Today We Honor Tania León
Afro Latina Tania León is a Cuban born American Pulitzer Prize Composer and Conductor, who won the award in 2021 for ‘Stride,’ her orchestral work inspired by Susan B. Anthony’s activism.
León is an educator at the City University of New York and the founding Composer of Composer Now, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating living composers.
“The beat must go on. Specifically, the one toward the end of the last section.”That’s composer Tania León’s only note for the New York Philharmonic at a recent rehearsal in freshly finished David Geffen Hall.
The Kennedy Center honoree has been an unstoppable force in expanding the possibilities of what American “classical” music can — and ought to — sound like.
Since arriving in the United States from Cuba as a 24-year-old refugee, León, has become one of the most essential voices in American classical music. Over her prolific 50-year career, León has composed orchestral, chamber and choral works, and operas and ballets — music that draws partially from decades of classical training, but most potently from her own sharp musical instincts, which fuse the rhythms and colors of the folk music she grew up listening to in Havana with a mesmerizing modernism.
Tania León (center) with Karel Shook (left) and Arthur Mitchell (right), founders of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, working on the score of León’s first ballet, ‘Tones.’
CARTER™️ Magazine
