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Born in Cuba to parents of French, African, Chinese, and Spanish descent, Tania León began studying music at the age of four, before training in piano at the Amadeo Roldan Conservatory in Havana. She became pianist and musical director for a Cuban television channel. In 1967, she applied for the “Freedom Flights” program, allowing her to leave for the United States. She then obtained a scholarship at the New York College of Music.
In 1969, while substituting for a friend as a piano accompanist for dance lessons, she was noticed by the dancer Arthur Mitchell, who employed her as musical director at his new project, the Dance Theater of Harlem. She remained there until 1980. She worked with Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine at the Dance Theater, with Mitchell encouraging her to improvise, and then write, for him. In 1970, she composed her first piece, Tones, a ballet for orchestra. Mitchell also pushed her to conduct for the first time, for a Julliard Orchestra performance in Italy. On her return to the United States, she began studying orchestra direction with conductors Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa, among others.
In these first years of composition, León produced large ballets with ensembles rich in percussion, influenced by the serial techniques in vogue at the time. Examples include The Beloved (1972), Haiku (1973), and Belé (1981). After her first return to Cuba in 1979, León became interested in polyrhythm, particularly the Cuban clave rhythm, which works “as a sort of metronomic system layered in independent binary and ternary lines.” Still interested in combining composition and movement, she began to use the rhythm of her father’s gait as inspiration, thus making her first turn toward her Cuban roots. Her pieces Batà (1985) for orchestra; Inura (2009), a ballet for voice, strings, and percussion, evoking Yoruba rituals; and A la Par (1986), a Guaguancó rumba for piano and percussion, also indicate Cuban influence.
In 1994, her opera, Scourge of Hyacinths (1994), based on a play by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka and commissioned by Hans Werner Henze for the Munich Biennale, was performed on twenty occasions in Europe and Mexico, winning the BMW Prize. During this period, German conductor Kurt Masur granted León the position of New Music Advisor at the New York Philharmonic, a position that she also held for music from Latin America for the American Composers Orchestra. A Professor at Brooklyn College since 1985, she was made Professor Emeritus at City University of New York in 2006. She then became artistic ambassador of American culture in Madrid and joined the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2010. The same year, she founded the Composers Now Festival in New York, of which she is currently director.
León’s works are published by Peer Music Classical.
New York Times, Fanfare.
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