The composer created her personal symphonic fable that weaves Andean cosmology with the pure world
Composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s Pulitzer-winning piece is impressed by the traditional cosmologies of her Peruvian heritage.
Mariah Tauger
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Mariah Tauger
Gabriela Lena Frank has gained the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestral work Picaflor: A future delusion. In asserting the prize Monday (Could 4), the Pulitzer jury described the 30-minute piece as a “trendy symphonic work knowledgeable by the composer’s private experiences with California wildfires and Andean legend, ten highly effective actions that observe a hummingbird by means of its makes an attempt to flee cataclysms, a contemplation of the delicate future.” The 2 different finalists have been Within the Arms of the Beloved by Billy Childs and American Descent by Andrew Rindfleisch.
Picaflor acquired its world premiere on March 13, 2025 when Marin Alsop led the Philadelphia Orchestra, which commissioned the work together with the Oregon Symphony and the Bravo! Vail Music Competition. With Peruvian mythology as a leaping off level, Frank crafted her personal fable, with a number of characters together with gods, mollusks, ghosts, flies and one decided little fowl.
Reached by phone Monday afternoon, the 53-year-old composer was in Manhattan presiding over rehearsals for her opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego, which opens Could 14 on the Metropolitan Opera.
The next dialog has been edited for size and readability.
Tom Huizenga: You might be calling Picaflor: A Future Fantasy a fable in music. Nevertheless it’s a fable that you’ve got made up, proper?
Gabriela Lena Frank: It has its roots in present Andean cosmology that appears on the picaflor — the hummingbird — as a creation origin story. And within the story, a small hummingbird helps convey fireplace to the earth and to assist life and civilization populate as we all know it. So I took that as a place to begin, after which I wrote a fantastical premise. I authored a brand new story: What occurs if we solid that story sooner or later? What occurs to our mythologies after a time of troubles? It may be political, it may be environmental – for me political and environmental are sometimes the identical factor.
Is it a warning for us?
There’s a component of alarm to it, but in addition a component of the aspirational, as a result of it does finish on an optimistic word.
I’ve seen footage of you with a beekeeper’s outfit on and that leads me to surprise why the pure world figures so prominently for you personally and on this piece, particularly.
Effectively, fireplace has grow to be an on a regular basis actuality for us Californians. We have had fires in our state’s historical past for a very long time, however the relentless rhythm of it each season solely began about ten years in the past. Earlier than that point, I lived within the city Bay Space after which I moved right into a extra rural a part of California, about two hours north, in Mendocino County.
I feel I used to be an informal environmentalist earlier than. I believed I used to be doing my half if I went to a farm-to-table restaurant or taking the practice as an alternative of flying. However as soon as I noticed these fires, I began going deeper into “How did we get right here?” And when you begin asking that query, you notice that the seeds for the state of affairs we’re in now have been planted centuries in the past with colonization, with attempting to reap assets. After which we simply stayed in that mode and the trajectory went very sharp with the extent of expertise during the last hundred years.
So I tie this to outdated cosmologies, and that is what this piece is about. It mixed my on a regular basis residing actuality with my ancestry and the way my ancestors have been colonized.
Do not you really farm a few of your personal meals?
Sure. We do develop a variety of our personal meals. We’ve got chickens. We’ve got about 40 fruit timber and throughout the early months of the pandemic we did not must go to the shop that a lot as a result of we have been capable of develop meals and forage. Our space is thought for mushrooms, acorns and huckleberries. My husband is a small recreation hunter, principally wild turkey. At one level, I believed we would get llamas and goats, and as an alternative I opened up a music college so we could not do all of it.
Effectively, now you are additionally rising one thing else. You are rising music.
Sure, I do know.
How would you describe the precise music in Picaflor for somebody who hasn’t heard it or does not know your work?
It is a huge, vibrant work. I even think about it nearly as a ballet with out dancers. It is extraordinarily gestural, very colourful and you can think about dancers glomming on to a rhythm that they hear, or a giant gesture. It is tonal in some elements, atonal and polytonal in different elements. I take advantage of all the varied harmonic languages. I’d additionally say it is a type of virtuoso work for orchestra. And it has a variety of solos, like a concerto for orchestra that options teams of gamers.
What does it imply to you that any longer you’ll be known as a “Pulitzer Prize-winning composer?”
I take that significantly. I’ve considered different artists whose bios lead with the Pulitzer Prize. And I perceive that this implies a sure form of recognition and implies that their work is taken into account severe and essential.
Look, I am a disabled Latino girl at a time after we’re inspecting Latinos right here within the U.S. and who deserves to be right here and who should not be right here. And so it is transferring to me that we’re celebrating Latino cultures presently. I take that very significantly to characterize properly.
