Gabriela Lena Frank has won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her orchestral work Picaflor: A future myth. In announcing the prize Monday (May 4), the Pulitzer jury described the 30-minute piece as a "modern symphonic work informed by the composer's personal experiences with California wildfires and Andean legend, ten powerful movements that follow a hummingbird through its attempts to escape cataclysms, a contemplation of the fragile future." The two other finalists were In the Arms of the Beloved by Billy Childs and American Descent by Andrew Rindfleisch.
Picaflor received its world premiere on March 13, 2025 when Marin Alsop led the Philadelphia Orchestra, which commissioned the work along with the Oregon Symphony and the Bravo! Vail Music Festival. With Peruvian mythology as a jumping off point, Frank crafted her own fable, with a host of characters including gods, mollusks, ghosts, flies and one determined little bird.
Reached by telephone 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 May 14 at the Metropolitan Opera.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Tom Huizenga: You are calling Picaflor: A Future Myth a fable in music. But it's a fable that you have made up, right?
Gabriela Lena Frank: It has its roots in existing Andean cosmology that looks at the picaflor — the hummingbird — as a creation origin story. And in the story, a small hummingbird helps bring fire to the earth and to help life and civilization populate as we know it. So I took that as a starting point, and then I wrote a fantastical premise. I authored a new story: What happens if we cast that story in the future? What happens to our mythologies after a time of troubles? It can be political, it can be environmental – for me political and environmental are often the same thing.
Is it a warning for us?
There's an element of alarm to it, but also an element of the aspirational, because it does end on an optimistic note.
I've seen pictures of you with a beekeeper's outfit on and that leads me to wonder why the natural world figures so prominently for you personally and in this piece, especially.
Well, fire has become an everyday reality for us Californians. We've had fires in our state's history for a long time, but the relentless rhythm of it every season only started about ten years ago. Before that time, I lived in the urban Bay Area and then I moved into a more rural part of California, about two hours north, in Mendocino County.
I think I was a casual environmentalist before. I thought I was doing my part if I went to a farm-to-table restaurant or taking the train instead of flying. But once I saw those fires, I started going deeper into "How did we get here?" And once you start asking that question, you realize that the seeds for the situation we are in now were planted centuries ago with colonization, with trying to reap resources. And then we just stayed in that mode and the trajectory went very sharp with the level of technology over the last hundred years.
So I tie this to old cosmologies, and that's what this piece is about. It combined my everyday living reality with my ancestry and how my ancestors were colonized.
Don't you actually farm some of your own food?
Yes. We do grow a lot of our own food. We have chickens. We have about 40 fruit trees and during the early months of the pandemic we didn't have to go to the store that much because we were able to grow food and forage. Our area is known for mushrooms, acorns and huckleberries. My husband is a small game hunter, mostly wild turkey. At one point, I thought we might get llamas and goats, and instead I opened up a music school so we couldn't do it all.
Well, now you're also growing something else. You're growing music.
Yes, I know.
How would you describe the actual music in Picaflor for someone who hasn't heard it or doesn't know your work?
It's a big, vibrant work. I even imagine it almost as a ballet without dancers. It's extremely gestural, very colorful and you could imagine dancers glomming on to a rhythm that they hear, or a big gesture. It's tonal in some parts, atonal and polytonal in other parts. I use all the various harmonic languages. I would also say it's a sort of virtuoso work for orchestra. And it has a lot of solos, like a concerto for orchestra that features groups of players.
What does it mean to you that from now on you will be referred to as a "Pulitzer Prize-winning composer?"
I take that seriously. I have thought of other artists whose bios lead with the Pulitzer Prize. And I understand that this means a certain kind of recognition and means that their work is considered serious and important.
Look, I'm a disabled Latino woman at a time when we're examining Latinos here in the U.S. and who deserves to be here and who must not be here. And so it's moving to me that we are celebrating Latino cultures at this time. I take that very seriously to represent well.
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