By HRJ
Mexican Gabriela Ortiz (1964), one of the most interesting voices of contemporary composition, will be present during the 2022 Summer Season of the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería with Téenek - Inventions of territory, where she explores the concepts of identity and frontier to trace a fascinating musical poetics on the influence of territories and the sense of belonging.
"Who is Gabriela Ortiz?"
In the world of contemporary composition, the voice of Mexican Gabriela Ortiz (1964) stands out for its originality and forcefulness. Her music can only be related to herself," says orchestra conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, "because the art of Gabriela Ortiz is a world of sound of its own, full of her own.Gabriela Ortiz's art is a world of sound of her own, full of mystery and daring, whose most visible works are perhaps the Candela Concerto for percussion and orchestra (1993) and the symphony Lava Light (2010), for soprano, chamber choir, solo flute and orchestra, where the four movements (Telluric geometry, Inner magma, The Pedregal y Evolutionary Vision) weave a volcanic poetics through an overflowing rhythmic impetus that at times contrasts with the ethereal dialogues between soprano and flute.
Gabriela Ortiz's music is vast, diverse and growing in both quantity and fame every year, as evidenced by the fact that the New York Philharmonic commissioned and premiered a symphonic work from her in March under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel (Clara) which she wrote inspired by the life of the German composer and pianist Clara Wieck (1819-1896). This makes her the second Mexican-born person to receive a commission from the New York Philharmonic (the other was Carlos Chávez with his Symphony No. 6). In addition to this recognition, she has been appointed as a new member of the Colegio Nacional, for which she gave an interview to the Spanish newspaper El País in which she stated: "I fell in love with music once I understood that sounds have soul".
Gabriela Ortiz is going through one of the most intense and happy moments of her artistic life. To celebrate the fact that one of the most interesting voices in contemporary composition is Mexican, the Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería will perform her work Téenek - Inventions of territory during the fifth program (July 30 and 31) under the baton of Carlos Miguel Prieto next to the Romantic Concerto for piano by Manuel M. Ponce (with the soloist participation of Jorge Federico Osorio) and Symphony No. 6, Pathetiqueby Tchaikovsky.
"What does *Téenek – Invenciones de territorio* by Gabriela Ortiz sound like?"
In this regard, Juan Arturo Brennan writes:
"While containing some other concrete ideas, expressed by abstract musical means, Gabriela Ortiz's work entitled. Téenek - Inventions of territory alludes to two issues that have always been very present in the composer's personal and creative ideology: identity and borders. An original text on the work, written by Alejandro Escuer, which I transcribe in its entirety here, bears witness to this:
Téenek is the language spoken in the Huasteca region, which includes the states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí, Hidalgo, Puebla and Querétaro in Mexico. The name means "local man", in reference to all men and women who belong to a place whose very existence determines their destinies in time and space: their territories. In fact, in any region of the world, human beings of any era determine a way of BEING that transcends through time and defines their relationship with their environment, no matter what their race, skin color, political boundaries or socioeconomic conditions may be. We are all mortal, and our domains, differences, boundaries and possessions will eventually disappear, if not in decades, then over the centuries. In the end, human beings transcend such conditions and circumstances by simply BEING, by existing culturally, by all that remains. Téenek is a metaphor of our transcendence, a force that alludes to a future in which there are no borders, but, on the other hand, there is a recognition of the particularities and real differences among us, which propitiate our development while enriching and exalting us. Thus, music bears witness to a gradual history of concordance and discordance, of ancient cultures and new symbols, of ways of resisting and understanding the world by imagining sounds and senses, of that vital rhythm that gives meaning to the sense of belonging and to the roots that identify us culturally. Through the basic and simple idea of belonging, of not dividing but, on the contrary, recognizing otherness, Téenek reflects on the importance of identities through fragmentation. This is precisely why Téenek is composed of a series of seemingly dissimilar inventions that find their strength in their differences, their musical enrichment and development; these are interwoven and transformed over time into a discourse that demonstrates how the existence of borders can be diluted in the pursuit of the powerful idea that our future potential lies in recognizing our differences.
"Join us for our 2022 Summer Season!"
