Ortiz & Beethoven: Sep 11-13, 2026
Updated: 13 hours ago
Gabriela Ortiz
yanga
DIVE IN!
Gabriela Ortiz (1964 - ) is a Mexican composer and educator based in Mexico City. Ortiz has won 6 Grammy awards in the past 2 years for 3 major works: Revolución diamantina - a ballet score for orchestra and vocal soloists, Dzonot cello concerto, and Yanga for chorus, orchestra, and 4 percussion soloists - the latter of which is opening the Colorado Symphony’s 26-27 season on this program.
While retaining essential Mexican characteristics and subject matter, Gabriela Ortiz’s music is intentionally multicultural and translates easily to audiences around the world. Ortiz, like many of us, grew up listening to the music of her home country including traditional folk music. Her parents were deeply engaged Mexican folk musicians and also frequently listened to classical music so there was pretty much no escape for her! Unlike most of us however, she went on to be exceptionally well trained in some of the finest music schools in Mexico and later in Europe. This combination of interests and broad scope of fluency in multiple styles is a huge part of what makes her, and her compositions, strongly engaging to listeners.
About the Music:
Yanga is a substantial work for chorus, percussion soloists, and orchestra which Gabriela Ortiz composed in 2019.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned Ortiz to create a companion piece to Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Symphony No. 9 - a colossal work of the early 19th century which features 4 vocal soloists and a chorus in the 4th movement delivering a message of the power of shared purpose.
At the time, Ortiz had been working toward an idea of an opera based on Gaspar Yanga, a folk hero in Mexico. Yanga was an West African born prince, taken to be enslaved by Spanish colonialists in the late 16th century, who ultimately led a group of enslaved people to freedom and established their own settlement near Veracruz. For this commission, Ortiz decided to work with librettist Martín Bermúdez to create a poem for part of the text to which she added traditional Congolese chants.
Yanga is divided into contrasting sections of music that are either slower paced and timeless or quicker, very rhythmic, and even groovy.
It features the use of West African instruments that made their way to Latin America including the shekere, the batá, the cabasa, and the guiro. Ortiz creates an imaginary sound world in which these and others provide new colors that can be used in musical dialogue to make sounds that recall both the African and Latin American rhythms without copying them outright. She also uses the chorus in an unusually tightly rhythmic way to enhance this dialogue between them, the orchestra, and the solo percussionists - punctuating the central theme of the text to “leave the slave trade behind, leave death far behind,” and to seek freedom.
Ortiz writes about the piece, “To me, Yanga is a work about an immense expressive force that speaks of the greatness of humanity when in search of equality and the universal right to enjoy freedom to the fullest.”
A typical performance of Yanga lasts about 20 minutes - nearly the same length of time as the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony!
Resources:
Ludwig van Beethoven
Symphony No. 9
About the composer:
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a German composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he really forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802, just before he composed his Symphony No. 3 which is often pointed to as a gateway composition to the Romantic era. In fact from that point forward he began to develop a personal style that deviated from the influence of Classical era composer Franz Joseph “Papa” Haydn, the inventor of the symphony form. This is supremely evident in his colossal Symphony No. 9!
About the music:
Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was composed between 1822 and 1824, and premiered that same year in Vienna. Though he conducted the premiere, he was unable to hear any of it clearly due to his advanced hearing loss and was frequently “off” from the musicians, who instead watched a second conductor positioned a bit behind Beethoven for important cues.
Symphony No. 9 takes 70-74 minutes to perform and is in four movements - the famous “Ode to Joy” final movement taking a full 25 minutes.
Symphony No. 9 was immediately notable for its unusual use of vocal soloists and a chorus. Ordinarily the use of vocal soloists and chorus with an instrumental ensemble would indicate a form of music called 'cantata'. Incorporating these elements into a symphonic form was a real innovative move for Beethoven. Other notable elements include the first use of piccolo, contrabassoon, and trombones in symphonic literature, and the use of timpani as a solo instrument rather than solely to underpin bass lines and harmonic changes.
The first three movements follow standard operating procedure of the Classical and early Romantic eras: a medium quick tempo first movement that establishes a sense of scope and scale to the whole work, a dance form derived 2nd movement, and a slow tempo contemplative and melodic 3rd movement. The fourth movement is when we really go off the rails. Here the music begins with an explosion of a cluster chord of notes that deliver us into a new world of sound - at turns dramatic and wild, at turns tender and searching. From that initial explosion there is a tumbling of notes from the winds which then even more confusingly leads to a recitative from the cellos and basses. This happens a few times and then the interjections between cello/bass recitatives becomes a series of statements recalling major thematic material from each of the previous movements.
WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING HERE??
DID BEETHOVEN CREATE THE FIRST WHOLISTIC SYMPHONY?!
The first time we hear the Ode to Joy melody is after all this expository insanity, so it does act as a sonic salve of sorts. But wait! We know things have really strayed from typical symphonic writing when a baritone leaps up and begins singing, in fact that same recitative the cellos and basses had played a few minutes earlier. From here things really launch into an all out celebration of the 1785 “Ode to Joy” text by Friedrich Schiller with the full chorus and orchestra launching into Face Melt Mode!
Fun FActs:
Many other composers paid homage to this great piece by quoting or incorporating material from the symphony into their works. In his first symphony, Johannes Brahms composed a beautiful melody which leaned so heavily on the Ode to Joy theme that it was often mockingly referred to as “Beethoven’s Tenth”.
CDs, those quaint tiny plastic “records” of the 80s and 90s, were engineered to hold 74 minutes of music based on the timing of the longest existing Symphony No. 9 recording at the time.
The “Ode to Joy” portion of Symphony No. 9 has been the European Anthem since 1972. Even more fun fact - your Colorado Symphony made a socially distanced recording of the Herbert von Karajan arrangement during quarantine in March 2020 which has gotten hundreds of thousands of views since then on YouTube alone. People are somehow still watching and finding something meaningful in it even with its relatively janky early pandemic ‘recorded-at-home-on-the-phone’ sound quality and multi square Brady Bunch look.
Resources:
Consider and discuss:
Even though their individual lived experiences were very different, both Yanga and Beethoven dealt with consistent adversity throughout their lives. Resilience and gratitude and respect become recurring themes - especially for Beethoven in his compositions.
How do you express resilience and gratitude? What creative activities do you engage in to relieve stress or give yourself space to think?
Take some time to consider how you practice resilience, gratitude, and creativity in your daily life - and how that practice connects you to humanity and community. You, Gabriela Ortiz, Yanga, and Ludwig van Beethoven have a lot more in common than you might think!
Because I love you, here's an extra credit reading recommendation on this topic:
“The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life” by Eric Booth
get creative!
Do you have a favorite poem, inspirational speech, or quote? Think about how you would set it to music! Beethoven set a portion of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to a variety of styles of music, some of it hymn-like, some of it a jovial dance, some of it a rollicking party. Ortiz set a Spanish language poem and Congolese chants to perfumily textured and highly rhythmic music. What styles of music might reflect all the different ways you feel connected to the central message of your chosen text? What styles of music might bring new or different meaning to the text? Have some fun experimenting with your ideas!
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