Tania Justina León (b. 1943)
has a web site at http://www.tanialeon.com/
and is featured at AfriClassical.com
"I am of the mind that I am a composer. I am not a Black composer. I am not a woman composer. I am not a Caribbean composer." [Tania León in interview with Maria Hinojosa, Latino USA]
By Michael Simon Johnson
April 17, 2015
Composers like Tania León infuse their work with caribbean
instruments, Yoruba rhythms, and a-tonal piano work—elements that make
their music a much more global experience.
Tania’s compositions and operas have been performed internationally
and they’ve have received countless awards from places like the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and ASCAP. The Grammy and Latin Grammy
nominated León was the first musical director and a founding member of
Arthur Mitchell’s famous Dance Theatre of Harlem and has been a visiting
professor at Yale, the University of Michigan and others.
And at 71 years-old there is no sign of her slowing down. She recently assembled a month-long music festival called Composers Now
featuring New York-based composers of all kinds. Plus she is in the
process of writing an opera with Harvard African-American Studies
professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. about the Little Rock Nine–the group of
black students who bravely enrolled at a white high school in Arkansas
in the 1950’s.
Born in Havana in the 1943, Tania León was classically trained, but
Afro-Cuban music and other Cuban traditions, as well as a variety of
postmodern musical forms have always found a way into her unique style.
She sat down with Maria Hinojosa to talk about her life and her work.
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