Tania León embodies multiculturalism in her life as well as her music: Born in Havana, she traces her ancestry to Spain, Africa, France, and China, and identifies as an American composer in the most inclusive sense. After immigrating to the United States in 1967, León rose to prominence as a founding member of the Dance Theater of Harlem. Subsequent high-profile gigs with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, and New York Philharmonic—as well as her advocacy work with Composers Now, the organization she founded in 2010—have made her a leading voice on the city’s new-music scene. The current holder of Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair, León won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for her orchestral work Stride, a characteristically propulsive tribute to Susan B. Anthony and other pathbreaking women.
Composed in 1991, Indígena (Indigenous Person) was the long-ripening fruit of León’s Cuban homecoming in 1979 and her ensuing quest to establish her identity, both social and musical. In her words, the score pulses with “the sounds of my neighborhood, the conversations I used to listen to.” Near the beginning, the wind instruments take turns imitating the speech patterns of people she encountered in Cuba; they consort with complex polyrhythms derived from Cuban dances like the montuno and guajira. León’s score is stylistically polyglot, blending elements of folk, jazz, and concert-hall music. One section evokes the cross-cultural fervor of the Afro-Cuban santería religion, another the revelry of comparsa street musicians during Carnival, and another her plane taking off from José Martí Airport in Havana. Such programmatic allusions extend to minute details like the pair of porcelain mugs that enter midway through Indígena, recalling the improvised percussion instruments that León’s family played around the dinner table in her childhood.
(transcr. Yvar Mikhashoff in cooperation with Charles Schwobel)
One of America’s archetypal musical “mavericks,” Arkansas-born Conlon Nancarrow was as radical in his politics as he was in music. After fighting in the Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War alongside other members of the Communist Party, he spent the rest of his life in political exile in Mexico City. Like Henry Cowell, another pioneering experimentalist with whom he is often bracketed, Nancarrow relentlessly pushed the envelope of musical language and practice. Inspired by Cowell’s book New Musical Resources, a locus classicus of avant-garde ideas and techniques, he purchased a player piano and a roll-punching machine in 1947 and used them to compose several-dozen fiendishly complex studies reflecting his belief that “time is the last frontier of music.”
Beneath its easygoing, easy-to-listen-to surface, Study No. 7 is one of the more formidably arcane pieces in Nancarrow’s collection. Both it and Study No. 6, to be heard later on the program, are organized according to the medieval concept of isorhythm, a term applied to the simultaneous but unsynchronized appearance of recurring rhythmic and melodic patterns whose interactions are governed by precise mathematical ratios. The resulting sonic layer cake twists and turns unpredictably in a continuous process of shapeshifting. Yvar Mikhashoff’s chamber ensemble transcription of Study No. 7 clarifies the music’s intricate textures and highlights its quirky lyricism, while preserving the almost jazzy vitality of the original player piano version.
Nancarrow’s music wears its mathematical intricacy lightly. The blues-flavored Study No. 6 features what scholar-composer Kyle Gann calls a “cowboy” melody set against a stuttering ostinato bass line that changes tempo every four notes. The formal name for this procedure is “tempo canon,” and the piece illustrates Nancarrow’s concept of “temporal dissonance” among layers of music moving at different speeds. Such “clashes of tempo carry my music,” he explained, “not the fact of canon, not pitch imitation.”
Study No. 12 is infused with the rhythms, melodies, and arpeggiated figurations of flamenco guitar music. Watching the player piano keys respond at lightning speed to the punch-card–like perforations in the original piano roll (as one can do on YouTube) is fascinating. Nancarrow claimed that he didn’t “have any obsession” with making his music “unplayable” and that “a few of my pieces could be played quite easily.” The “Flamenco Study” is not among them.
A native of South Africa, Andile Khumalo studied at Columbia University with French composer Tristan Murail, a pioneer of spectral music—music based on the intrinsic acoustical properties of sound (its physical spectra) rather than the manipulation of pitches. In his own work, Khumalo draws on his ethnic heritage to explore what he calls the Nguni people’s “sense of existential spirituality through sound.” Invisible Self, which Ensemble intercontemporain premiered last year in Paris, reflects his search for an African identity, both individual and collective. It was partly inspired by the music of traditional African instruments such as the amadinda (Ugandan xylophone) and shekere (Yoruba gourd), and the Xhosa bow music of South Africa.
Invisible Self is a work for piano with ensemble. Though the piano is the central object, it is not viewed differently from the whole ensemble, which is the metaphorical representation of the environment in which the object finds itself. The main musical object of the piece gets more and more pulled apart by the environment, or as the material continues to develop itself over time, it adapts or pulls the environment into itself. Each time it is stretched by the environment, its inner layers are revealed. This process gives an illusion of going deeper into the soul or core identity of this musical object. As it does so, the “true self” or “inner self” seems to highlight the original self (as perceived at the start of the piece) as a distorted version of the inner self. The piece was inspired by the tension between the “migrant” Africans and Africans within South Africa that led to the xenophobic attacks that have dominated the South African social landscape in recent years. Of course one asks, what is a migrant African, in Africa? And according to whom do we define foreignness or the “other” as Africans in Africa? ... In short, the work is about identity—how we perceive who we are, based on what people see versus who we are, based on our internal self.
—Andile Khumalo
A native of New Orleans who studied in England, Turkey, and France, Christopher Trapani blends a cornucopia of styles and techniques in a spicy musical jambalaya. His extensive catalog ranges from settings of poetry by Constantine P. Cavafy and prose by Rebecca Solnit to instrumental chamber and orchestral works for sundry traditional and not-so-traditional ensembles. Scored for 13 players, no window without a wall pays homage to the late avant-garde trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, who predicted that his “fourth world” synthesis of European, African, and Indian traditions would lead to “the coffee-colored classical music of the future.” Trapani notes that Hassell was partial to the sound of the Eventide harmonizer, which “turned his restrained Harmon mute lines into wide waves of parallel motion.”
A microtonal rendition of this Harmon effect can be heard about five minutes into no window without a wall, against a harmonic palette colored by the harp (with certain strings detuned by a quarter-tone) and bowed strings that buzz with aluminum foil, against the backdrop of a shifting arsenal of “exotic” percussion: tabla, batá, shekere, bongos, almglocken, and (later) berimbau. Interlocked polyrhythms, inspired by Cuban clave and African timeline patterns, are heard constantly throughout the piece, first in softly alternating brushstrokes that underpin a gradually emerging microtonal mode, fragmented melodies shared by horn and cello, then oboe d’amore and viola. Wind multiphonics and untempered piano harmonics lend a metallic glint to the modal lines that eventually align with a series of descending dense treble chords. A coda featuring a tuned gong, harp multiphonics, and the berimbau offers a brief glimpse of another “possible music” full of rebounding attacks and accumulating resonance.
—Christopher Trapani
This is a five-movement work I based on a rhythmic spectrum that creates a rainbow of polyrhythmic inventions emerging from theSonandGuaguancó clave—a key pattern used as a tool for temporal organization and as a ground or rhythmical motive, and which is at the basis of each movement. The clave pattern is a fundamental African-derived rhythmic device which consists of the addition of irregular pulses repeated as a persistent structure—ostinato—throughout a piece. This rhythmical tool creates and instills music with a sense of energetic groove and can be found in the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, throughout the rest of the Caribbean basin, and in Brazil, Latin America, and sub-Saharan cultures.
Rítmicas was inspired by the legacy and title of a work by Cuban composer, violinist, and conductor Amadeo Roldán, who in 1930 wrote the first symphonic pieces to incorporate Afro-Cuban percussion instruments. The fifth and sixth of Roldán’s Rítmicas, composed around the same time as Edgard Varèse’s Ionisation(1929–1931), were among the first works in the Western classical music tradition scored solely for the newly conceived percussion ensemble: an ensemble that comprises all types of percussion instruments.
—Tania León
Program notes by Harry Haskell.