Tania León's accomplishments as composer, conductor, and educator keep her in constant demand. Born in Havana, Cuba, she has lived in New York City for more than twenty years. In 1969, within a year of her arrival in the United States, Ms. León met Arthur Mitchell, who invited her to join the Dance Theatre of Halem as its first music director and founder of its music department, music school, and orchestra, a position she held until 1980. In September 1992, she traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa, with the DTH, the first multi-racial arts group to perform and teach in that country in modern times. This tour was the focus of a segment on León by Eugenia Zukerman on CBS's “Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt” in February 1993.
Ms. León's recent notable conducting engagements have been with the New York Philharmonic during its celebration of composer Manuel de Falla, the Metropolitan Opera, the Gewandhaus Orchestra of Leipzig, the Johannesburg Symphony, the Beethovenhalle Orchestra of Bonn, the Louisville Orchestra, the Cabrillo Music Festival, the New World Symphony, and the Netherlands Wind Ensemble. Ms. León studied conducting with Laszlo Halasz and coached with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa in the Tanglewood Conducting Program.
Tania León was appointed Revson Composer Fellow by the New York Philharmonic in January 1993, a three-year post in which she advised Music Director Kurt Masur on contemporary music. In 1996 she was named New Music Advisor of the Philharmonic. She is also artistic advisor of Meet the Composer's New Residencies program.
As a composer, Tania León has received numerous commissions, including Scourge of Hyacinths, a chamber opera with libretto based on a play by Wole Soyinka, which won the BMW prize for best composition at the 1994 Munich Biennale for New Music Theatre. Indígena, a CD of her chamber music, was released on CRI in 1994. A CD including her works Batá and Carabalí, with the Louisville Orchestra, was released in 1995 on First Edition Records. Her music has also been recorded by Albany Records, Newport Classics, Leonarda, and Mode.
She has received awards for her compositions from the New York State Council on the Arts, ASCAP, CINTAS, the National Endowment for the Arts, Meet The Composer, Chamber Music America, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has received a MacArthur Foundation residency at Yaddo and a Rockefeller Foundation residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy. Additional awards include the NYU Distinguished Alumni Award and recognition in the Latinas Abiendo Camino's Women of Hope program.
Ms. León is Professor of Music at Brooklyn College, where she has taught since 1985. She is also composer-in- residence at the New School in New York City. She gave master classes at the Hamburg Musikschule in 1995, and was Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University in February 1994 and Visiting Professor of Composition at Yale University for the spring of 1993.
Web: http://www.artswire.org/aco/index.html (2004)