I hear a timpani

Student musicians at Michigan State University — and music lovers of all kinds — are about to sit down to a rich and colorful banquet.

Well, maybe not sit down.

“I don’t know why everybody has to behave in classical music,” Mexico-based composer Gabriela Ortiz said. “You listen to all kinds of music, and everybody’s dancing. It’s something you can’t control. It comes naturally. We have to be a little bit more open. Moving is part of the way you express yourself. Why not?”

A series of concerts this weekend will feature Ortiz’s rhythmically and sonically spectacular music, with the composer herself in town to work with students, give master classes and meet with the public.

The world’s greatest orchestras, from Mexico’s National Symphony to the New York Philharmonic, have commissioned works from Ortiz. Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is a passionate fan.

All of that high-level attention suits Ortiz fine, but student ensembles have a special affinity for her high-energy, richly woven music, and she returns the love.

“There’s something really honest about students — an openness, a willingness to learn,” she said. “The energy is so fresh. To look at them, how they’re putting all their energy into music, it’s  something I really enjoy.”

The monster-piece of this mini-festival is “Concierto Voltaje,” a concerto for timpani and orchestra, featuring the MSU Symphony at full force, with every bell and whistle imaginable, and percussion Professor Gwendolyn Dease as the soloist.

That’s right — a timpani concerto.

“There are very few of those,” Ortiz admitted.

“Voltaje” means “voltage,” and this concerto never lets the voltmeter needle leave the red zone.

“It’s very energetic,” she said, relishing the understatement. “It’s an instrument with a lot of possibilities to discover.”

The soloist pounds the timpani with the usual mallets but also weaves intricate patterns with sticks and bare hands. At a crucial moment, tuned temple bells (of Tibetan Buddhist origin) rest on top of the drum skin and generate an unearthly resonance.

“You use the pedal on the timpani, and the sound is out of this world,” Ortiz said. “It’s really fun to do these kinds of experiments.”

At the concerto’s world premiere, timpanist Gabriela Jiménez tore it up with the Mexican National Symphony. Ortiz wrote the concerto especially for her. (There’s a clip of the jaw-dropping finale on YouTube.)

“Gabriela is amazing,” Ortiz said. “It’s almost like she’s dancing with the mallets, doing tai chi with the symphony. It’s so beautiful, and  it’s because she’s enjoying what she’s doing.”

Ortiz and her music are in great demand around the world. City Pulse caught up with her last Friday, the day before her joyous orchestra work “Kauyumari” was set to be performed at a celebration marking the opening of the Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

The MSU Wind Symphony will perform “Kauyumari” at the Wharton Center’s Cobb Great Hall on Friday (Oct. 27).

 “It’s a very direct piece, a specific request from the L.A. Philharmonic to mark their return after the pandemic,” Ortiz said. “They asked for something light and joyful to celebrate being together after a year.”

When she got the call from L.A., Ortiz was busy and wasn’t sure she could fulfill the commission in two months. She revisited one of her most important pieces, “Altar de Muertos,” a string quartet inspired by the traditional Día de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, celebration, written for the Kronos Quartet in 1997.

She homed in on a theme from the quartet’s last five minutes, based on a song from the Huichol, an indigenous people of Mexico. “Kauyumari” (“Blue Deer”) takes the listener on the musical equivalent of a spiritual pilgrimage (aided in Huichol culture by hallucinogenic peyote) to “hunt” a blue deer, a spiritual guide that represents access to intangible, healing forces.

“It’s something that is very sad, very simple, and grows, and grows, and grows, like Ravel’s ‘Bolero,’” she said. “It goes into this psychedelia, an ending that is very energetic.”

On Monday (Oct. 30), MSU’s contemporary music ensemble, Musique 21, will perform two of Ortiz’s works, “Atlas Pumas” and “Corpórea.”

Ortiz finds musical material everywhere. (In 2018, she wrote a piece called “Pico-Bite-Beat,” inspired by food trucks in L.A., for the L.A. Philharmonic.) She named “Atlas Pumas,” for violin and marimba, after two rival soccer teams in Mexico.

“In this case, it’s the marimba versus the violin,” she said. “In the end, nobody’s winning, but it’s a metaphor.”

“Corpórea” is an eight-tentacled brain massage from an octet. Ortiz called it “a reflection of how creativity works — how  rational or irrational you can be.”

Ortiz sees herself as part of a grand mosaic of Latin-American musical culture, and the Sunday (Oct. 29) MSU Symphony concert will surround her percussion concerto with a rich banquet, including Symphony No. 2 (“Sinfonía India”), by Carlos Chávez, one of Ortiz’s teachers, along with “Sensemayá” for orchestra, by Silvestre Revueltas, and “Todo Terreno,” by MSU Professor of Composition Ricardo Lorenz, first commissioned and performed by the L.A. Philharmonic.

It has long been Ortiz’s goal to encourage worldwide appreciation of the richness and variety of Latin-American music, the same way Latin-American literary arts, visual arts and film are celebrated.

“I’m so happy Ricardo is putting together this program,” Ortiz said. “Recently, I was looking in some books about 20th-century music for information about Latin music, and all I found was conga. I thought, ‘Our whole continent is about the conga? This is insane.’”

Several years ago, she spoke with a Polish composer who couldn’t name a single Mexican or Latin-American composer — no Revueltas, no Chávez, no Villa-Lobos.

“I had to study all the European traditions,” Ortiz said. “My students know all the Polish composers — Lutosławski, Penderecki. We have to study Europe, but Europe doesn’t study Latin America. Europe is not the belly of the world.”