The composer Gabriela Lena Frank won the Pulitzer Prize for music on Monday for “Picaflor: A Future Myth,” a 10-movement symphonic work that draws on Incan mythology to tell the story of a hummingbird trying to save a future world from ecological disaster.
“Picaflor” premiered in March 2025 at the Philadelphia Orchestra, one of the piece’s commissioners. It was based on her experience in California; she lives on a farm in the redwoods near Mendocino and was close to the disastrous Camp fire of 2018. Frank, 53, received the Pulitzer news while preparing to make her Metropolitan Opera debut with “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” her recent opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, which opens next week.
“I’m still trying to get my wits together,” Frank said in an interview. “What a ride.”
The Pulitzer Prizes also announced two finalists for music: Andrew Rindfleisch, for “American Descent,” and Billy Childs, for “In the Arms of the Beloved.”
Frank wrote “Picaflor,” which is 32 minutes long and was first conducted by Marin Alsop, while the composer in residence at the Philadelphia Orchestra. She said that she decided to approach the piece as if it were the last orchestral work she would ever write.
“I put it on all on the table,” said Frank, whose mother was Indigenous Peruvian. “I took ancient Peruvian mythology and cast it in the future.”
Frank’s publisher describes the piece as programmatic, with an original story she conceived. “It draws upon the legends of a sky kingdom ruled by a sun god creator, a rebellious hummingbird (Picaflor) who tears through the sky, and the chaski — messengers of the Inca Empire,” the publisher said. “The piece is also immersed in the concept of pachacuti, the belief that era-worlds undergo cataclysmic transformations every few hundred years.”
Frank grew up in Berkeley, Calif., and lives on a 15-acre farm in Boonville. She studied music composition at Rice University in Texas and earned a doctorate at the University of Michigan.
“I’m shaking a little bit,” she said on Monday. “I feel very honored.”
Adam Nagourney is the classical music and dance reporter for The Times.
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