Tania León: Color, African-American Culture, and Becoming an American Composer

• In Event: Music and Afro-Latin American Studies

Abstract

Cuban-American composer Tania León immigrated to the United States in 1967. A few years after settling in her new country she became music director of Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theater Harlem. Holding this post for more than ten years —during the more difficult moments of her adaptation to U.S. life— allowed her not only to launch her career as a composer and conductor but also to establish long-standing professional relationships and friendships with outstanding members of the African-American community. This led her to work as music director for Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater, the Broadway revival of The Wiz, and to collaborate with Marian Anderson and Geoffrey Holder through the 1970s and 1980s. By exploring León’s experience of blackness in Cuba before and after the revolution and her participation in these African-American networks in the United States vis-à-vis her well-known reticence to be labeled an Afro-Cuban or African-American composer, this paper explores the complex ways in which contradictory experiences of race were essential in her finding an artistic voice, making sense of U.S. identity, and eventually becoming an American composer. I argue that by becoming aware of the African-American experience León was able to find a niche within U.S. culture that she could claim as hers but also she became especially sensitive to the shortcomings of identity politics in U.S. everyday life.

Author

• Alejandro L Madrid, Cornell University