first movement, Folia Tropical, has the form of a traditional classical concerto: introduction, exposition with its two themes, bridge, development and recapitulation. Emotionally, the introduction is a call to the remote history of the Fandango; the first theme and the bridge are based on the Caribbean “clave” rhythm, and the second theme is eminently expressive, almost like a romantic bolero. Folias are ancient dances that come from Portugal and Spain, with a root and meaning that comes from the French word folie: madness.

The second movement, Plegaria, pays tribute to the huapango mariachi together with the Spanish Fandango. I do not use traditional themes, but there is a healthy attempt to unite both worlds; that is why this movement is the fruit of an imaginary marriage between the Huapango-Mariachi and three Spanish composers I love and admire: Pablo de Sarasate, Manuel de Falla and Isaac Albeniz.

The third movement, Fandanguito, is a tribute to the famous Fandanguito Huasteco. The music of this region is composed of violin, jarana huasteca (a small rhythm guitar) and huapanguera (a low guitar with five orders of strings), accompanying voices. The Huasteco violin has certain features similar to Baroque music but with great rhythmic vitality and a rich original variety in bow strokes. This movement demands great virtuosity from the soloist, and it is the music that I have kept in my heart for decades.

— Arturo Márquez

CLAUDE DEBUSSY
Ibéria from Images for Orchestra, L. 122 (1905-12)
Approximate duration: 21 minutes

The luxurious and evocative scores that Debussy wrote for orchestra, including Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1895), Nocturnes (1899) and La mer (1905), played a large part in establishing him as the indisputable thought leader of French music and a legend in the art of tone painting. After he completed a first book of Images for solo piano in 1905, he began drafting another set of visually oriented pieces that he planned to score for two pianos, but he soon shifted course and designed this new set of Images as a triptych of orchestral pieces. The first part he completed was Ibéria, structured in three poetic sections inspired by the sights and sounds of that peninsula shared by Spain and Portugal.

The most direct contact Debussy had with Spain was an afternoon excursion over the border with France that he purportedly took as a teenager to watch a bullfight. But between the flamenco dances staged at the 1889 World’s Fair and the many Spanish musicians who passed through Paris in the years after, Debussy had enough contact with authentic Spanish music to take his place in the long line of French composers fascinated by their neighbors to the south, going back to pieces like Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole from 1874 and Bizet’s Carmen from 1875.

Debussy’s opening movement, which translates to In the Streets and Byways, channels a Spanish atmosphere with its castanets and dancing triplet rhythms, and the melodies infuse the distinctive modes of Spanish music, with their lowered second scale tones, into Debussy’s own idiosyncratic approach to harmony. The central vignette, Perfumes of the Night, channels the sultry, languid feeling of a Spanish evening in Debussy’s own language, nodding only obliquely to local folk music in the plaintive oboe solos. The final section, Morning of a Festival Day, paints the expectant scene with church bells, jangling percussion and rhythmic patterns modeled after the strumming of a guitar.

MAURICE RAVEL
Boléro, M. 81 (1928)
Approximate duration: 15 minutes

Ravel spent his early career rebelling against the gatekeepers at the Paris Conservatory and working in the shadow of chief rival, Debussy, but by 1928 this son of a Swiss engineer and a Basque peasant had risen to become one of France’s greatest musical treasures. Ravel was also just starting to complain of the neurological symptoms that would arrest his flow of music in 1932 and lead to his death five years later. It’s possible that he was suffering from frontotemporal dementia, a degenerative condition that has been associated with surges of creative work marked by meticulous patterns.

No work of Ravel’s was more meticulous or patterned than Boléro, composed in 1928 for Ida Rubinstein, a Russian dancer who broke off from the legendary Ballets Russes to form her own company in Paris. Rubinstein had originally asked Ravel to orchestrate selections from the piano suite Iberia by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz, but when the copyright clearances fell through, Ravel opted to write a new work with a Spanish flavor. His working title was Fandango, which he later changed to Boléro; both are traditional flamenco dances with rhythmic patterns based on triplets.

The musical material of Boléro could hardly be simpler. There is an unchanging rhythmic ostinato, a Spanish-inflected melody in two repeating sections, and static harmonies that only stray from C major for several measures near the end. The sustained musical interest comes entirely through variations in instrumental color, intensifying with each successive repetition.

– © 2026 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel’s masterpiece as a collective call for justice.