Tania León’s orchestra work Stride was composed on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, premiered in 2020, and won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music. By design and circumstance, the piece is a grand coming-together of many byways and interests found throughout the composer’s life, the most obvious of which is geographical and centered on New York City, Léon’s home since 1967. Her connections to the city were further solidified with her appointment as Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2023–2024 season. For her achievements in the arts over her lifetime, León was celebrated at the 45th Kennedy Center Honors in 2022.
León’s musical talent was encouraged by her paternal grandmother in what the composer called “the Tania Project”—her family’s goal of providing her with opportunity and expanding her horizons. León studied piano at Havana’s Peyrellade Conservatory, graduating in 1960. After moving to New York, she worked toward her master’s degree in composition with Ursula Mamlok at New York University while simultaneously becoming founding music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem. In 1978, she fulfilled a longtime ambition by joining the conducting seminar at Tanglewood, where she worked with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa.
León was a longtime member of the faculties of Brooklyn College and City University of New York. She was the Composer Fellow of the New York Philharmonic from 1993 to 1997, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas festivals, and founded Composers Now in 2010. She has conducted orchestras and opera productions throughout Europe as well as in South America, Cuba, Africa, and Asia. In fall 2023, León became composer-in-residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Among many major commissions are the opera Scourge of Hyacinths for the Munich Biennale and those from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, and International Contemporary Ensemble. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has commissioned León to write a new orchestra work for a future season.
Though rich with influence, León’s musical voice is her own, developed through a lifetime of encounter and insight. Given her immersion in the dance world from early in her career, propulsion, movement, and a sense of narrative trajectory infuse her work. A nuanced exploration of instrumental color is also fundamental, as can be heard in the layered orchestral textures of Stride. Stride was commissioned as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19, which marked the centennial of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing a woman’s right to vote. León dedicated the piece to suffragist Susan B. Anthony while tacitly acknowledging the strength of the women in her own life (her grandmother, her piano and composition teachers) who have allowed her to become herself a powerful influence on younger generations facing ossified societal expectations.
Stride begins outside of time, without pulse, with strings in harmonics and pizzicato creating a sonic scrim. Trumpets add disjunct fanfares, encouraging percussion, and the piece unfolds through contrasting, active interplay of orchestral colors. This narrative idea of different streams and densities of activity acts as a metaphor for human interaction in all its variety. A musical characteristic of many of León’s pieces (e.g., her orchestral piece Horizons), the effect is achieved both through very detailed notation and through brief pockets of incompletely defined, quasi-improvised fragments for individual players. Under this seemingly conflicting activity a slow, undeniable, but not quite regular pulse is maintained, driving to a climax. Suspended again in time, the music highlights individual voices and dialogues, brief virtuoso passages for contrabassoon, flutes, piccolo, oboes, percussion, and violins. The irregular tread of pizzicato double basses with sandblocks returns along with the trumpet fanfares and bursts of percussion. Tubular bells have the final say, suggesting celebration—but not necessarily conclusion.
—Robert Kirzinger
When the New York Philharmonic reached out to me about writing for this project celebrating the 19th Amendment, I confess I only knew about it generally. I started doing research, reading Susan B. Anthony’s biography, her statements. It was tremendous to see the inner force that she had. Then I started looking for a title before starting the piece—not the way I usually do it. The word “stride” reflected how I imagined her way of not taking “no” for an answer. She kept pushing and pushing and moving forward, walking with firm steps until she got the whole thing done. That is precisely what I mean by Stride. Stride has some of what, to me, are American musical influences, or at least American musical connotations. For example, there is a section where you can hear the horns with the wa-wa plunger, reminiscent of Louis Armstrong, getting that growl. It doesn’t have to be indicative of any particular skin tone; it has to do with the American spirit. When I discovered American music, Louis Armstrong actually was the first sound that struck me. When I moved here, the only composers I knew anything about were Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin. The night I arrived at Kennedy Airport, I was picked up by a Cuban couple from the Bronx, who allowed me to stay on their sofa. I looked at the stairs outside of their building, and I started crying “Maria!” They were confused, and I explained that in Cuba I’d heard the song by Leonard Bernstein. I later worked with Bernstein, and we were very close in his later years. When I first arrived here I couldn’t speak English … but I knew how to say “Maria.”
—Tania León
About 1930, Maurice Ravel found himself simultaneously with two commissions for piano concertos, one from his longtime interpreter Marguerite Long, the other from Paul Wittgenstein, a concert pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. Ravel worked on both commissions at the same time, but the results were quite different. The G-Major Concerto—composed for Ravel’s own use, but eventually given to Marguerite Long when Ravel realized he was too ill to perform it himself—is a three-movement concerto that is part brilliant, part ravishingly melancholy. The Concerto for the Left Hand, perhaps inevitably, is altogether more serious, one of the most serious of all the works of that urbane master.
Paul Wittgenstein was a remarkable member of a remarkable Viennese family. He was the brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who also possessed considerable musical talent. Paul had barely begun his concert career when he was called into the Austrian reserves in 1914. Only a few months later he was wounded, and his right arm had to be amputated. After being captured by the Russians (when the army hospital in which he was located was overrun), Wittgenstein was exchanged as an invalid and returned to Vienna, where he resumed his concert career in the season of 1916–1917. He quickly made a name for himself as a pianist with only one arm, and he induced many leading composers to write substantial works for him in all the genres—chamber and orchestral—that made use of a piano. Among those who responded to his requests were Richard Strauss, Franz Schmidt, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Paul Hindemith, and, most famously, Ravel.
There are few sources of music for the left hand alone to which Ravel might have gone to study the problems involved, among them Saint-Saëns’s six studies for the left hand and Leopold Godowsky’s transcriptions for left hand alone of the Chopin etudes. He might also have seen Brahms’s mighty transcription for piano left-hand of J. S. Bach’s D-Minor Chaconne for unaccompanied violin and Scriabin’s Prelude and Nocturne. But for the most part Ravel was on his own, especially as he wanted the piano part to be as full and active as if it were intended for a pianist who had both hands. The result, needless to say, is a fantastically difficult work perfectly gauged for the shape of the left hand (which can have, for example, a rather large stretch between the thumb and index finger in the higher pitch levels and the upper ends of chords, an arrangement that would be reversed if the piece were conceived for right hand).
Ravel once discussed his two piano concertos with critic and musicologist M. D. Calvocoressi. Of the Left-Hand Concerto he commented: “In a work of this sort, it is essential to avoid the impression of insufficient weight in the sound-texture, as compared to a solo part for two hands. So I have used a style that is more in keeping [than that of the lighter G-Major Concerto] with the consciously imposing style of the traditional concerto.”
The concerto is in one long movement divided into Lento and Allegro sections. Beginning low and dark in strings and contrabassoon, a long orchestral section avoids the first appearance of the soloist until a climax brings the piano in with a cadenza designed to show right off the bat that limiting the conception to a single hand does not prevent extraordinary virtuosity. Ravel describes this as being “like an improvisation.” It is followed by what Ravel called a “jazz section,” exploiting ideas he had picked up during his visit to America. “Only gradually,” he noted, “is one aware that the jazz episode is actually built up from the themes of the first section.” The level of virtuosity required by the soloist increases—if that is possible—to the end. Ravel rightly considered this, his last completed large-scale work, a supreme piece of illusion. Who can tell, just from listening, the nature of the self-imposed restriction under which he completed his commission?
—Steven Ledbetter
Igor Stravinsky first thought of the visual image that would become the basis of his ballet Le sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring)—a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death—while he was working on The Firebird. Although Serge Diaghilev, who commissioned the work for his own Ballets Russes, liked the idea and suggested Stravinsky go ahead with it, the composer was sidetracked by the musical idea that turned into Petrushka, which got written first. Then, in July 1911, Stravinsky met with the designer Nicholas Roerich on the estate of the Princess Tenichev in Smolensk. There they laid out the entire plan of action and the titles of the dances. Roerich began designing his backdrops and costumes after some originals in the Princess’s collection.
In fall 1911, Stravinsky rented an apartment in Clarens, Switzerland, and began to work at a muted upright piano, starting with the “Auguries of Spring,” the section immediately following the slow introduction with that wonderfully crunchy polychord (consisting of an F-flat chord on the bottom and an E-flat seventh chord on top) in eighth-note rhythms with carefully unpredictable stresses. The music of Part I went quickly; by January 7, 1912, he had finished it, including most of the orchestration. Then he began serious work on Part II at the beginning of March.
Rehearsals began nearly six months before the performance, sandwiched in between the tour commitments of the company. The choreography had been entrusted to Vaslav Nijinsky, who had made a sensation dancing the title role of Petrushka, but whose talents as a choreographer were raw. Atypically, Stravinsky attended very few rehearsals until just before the premiere, which took place on May 29, 1913, and which was one of the greatest scandals in the history of music. There had been little hint of it beforehand; at the dress rehearsal, attended by a large crowd of invited musicians (including Debussy and Ravel) and critics, everything had gone smoothly. But at the performance, the noise in the audience began almost as soon as the music started. Stravinsky left the hall early, in a rage, though he never forgot the imperturbability of the conductor, Pierre Monteux, who continued “apparently impervious and as nerveless as a crocodile ... through to the end.”
Backstage, Diaghilev was having the house lights flipped on and off in an attempt to quiet the audience. Nijinsky stood just offstage shouting numbers to the dancers to keep everything together. After the performance, Stravinsky related, they were “excited, angry, disgusted and … happy.” Diaghilev recognized, with the impresario’s instinct for publicity, that the evening’s events, however frustrating they may have been for the performers and the composer, were worth any amount of advertising. Though opening night did not constitute a real setback for the ballet, the real success came almost a year later, when Monteux conducted the first concert performance of the score outside of Russia (Koussevitzky had given a performance in Moscow in February). This time the triumph was total, and the composer was carried from the hall on the shoulders of the crowd and borne through the Place de la Trinité.
No single musical work written in the 20th century has exercised so profound and far-reaching an effect as The Rite of Spring. Though Stravinsky’s advanced, dissonant harmonies probably attracted the most attention at first, it is the rhythms of Le sacre that continue to challenge and inspire. Critics once railed that this composition signified the destruction of all that the word “music” had meant. Composers were overwhelmed, and had to come to grips with it. Stravinsky himself never wrote another piece remotely like it; the grandeur, the color, the energy of Le sacre have never been surpassed. “I was guided by no system whatever in Le sacre du printemps,” the composer wrote. “I had only my ear to help me. I heard and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which Le sacre passed.”
—Steven Ledbetter