Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

A Student of the World
Tania León

Photo: Michael Provost

by David Salvage

Let’s face it. Composers are somewhat dismal people: self-absorbed, irrational, shy, and inclined to pessimism and misanthropy. They grumble about the marginal status of new music in today’s world, shake their heads at performers, and envy other composers more successful than they are.

Then, however, there’s Tania León. She laughs easily, is gregarious and upbeat, delights in learning something new, and loves people. She is friends with composers as disparate as Philip Glass and Charles Wuorinen. “For me composers are creators,” she told me last Tuesday when we sat down to chat at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches. “They need to be different . . . because every single person needs to be different.”

Tania León was born in Havana in 1943. Her family was poor and knew nothing about “classical” music. But when León was age four, she began to play with the radio dial and started stopping at the classical stations. Her grandmother caught her dancing and singing along with the music and took her straight to the Havana Conservatory. When the administration objected that León was too young and couldn’t read well enough, her grandmother resolved to read the theory books aloud to León so that she could take classes. At age seventeen, she graduated from the Conservatory with a degree in piano performance, and, a few years later, in 1967, she left for the United States with the intention of moving on to Paris. Upon arriving in the US, however, she found she “had to redo everything. Everything.” It was like “learning to walk again, learning to talk again . . . I had to start applying twelve-tones. I had to write pieces the way everybody was writing pieces.”

To think of all the possible disadvantages to someone in her position is dizzying. She was a foreigner who didn’t speak the language well; she was a woman; she was a pianist who composed and conducted (a.k.a. dilettante). Was Tania León someone to take seriously?

This question was plaguing her, when, in 1979, she went back to Cuba and discovered that her family was baffled by the music she was writing. Her father asked, “Why don’t you in your music put in something that has to do with us?” Soon after returning to the States, her father passed away. León was unable to attend the funeral. She began to have nightmares – Cuban musicians banging away in the middle of her room in New York. Then, in a series of pieces for solo cello, she began to capture the rhythms and sounds that had surrounded her as a child.

Now, two-and-a-half decades later, after two honorary doctorates, conducting engagements around the world, commissions from the American Composers Orchestra, New World Symphony, Gilbert Kalish, and Meet the Composer, awards from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and Koussevitsky Foundation, having been the New Music Advisor to Kurt Masur and New York Philharmonic, and profiled on CBS, PBS, and elsewhere, Tania León’s status as one of America’s leading composers is secure. This Saturday, the Miller Theater honors her with a concert in their terrific “Portrait” series, featuring MOSAIC. The program includes A La Par for percussion and piano and Indígena, both available on CRI (#662). Also featured is the New York premiere of Azulejos – a piece commissioned for MOSAIC. León will be conducting on the program and giving a pre-concert discussion.

Tania León belongs to the small group of composers who have managed to assimilate musical elements from around the world into a coherent, personal language. “A creative person is always looking for tools for creation,” she says. While atonal textures dominate, she is unafraid of incorporating tonal elements – as Indígena exemplifies. A love of polyrhythm and complexity informs her output, but the music never feels academic; there is dancing, drama, and charisma to spare. Needless to say, the music is much like the woman herself – relentlessly (and convincingly) inclusive. “I have been learning for many, many years how to put the ego away to see the benefit of something totally different from oneself.”

These days, eclecticism is “in,” and world-music influences have become nearly omnipresent in contemporary music. Tania León has a special admiration for today’s Asian composers, particularly Qigang Chen, because they have from the start assimilated their cultural roots into Western music – something she suppressed in her own music for years. But, as she quickly points out, classical music is not some superior musical world which nonetheless can afford to legitimize lesser “ethnic” musics; all music can become “classical,” given time. For her, Beethoven and Mozart are to the West as the Buena Vista Social Club musicians are to Cuba and Latin America.

Equipped with this pragmatic, open-minded point of view, León exhibits no strains of bitterness or regret in talking about the future of “classical” music. (This in itself distinguishes her from nearly all other composers I’ve spoken with.) “Music,” she says, “is a part of our rituals – a ritual of creation, creativity at work. It is a part of what we are on this planet. We create, we create, we create. Sometimes we don’t create good things, but we continue creating.”