Revolución: Mexican Composers on the Rise

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When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra programmed Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía india in 2010 as a tie-in to the citywide celebrations of the bicentennial of the Independence of Mexico, many saw it as a gesture of appreciation for the nearly 600,000 residents of Mexican descent in Chicago at the time. The short symphony from 1936, which employs themes from the Huichol and Yaqui people of Mexico and calls for indigenous percussion instruments, has become an icon of the country’s orchestral music. In more recent years, there has been an upswing in performances of music by contemporary Mexican and Mexican American composers, who are making inroads into classical music in the United States and entering the repertoire in greater numbers.

It’s a trend that can be traced in part to Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2, an orchestral piece that was premiered in Mexico City in 1994 and widely performed in the U.S. and abroad in the early 2000s, when it was expanded for full orchestra and championed by conductor Gustavo Dudamel. According to data compiled by Bachtrack, the piece, inspired by dance music from Veracruz, was the third most-performed contemporary concert work of 2024, worldwide, nestled between works by the Estonian Arvo Pärt. It is the only piece by a living composer from Mexico to acquire an international stature on par with the Sinfonía india, Silvestre Revueltas’s Sensemayá (1938), and José Pablo Moncayo’s Huapango (1941).

Works by many Mexican composers are increasingly being performed on main-stage concerts alongside the classics from the repertoire. Recent programming has erupted in addition to the Cinco de Mayo and Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) concerts by many American orchestras; the San Francisco and San Diego symphonies have presented Día de Los Muertos programs, in early November, for years, although they can be perceived as one-off special events. Multiple orchestras, particularly in the Southwest, also present concerts that spotlight the mariachi tradition, featuring mariachi ensembles or soloists. There have also been performances by youth orchestras from the U.S. and Mexico playing side by side: last November, musicians from the San Diego Youth Symphony and from the Sinfónica Juvenil de Tijuana performed at the University of California, San Diego, bridging both cultures.

The Ortiz Factor

The trend reached a watershed earlier this year with Gabriela Ortiz’s triple Grammy win for the album Revolución Diamantina, including Best Contemporary Classical Composition for the ballet of the same name, played by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dudamel. The album also includes the short concert opener Kauyumari, which uses a Huichol melody that Ortiz originally borrowed and harmonized for the last movement of her 1997 string quartet Altar de Muertos.

There were more than 90 performances of Ortiz’s music in the U.S. in the 2024–25 season alone, including Kauyumari, which has been played more than 90 times by more than 50 orchestras around the world since its 2021 premiere. Ortiz modestly attributes its popularity to its brevity and the catchiness of the borrowed melody. But that is only one facet of Ortiz, a composer who grew up in Mexico City, studied with Chávez’s influential pupil Mario Lavista, and absorbed a wide variety of local and European music.

“When I was in London, I went to Darmstadt and to European festivals of contemporary music, but I never really felt that I belonged to that. Never,” she says. Today, she identifies with postmodern integration and eclecticism. “I remember that I did this trip to Chiapas, in the south of Mexico, and I went to this church, and it was interesting because I saw this altar with a neon light and a Coke and candles—a collage of elements. Why do these Chamula people have a Coke in an altar and a Mickey Mouse and a neon light and then something Spanish and a smell that comes from Hispanic traditions, with everything mixed together? This is who I am. I don’t come from a single pure thing; I come from a mix of so many things, from modernity but also pre-Hispanic cultures that were in my country and the European. This is a result of my culture.”

That visit to Chiapas inspired the creation of the Altar series, a title the composer uses not in the ecclesiastic sense but rather to denote “something that is big and important, something that you have to respect,” she says. The first piece was Altar de Neón, from 1995, for percussion ensemble and orchestra. Seven more Altar pieces have followed, including Altar de Cuerdas, a violin concerto for María Dueñas that is also on the recent Grammy-winning album.

Although Ortiz is one of the most performed Mexican composers of the day, she also advocates for other composers from Mexico and from Central and South America. As the 2024-25 composer chair at Carnegie Hall, she curated a program by Ensemble Connect that featured living composers from Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, and the premiere of her own Pigmentum, for horn and piano. The Carnegie Hall position included the premiere of four new works that were performed, in separate programs, by cellist Alisa Weilerstein, Dueñas, the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, and Attaca Quartet. Ortiz was also the music director of the 2025 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood this July, where 15 of her pieces—besides music by other composers—were performed, including Altar de Muertos, and a revised version of Altar de Viento, a flute concerto from 2015 that she wrote for Alejandro Escuer, her husband.

“Gabriela has never shied away from melody, rhythm, and a very lush orchestration,” says Mexican conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. From 2007 to 2022, Prieto was the music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México and has led about 100 premieres of works by Mexican and American composers, including Ortiz, with whom he has worked for 30 years. “Her pieces are very successful no matter what,” he says. “I just did an opener of hers with the National Symphony Orchestra [in January 2025] and had a huge success. It’s called Téenek. I know that I can suggest it with no problem because it’s a piece that will go well with the orchestra and very well with the audience.” Téenek, commissioned by Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic, which premiered it in 2017, was a breakthrough for Ortiz. In 2023, Dudamel performed it with the Berlin Philharmonic, which was something of a cross-cultural landmark.

But Prieto, the music director of the North Carolina Symphony since 2023, wishes he could program more music by composers whose style doesn’t necessarily fit preconceived notions of what Mexican music should sound like. He was one of the first conductors to perform Danzón No. 2 in the U.S. (The other eight Danzones, incidentally, are virtually unknown in this country). “There is an expectation both in the orchestras and in the audience that as a Mexican conductor I will bring some of the vibrancy and local flair of Mexican music,” he says. “They want to see a Mexican conductor doing a Mexican beat with that kind of folk-infused style, rhythms, and all. And there are some composers from my country who completely say no to that aesthetic as a way to assert that they can be Mexican composers without writing ‘Mexican’ music.”

That problem, or limitation, is not unique to Mexican music, Prieto explains: the Bernstein-Copland-Gershwin trifecta, frequently performed around the world as “American” music, represents but a sliver of the breadth of our orchestral music. But “orchestras have a finite number of pieces and they really want to maximize the impact of these composers,” he says

Expansive Range

The styles and aesthetics of today’s Mexican and Mexican American composers range widely. Some are generally characterized by a populist flavor that embraces rhythmic vitality with appealing harmonies and an unabashed tunefulness. A more refined compositional style leans toward the European avant-garde, requiring a greater effort—more rehearsals, for one thing—from performers and audiences alike. Much of the most stimulating music is somewhere in between, with the six symphonies of Chávez, who died in 1978—and now the music of Ortiz as his successor—as points of reference.

Besides Márquez, who won a Latin Grammy last year for his violin concerto Fandango, increasingly recognized composers include Juan Pablo Contreras, whose mariachi-styled Mariachitlán has been performed about 120 times worldwide, and whose MeChicano was commissioned by a consortium of American orchestras led by the Las Vegas Philharmonic; the late Eugenio Toussaint (Suite de Mambos de Perez Prado is a crowd pleaser); Samuel Zyman (a highlight is Encuentros); and José Elizondo (try Danzas Latinoamericanas.)

Enrico Chapela, the only other contemporary Mexican composer besides Ortiz to be published by Boosey & Hawkes, has received dozens of commissions in the last 20 years, including by the L.A. Philharmonic. He blends elements of hard rock and other non-classical genres with orchestral music. Magnetar, a concerto for electric cello, includes metal-style distortion, while the cantata Braceros employs mariachi vocals with a libretto set in the historical context of the “bracero” program, an agreement between Mexico and the U.S. during World War II that allowed more than three million Mexican braceros (hand laborers) to enter the U.S. to work in agricultural fields while American farmers were drafted into the army. Federico Ibarra Groth opts for a more traditional aesthetic, but with a style that asserts itself as entirely idiomatic and persuasive; his Symphony No. 2, Las antesalas del sueño (“The antechambers of sleep”), is an excellent entry point. Of course, these are just a few of the notable composers in the scene.

Prieto tries to perform music by Lavista, Ortiz’s teacher, who died in 2021, as often as he can. “He is a senior voice that is unfortunately hard to program because it’s not what people imagine is going to be ‘Mexican’ music,” he says. His music is usually more cerebral and textural, rather than melodic. Clepsidra and Ficciones are orchestral highlights.

What Makes “Mexican” Orchestral Music Mexican?

The “Mexican” sound that loosely links these composers, notwithstanding the variety of styles and voices, is not easy to define. For conductor Alondra de la Parra, who grew up in Mexico City and has been performing Mexican and Latin American music since she founded the Philharmonic Orchestra of the Americas as a young music student in New York City in 2004, it all starts with Mexican culture’s innate relationship to rhythm. “It’s very important that it comes from dance; it comes from feeling the pulse in the ground, in your feet,” she says.

The evening before our conversation for this article, de la Parra had conducted Danzón No. 2 with the Joven Orquesta de la Comunidad de Madrid, the youth orchestra of Madrid. With her Cancún-based Festival Paax GNP, de la Parra also commissioned, premiered, and recorded Márquez’s first symphony, Sinfonía Imposible, in 2022. She is performing it next year with the Orquesta y Coro de la Comunidad de Madrid, which she has conducted since late 2024. Ortiz, too, is on her radar: de la Parra recently commissioned the composer’s first symphony, which will be premiered in 2026 at Paax and performed by a consortium of co-commissioning orchestras.

“As a culture, Mexico is extremely musical,” de la Parra points out. “We have a historical and cultural wealth that very few countries in the world can share because we come from thousands of years back, from the Mayans, the Aztecs, all of our pre-Hispanic cultures, and then the arrival of the Spanish and the combination with Europe. So, we’re a very old culture that was always surrounded by music, which is a very central part of it.”

Ortiz’s latest piece for orchestra is the climate change-themed Si el Oxígeno Fuera Verde (“If oxygen were green”), which London’s Philharmonia Orchestra permiered in September at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and took on tour in the U.S. She’s come a long way for a composer who for many years never rented her music to orchestras because she felt they were doing her a favor, she recalls: “I was so pleased that they were going to play my music that I gave them the music for free.”

While Prieto recognizes the challenges and limitations facing the industry in general and Mexican composers in particular, he is sanguine about the direction things are heading. “American orchestras do a great service to their community,” he says. “The fact that they are programming more Mexican work is a testament not only to their involvement, but also to the importance of the Mexican community.”

His wish is that the trend results in more orchestras and audiences interested in styles of Mexican music that are still neglected—even music by otherwise accessible composers who are represented only by one or two of their works. “You can’t ignore the fact that even a composer as popular as Arturo [Márquez] has a side of him that is not being played,” he says. Another example is Chávez himself, whose Symphony No. 4, Sinfonía romántica, and his Piano Concerto, could certainly be embraced if more orchestras gave it a chance.

De la Parra thinks that most of this should’ve happened a long time ago. In 2004, when she was an undergraduate, works of this kind had a very limited presence in American concert halls; now, these changes have enabled her to take a new piece like Sinfonía Imposible across the world from Cancún to São Paulo, Coruña, Copenhagen, Stuttgart, and, next year, Madrid. Among the selections she has programmed for this summer’s edition of Festival Paax, holding its own close to Gershwin, Mahler, and Beethoven, is Danzón No. 2. Unassailable.

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2025 print issue of Symphony magazine.