Debs Composer Tania León Continues Carnegie Hall Residency This Spring

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Tania León will continue her Debs Composer’s Chair residency at Carnegie Hall this spring with two inventive programs in Zankel Hall, followed by two free Carnegie Hall Citywide concerts this summer to be announced soon.

On Saturday, April 13 at 7:30 p.m., audiences will have the rare opportunity to hear the eminent multinational new music collective Ensemble Modern in a program featuring music with driving, multilayered rhythms from the past century, including two seminal works from León’s category-defying catalog: Indígena and Rítmicas. Recent winners of the esteemed Silver Lion award at Music Biennale in Venice, the ensemble also offers daring arrangements of Nancarrow’s astonishing player-piano studies, and recent works by Andile Khumalo and Christopher Trapani.

On Tuesday, May 21 at 7:30 p.m., two of today’s most innovative jazz artists—“endlessly captivating (NPR)” pianist David Virelles and Grammy-winner and MacArthur “Genius” percussionist Dafnis Prieto—come together with an all-star ensemble in a program that celebrates the wide-ranging influence of Cuban rhythms across multiple genres of music, curated in collaboration with León. The program features the world premiere of Virelles’s Oro a multimedia work commissioned by Carnegie Hall which explores pulses, cycles, and tonalities inspired by the rhythmic language and counterpoint of the three ritual batá drums. Also featured is a piece by Virelles’s mentor, NEA Jazz Master Henry Threadgill, and music by composer and turntablist Val-Inc. The program opens with León’s propulsive duo for piano and percussion, A la par, performed by Orion Weiss and Ian Rosenbaum.

About the Artist

Cuban-born Tania León is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s next Composer-in-Residence—a post she will hold for two seasons, beginning in September 2023.

Recent premieres include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Modern Ensemble, Jennifer Koh’s project Alone Together, and The Curtis Institute. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others. Upcoming commissions feature a work for the League of American Orchestras, and a work for Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.

A founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers.

Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by New York City Mayor, and the MadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).

León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, The Curtis Institute of Music, Columbia University, Jersey City University, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award, and New York University's 2023 Dorothy Height Award. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Tania’s León’s archive.

Over the last 35 years, more than 20 of León’s works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, including many world and New York premieres. She first conducted at the Hall in 1980, returning in that role with the American Composers Orchestra as co-founder of the Sonidos de las Américas festival, beginning in 1994, and as part of Two Wings: The Music of Black America in Migration, a performance produced by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran, presented as part of Carnegie Hall’s Migrations: The Making of America festival in 2019. In 2009, at the invitation of the late Jessye Norman, she participated in Carnegie Hall’s HONOR! festival, sharing reminiscences of a life in the arts. 

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