Tania León
Essay by Donna Lee Davidson
Donna Lee Davidson is an orchestral percussionist, jazz vibraphonist, educator, and music journalist. Her work has appeared in I CARE IF YOU LISTEN, The New York Times, and BOMB Magazine.
When it comes time to reflect over a long career, a couple of questions worthy of contemplation might be:
1) How you’ve managed to keep your personal life balanced with your professional life?
and
2) What made you commit in the long run?
“Donna, I have no idea,” Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) said absolutely immediately to both questions, couched in heavy sighs. They were unmeasured, too genuine. León didn’t go on to explain how she did it. She only put together a clear illustration of what not knowing looks like.
“You probably know those people who sometimes appear in the circus,” León began. (I don’t even know someone who knows someone who knows someone in the circus, but I’m fascinated she thinks I do). “There are people that actually take that challenge by going on a rope, you know? And trying to go from one place to the other on the near precipice—that’s the way I feel sometimes.”
“I have gotten used to it, you see?” León continued. “It’s like being a dancer on an imaginary floor.”
(There is “you know?” or “you see?” with a question mark when she wants you to grab hold of something. And then there’s “you know.” With a period. When she wants, or wants you, to settle into it, accept it, let it rest. It’s not just a filler, it points direction.)
Aside from composing as a child with her brother for his band, León’s first compositions were ballets. When she arrived in New York City—on a Freedom Flight from Cuba in 1967—she was getting her degree validated at NYU. The idea that León’s first compositions in collaboration with Mitchell were ballets shocked me. But she was quick to educate me.
“It has happened to so many! Many composers have gone that route. It happened to [Igor] Stravinsky. He was working with [dancer and choreographer Vaslav] Nijinsky in Paris, and that’s why the Rite of Spring exists. He wrote it
for ballet.”
León composed her ballets for Arthur Mitchell, the first African American dancer with the New York City Ballet, and principal dancer for ten years. At the same time she started writing her first ballet for Mitchell, Stravinsky was, for a short while, still alive and writing for Mitchell, too.
“By the time I met Arthur, Stravinsky was writing pieces for him. For Arthur Mitchell. Listen, I was working with Arthur and I didn’t know who Arthur was. You know how I found out about him? He gave me a ticket to go to a performance for the first time. I got there, and I opened the program, and his face was in the program. And then the curtain went up and he was on stage, and I said, “Oh my God!”
“I didn’t speak any English. He didn’t explain anything to me. And that’s how I found out that some of the ballets he was dancing were created for him—and the composer was Stravinsky, who was still alive!”
“Sometimes it helps not knowing who people are getting started,” I responded.
“Exactly!”
Because unlike Stravinsky, she wasn’t a world-renowned composer with an avalanche of accolades, or any for that matter. León wasn’t given a chance for any reason except that she was absorbed into a community that made it their duty to help her grow. How León grew into the illustrious 60-year career being honored tonight is exactly the legacy she has built. She was a founding member, along with Arthur Mitchell and his teacher, of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the first African American classical ballet company and training school.
“You have to understand that I met Arthur when the Dance Theatre of Harlem existed in his mind, you see.”
León wasn’t only being trained as a composer, pianist, and conductor—she was being trained how to mind her community. She hasn’t stopped since. León established the music department, music school, and orchestra at Dance Theatre of Harlem, and founded and led the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concerts from 1977-1988. She also co-founded Sonidos de las Américas with the American Composers Orchestra in 1994, and is the founder and artistic director for the advocacy organization Composers Now, created in 2010, which she continues to lead today.
Her accolades, which she isn’t interested in talking about, recommend her to teach at conservatories all over the world (and indeed, she has done residencies at many of them), but she held her position at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College until retiring in 2019, and still teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, intentionally. She’s just as community-based now as Arthur Mitchell was then.
“He taught me how to bow and how to go on stage,” León detailed. And Mitchell’s close friend, the actress Cicely Tyson, taught León how to come out of her shell. “I had the support of Arthur and the entire company. It’s a family that adopted me upon my arrival.”
“León wasn’t only being trained as a composer, pianist, and conductor—she was being trained how to mind her community. She hasn’t stopped since.”
The first question—how she balances her personal life with her professional life—seemed to exhaust her. By the time we reflected on the second—what made her commit in the long run—again, she told me absolutely immediately, with a hefty sigh, “I don’t know.”
Community is a strong contender. Trying her best to answer, León didn’t reflect forward, from her first ballet compositions to the present. Instead, she went backwards, from her first compositions to her childhood.
“It’s not that I am hooked or attached to the past. But the thing is, this incredible situation of my life happened since I was nine years old. I told my family I’m going to live in France, and they looked at me like, ‘she’s out of her mind.’ Because the circumstances at the time were not conducive to think that way, you know.”
Who she is, as a lauded composer today, isn’t someone different than who she was at nine years old, she seemed to be saying. The commitment isn’t to something outside of León, from the time of her first compositions to now. It is a commitment she made to herself to go beyond the constraints that were supposed to dictate her reality.
Tonight’s concert spans the present back to 1986. Taking the same time machine with León to reflect on her legacy, we’ll begin our own reflection with the New York premiere of Singsong for flute (2025). León wrote it for flute and chorus in 2023, now woven into a flute solo by Claire Chase, who will perform it tonight. The piece is set to poetry by Rita Dove, with whom León has composed several song cycles. One of the poems Dove sent to León was entitled Singsong.
Every piece on the program tonight is based on poetry, with which León has a surprising relationship only because she keeps it a secret, she told me. “I have my own poetry that people haven’t seen because, you know. I have a book that I actually typed. To me, poetry is music,” she continued.
It made sense that a composer would hear the music in the abstraction of a structured language, re-composed in its own design. “Poetry is music. And same thing, to me, music is movement.”
We continue back to In the Field (2022), also a New York premiere, featuring poems from a collection based on sites in Philadelphia. Cuban poet Carlos Pintado, winner of The National Poetry Series Paz Prize, best describes the time machine we’re taking tonight.
“The city has accommodated with Time. It has settled itself with Time and it has created its own Time and that intrigued me. It’s History dancing a dance of eternity in its streets,” Carlos Pintado said about the piece ahead of its 2023 world premiere at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia.
“All of those pieces, six total, are in Spanish except the last one. It’s like acquiring the culture in a way. You see?” León told me first about them.
It made me think of the classes I’d been in with writers from all over the world, seeing, in real-time, what it looks like to lose one’s language—the impossible task of defining oneself apart from cultural communications already defined. Something I don’t know for myself except when it’s time to code-switch. When I have to “acquire the culture,” to put it diplomatically. But no, it’s a part of the culture, León explained.
“He took a spirit of Philadelphia with him. It’s important to finish the piece, or to say goodbye to the site, in its proper language,” León informed me.
“Donna, let me tell you. I belong to everywhere.”
“I’m sorry?” I asked, understanding that León was telling me to let her tell
me something.
“That by now, I belong to everywhere,” she emphasized with a designation of time.
“I travel the world, and I identify with every place I go to. When I go to Cuba, I have changed so much. I see the culture, I see everything, and I am, in a way, a spectator. Because by now, so many things have changed. Places of me don’t exist anymore, not even my piano. You see? All of my immediate ancestors are gone so I walk the streets, and I hear their voices, but they’re not there. So it’s a very strange way of thinking, this life. And then, I come back here and I am not from here either. Because I don’t go to the park dancing on Sundays. You see?”
“I think that everywhere you go, you stay a little bit and you absorb something. So you’re being transformed. I have been transformed.”
Twenty more years back is Tumbao (2005) for which León says is a release of her most vital roots. It was inspired by “The Queen of Salsa,” Cuban singer Celia Cruz, who popularized salsa music all over the world with a most stunning sixty-year career of her own.
“We are all reinventing ourselves constantly. Cultures have emerged from the influences of people travelling around the planet. The same could be said for the evolution of music,” León wrote about the piece.
Tumbao is built over the rhythmic concept of clave that pervades all styles of Cuban dance music—salsa, timba, son, montunos. But it’s more than just a syncopated bass line, it seemed León was trying to help me understand. It’s a culture and a way of living. Going to the park to dance on Sundays was her culture.
“You would see us Sunday. Everybody would go dress up, go into the park—and this isn’t just a practice in Latin America—you go to Mexico, on Sundays you’re going to see an orchestra, some mariachis, or any kind in the parks, and people come and dance. Dance has been part of my life since day one.”
León reminded me of the current debate circling amongst music experts about the downbeat in Ludacris’s hit single “Roll Out (My Business)” from his 2001 album Word of Mouf. Various social media videos demonstrate different constructions of where the downbeat lay, but the answer is not in the theory of meter. The answer is in the club, where dancers like me boogie down to it.
Esencia (2009) is a quick flash forward—a wrinkle in the time, a parallel dimension—to suit our reflective journey. From releasing vital roots to the essence of them. León is using the Spanish word for essence, defining it literally to explain what she’s doing in this piece—composing her intrinsic self.
It’s between these two pieces—Tumbao and Esencia—that I got stuck on something I had long been trying to define for myself. I asked her about the words I often see associated with her work. Words like heritage, culture, and roots, all of which I have a strong and tangible sense of. But homeland, that word—what is her relationship to it? If I had to compose a piece, whether of music or words, about homeland, I’m not sure that I could.
“I understand very well the concept of homeland,” León began. “The memories that I wanted to retain, you see, they are not the same memories. Again, I keep saying that those people who were so instrumental in my existence as a musician, none of them are there anymore. But there was something in me which is—listen, Donna, let me tell you something—”
León was starting to compose, pulling in the things that sculpted her to shape an answer much more abundant than the question I asked.
“When I go there, specifically when I went for the first time, the first thing that I said, ‘what took me out of here?’ You see? It was something inside of me. And I think that that something started when I was nine years old. That I said I’m going to live in France. Why? You see?
“And it didn’t leave me,” León continued. “That thing didn’t leave me. It’s like I had to get out. That’s the only thing that I remember that it was so powerful inside of me—it was inside of me that I had to go into the world.”
León was telling me to—I think—rather than fold into myself, open instead.
“And so living here, I mean, I was supposed to be in Paris, not in New York. I was supposed to be a pianist, not a composer. You see? When I go to my place of origin, people don’t recognize that I’m a Cuban. Because the mannerisms are different. There are even new words and people might tell me and I just look at them because I don’t know what it meant, what it said. And that is actually something that happens all over the world,” León rightly pointed out.
“So, I’m telling you, I mean, the shock of being asked ‘are you from Paloma?’ I mean, you know? Or even that little voice (her four-year-old nephew) saying that ‘she talks funny’ made me understand that I was changing whether I liked it or not. I think that everywhere you go, you stay a little bit and you absorb something. So you’re being transformed. I have been transformed.
“I have become sort of like Earthian, you know?”
A La Par (1986), the earliest piece on the program, takes us back forty years from tonight. In it you’ll hear a Guaguancó rumba, an Afro-Cuban dance rooted in a long, expansive history going the furthest back we’ll travel—to León’s origins. Guaguancó rumba is the rhythms and dances African slaves brought from their homelands; over time, blending with the indigenous—and the colonizers—to form rumba. From the struggle to the cultural and artistic explosions borne of it.
“I tell you about those ghosts that I talk to when I go to Havana? And when
I visit my neighborhood. It’s not that I want to romanticize the memory, but those memories are the ones that created this person. And all the hardships I saw inside the house and my grandfather doing the best to pay for my piano and help me. I mean, it was so incredible what these people are doing without realizing what they were creating. So they created me. And the thing is, then I took the responsibility to do my best with the tools that they made, that they gave me without knowing what they were doing, you see? That’s a consciousness that I don’t want to lose. You know?”