The unplanned, unstoppable career of composer Tania León
In the spring of 1967, Tania León won the lottery. Her reward wasn't any cash prize — instead, the 24-year-old budding pianist boarded an airplane just east of her native Havana, bound for Miami. León was one of an estimated 300,000 Cubans who left as refugees on the so-called "Freedom Flights," a program that ran from 1965 to 1973, organized by the U.S. and Cuban governments in a rare cooperative effort.
Although she came from a poor family, with a mother who couldn't read or write, León had rich dreams — as well as the support of a few well-wishers in her community who invested in her talent, including the gift of a piano. From the U.S., a mere stepping stone in her grand plan, she hoped to travel to Paris, where she would continue her studies and launch a career as a concert pianist. But her dream was deferred: As a refugee from Cuba, she learned she was required to stay in the U.S. for five years. She couldn't go to France; she couldn't even return home.
León quickly made her way to New York, where she met the dancer and choreographer Arthur Mitchell, who was busy with a dream of his own. After hearing her play, Mitchell asked León to help him establish the Dance Theatre of Harlem, and encouraged her to compose music for the company. The writing of that first ballet came so instinctively to León that she changed her major at NYU from piano to composition. She has followed it with six more ballets, an opera and a broad range of instrumental and vocal music.
León says she never planned to become a composer, much less one who earned a Pulitzer Prize. She in 2021 for , her orchestral work inspired by Susan B. Anthony's activism and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. and proved that she possessed that skill within her too. And through her 35 years as an educator at the City University of New York and the founding of Composers Now, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and celebrating living composers, she's found ways to reinvest those skills into her field.
