“I discovered that just by playing and experimenting,” she said, “we could create a song.”
As the popularity of Los Folkloristas soared, Ortiz joined her parents on tours across Mexico and Europe. A parade of famous Latin American artists passed through their home, including the Chilean singer Victor Jara, an activist who was later murdered by men under the command of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Jara, who was killed when Ortiz was 8, became a role model for Ortiz. His photo hangs in her studio, and she still has a guitar case he gave her.
As a teenager, Ortiz became a devoted pianist, spending nights and weekends practicing. Her father, an aspiring composer, encouraged her studies. She fell in love with the frantic rhythms of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” and the folksy swing of Bartok’s “Mikrokosmos” piano pieces. She was so focused that a boyfriend called her a “piano parlante” — a talking piano — and her mother pleaded with her to choose another career.
But Ortiz persisted, and with the help of the renowned Mexican composer Arturo Márquez, who had heard her play one of her pieces at a party when she was 17, she went to Paris to study music. After just a year, though, she returned home to donate a kidney to her mother, who had fallen ill. She stayed in Mexico City, enrolling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and studying with Mario Lavista, one of the country’s foremost composers.
Lavista, who became a mentor, encouraged Ortiz to deepen her studies of the classics. (“You need to know the traditions,” he told her, “if you want to break the traditions.”) But as Ortiz began composing, she ran into an obstacle: The school lacked a full-size orchestra. Frustrated that she could not hear her first orchestral piece, “Patios,” she marched into the offices of the Mexico City Philharmonic Orchestra. Her score in hand, she told the music director that she needed to hear it so she could learn. It worked: A few months later, the ensemble performed “Patios.”
In 1990, Ortiz, then 25, went abroad again to study electroacoustics in London. Her peers there were well versed in postmodernism and serialism but less familiar with Latin American music. It wasn’t just her classmates. In the library, Ortiz consulted a reference book about music since 1945. She found only a single entry on Latin America: a definition of conga.