NYTimes.com Article: Music Review

Tania León: A Composer Who Sends Atonality on a Caribbean Cruise

November 8, 2004
By ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Cultural clash is at the core of music by the composer
Tania León. Born in Cuban in 1943 and trained at a
conservatory in Havana, Ms. León, who is of mixed French,
Spanish, African and Chinese descent, immersed herself in
complex Western contemporary music techniques when she
moved to the United States in 1967. Her career has included
conducting and composing for Dance Theater of Harlem,
working as music director of "The Wiz" on Broadway and
teaching composition at Brooklyn College.

Naturally, these distinctive styles clash in her music,
though in a dynamic sense, as in a good fight, a feisty
confrontation. Usually the confrontation produces a vibrant
though slightly uneasy conversation, as in "sin normas
ajenas," her bracing work for large chamber ensemble, which
opened a concert of Ms. León's works on Saturday night at
Columbia University's Miller Theater, part of the Composer
Portraits series. The core players were the four members of
Mosaic, a technically deft, adventurous ensemble of flute
(Zizi Mueller), cello (Edward Arron), piano (Emma
Tahmizian) and percussion (Daniel Druckman). For this
concert Mosaic was joined by a roster of excellent players
and, in two works, the conductor Rand Steiger.

In "sin normas ajenas" ("without another's norms") Ms. León
boldly finds common ground between an astringent atonal
style, complete with dense counterpoint and wildly
zigzagging melodic lines, and Caribbean rhythms. The
healthy clash was even more overt in the propulsive and
breathless "A La Par," scored just for piano and percussion
(Ms. Tahmizian and Mr. Druckman). In the opening section,
it was fun to see the heads of young listeners nodding to
the sneaky hints of Caribbean rhythms with which Ms. León
animates her tart atonal harmonies. And there was many
heads in motion on this night, for the concert attracted a
large, mostly young and encouragingly diverse audience.

Ms. León conducted "Indigena," for large chamber ensemble
including strings, music that seemed her hip homage to the
Neo-Classical works of Schoenberg, though bit by bit the
work starts to sound like a strangely atonal Latino dance
band, capped by a take-it-away solo cadenza for trumpet
(Wayne DuMaine).

"Azulejos," composed in 2003, which received it New York
premiere, is intense, hard-driving yet elusive. A hidden
Latin American dance rhythm provides a fixed point upon
which she attaches other overlapping and enormously varied
rhythmic patterns. Though the music has an organic sweep,
perhaps that hidden unifying rhythm is too hidden. The work
seemed not just episodic but arbitrary. Yet it certainly
held the audience, which erupted in cheers.

After all this intensity it was a perfect touch to end the
program with a solo aria, a mother's prayer, from Ms.
León's opera "Scourge of Hyacinths." This was ruminative,
melancholic, quietly elegiac music, sung with wistful
beauty by the soprano Susan Narucki, accompanied only by
piano and solo cello.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/08/arts/music/08leon.html?ex=1100947090&ei=1&en=eec234222141fd5a