Tania León's Stride: A Polyrhythmic Life

Description

Acclaimed composer, sought-after conductor, esteemed educator, tireless advocate for the arts—Tania León's achievements encompass but also stretch far beyond contemporary classical music. Alejandro L. Madrid draws on oral history, archival work, and ethnography to offer the first in-depth biography of the artist. Breaking from a chronological account, Madrid looks at León through the issues that have informed and defined moments in her life and her professional works. León's words become a starting ground—but also a counterpoint—to the accounts of the people in her orbit. What emerges is more than an extraordinary portrait of an artist's journey. It is a story of how a human being reacts to the challenges thrown at her by history itself, be it the Cuban revolution or the struggle for civil and individual rights. Nuanced and multifaceted, Tania León's Stride looks at the life, legacy, and milieu that created and sustained one of the most important figures in American classical music. |List of Figures ix List of Music Examples xi Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Notes on a Biographical Counterpoint 1 Chapter 1 Tonic: The House on Salud Street 11 Chapter 2 Modulation and Displacement: cubana de adentro . . . cubana de afuera 33 Chapter 3 Syncopation and Color: Adapting to New Life Rhythms 59 Chapter 4 Direction: Leading in Music, Leading in Life 93 Chapter 5 Voice: Style and Idea in the Music of Tania León 126 Chapter 6 Canon: Representation, Identity, and Legacy 166 Epilogue Tania León's Stride: An Echo that Reaches Our Ears 181 Appendix A List of Works 185 Appendix B Tania León's Life 193 Notes 203 Bibliography 229 Index 241 | "There is incredible beauty and power in the way this book attends to aesthetics and artists with rigor and care. What sets it apart are Madrid's stunning interviews conducted over several years with León and her family, peers, and students. An essential document about an extraordinary artist."—Alexandra T. Vazquez, author of Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music "Alejandro L. Madrid is one of the leading musicologists of our time working on contemporary classical and experimental music, and his wide-ranging narrative on the life and works of the composer, pianist, and conductor Tania León perfectly matches her cosmopolitan outlook and incisive creative practice. León knew and worked with many of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and Madrid's intricate 'contrapuntal' dialogue with his subject shows in exquisite detail how and why Tania León has exercised an incalculable impact on the expressive culture of our time."—George E. Lewis, author of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music |Alejandro L. Madrid is a professor of musicology at Cornell University. He is the author of the award winning In Search of Julián Carrillo and Sonido 13 and coauthor of Danzón: Circum-Caribbean Dialogues in Music and Dance.