Tania León is highly regarded as a composer and conductor, and for her accomplishments as an educator and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Music. In 2022, León was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors. The following year, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s composer-in-residence—a two-year post that began last September. She also holds Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for the 2023–2024 season. She has been awarded the XIX Premio SGAE de la Música Iberoamericana Tomás Luis de Victoria 2023, becoming the first woman to be honored with Spain’s highest composition prize. In 2024, she earned the Distinguished Artist Award from the International Society for the Performing Arts.
In addition to composing, León’s activities include being a founding member and first music director of Dance Theatre of Harlem, founding the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s Community Concert Series, co-founding the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas festivals, serving as new music advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and founding and serving as artistic director of Composers Now. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired León’s archive.
A la par, a powerful duet for piano and a wide range of percussion (including mallet instruments, bells, bottles, and drums of every variety), translates as “going together.” “Think of it as like the rails of a train,” the composer says. “In the distance they look like one. And as they come toward you, they are in sync; if they take a curve, they take it together.” Those rails might as well be her two different musical heritages, moving in sync for the first time. The first movement, dissonant in harmony, jagged in contour, plunges us into a frenzy of rhythm, its unrelenting pulse enlivened by unpredictable accents and metric shifts. In the middle of the eerie, shimmering second movement, a rumba guaguanco emerges from the haze. León gradually builds up a dense polyrhythmic texture that includes an obsessive rumba ostinato in the left hand of the piano, angular chromatic interjections in the right hand, and tricky cross-rhythms in the drums. (No literal appropriation of a folk idiom, this guaguanco has clearly been filtered through a modernist sensibility.) The third movement returns to the propulsive rhythmic drive of the first, now coupled with a gradual accelerando and frantic harmonic stasis.
Excerpted from the original liner notes for Tania León: Indígena on New World Records. © 1994 Composers Recordings, Inc. © 2007 Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. Used by permission.
The composition title, Where Coconuts Fall, gleans its inspiration from … life, and further, an unnerving incident of truly unforgettable impact.
To be startled into the reminder of the impermanence of things—the temporary nature of material existence—and to be jolted into a state of awareness by the tragic, and the poetic as concomitant messengers ... and then to create a kind of beauty in response … that is the alchemy of art, the artist’s gift. It is to be both transformer and transformed. It is to be unrecognizable from the former state, yet uniquely, even obviously familiar in the present one—the one in which the unknown becomes knowable, raising provocatively unanswerable questions.
The composer, Pulitzer Prize winner and NEA Jazz Master Henry Threadgill, wrote Where Coconuts Fall in 2000 while living in India. He would spend the winter season of New York there, writing and refining his latest musical direction through his notoriously prolific compositional output. Spending time with him in Goa while he was developing music for a new ensemble of which I was to be a member, I recall the daily menu of activity: a new piece of music, or a revision of it from the previous day … all before sunrise when the lumbering water buffalo miraculously drifted silently past the front porch, herded with a slender wand of a tree branch held by their shepherd deftly guiding them to the rice paddies to drink and graze. Breakfast: mangoes, papaya, coffee, tea, a rinse, and then rehearsal until lunchtime. Outside was the untamable insistence of the natural world—encroaching imperceptibly, continually reclaiming itself from the temporary delusion of the triumph of materiality.
It was in this environment (barely reconcilable with the fact of a place like New York City existing simultaneously on the same planet) that something happened one day while running an errand on a scooter (a common mode of getting around for Mr. Threadgill): Gravity defeated nature. A coconut fell from a very high palm tree, striking the head of a passenger on the scooter a short distance in front of his own, instantly killing the person. Traffic stalled. Mr. Threadgill, understandably spooked, retired the mission of the errand and cautiously returned home.
Where Coconuts Fall was recorded for the Pi Recordings release Everybodys Mouth’s a Book in 2001, by Mr. Threadgill’s band Make a Move, of which percussionist Dafnis Prieto and myself were members. The reading captured on the recording communicates something of the shock and terror of the tragic event.
David Virelles’s subsequent interpretations of Where Coconuts Fall as a solo piano piece extend and validate the durability of the composition as a vehicle for seemingly endless possibilities of variation and invention. A mobile, adaptable, and modular compositional flow that bestows new revelations with each successive iteration—not only about the musical mechanics, but perhaps the pathos imbued in the composition’s title—is poised to exhibit yet another face in tonight’s performance.
—Brandon Ross
Val Jeanty—also known as Val-Inc—is a Haitian Afrofuturist, drummer, turntablist, and professor at Berklee College of Music. Jeanty is a pioneer of the electronic music sub-genre called Afro- Electronica or Vodou-Electro, incorporating Haitian folkloric rhythms with digital instrumentations by synergistically combining acoustics with electronics, thus the archaic with the postmodern. Jeanty’s Afro-Electronica has been performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and internationally at the Venice Biennale and Berlin’s House of World Cultures. Jeanty is the recipient of various grants and fellowships, including the 2017 Van Lier, 2019 NYSCA/Roulette residency, 2022 NYU/CBA Toulmin, and 2024 United States Artists.
Gerta, which is my late mother’s middle name, is an Afro-Electro composition dedicated to her and her hometown of Saint-Louis du Nord in Haiti.
—Val-Inc
The composition Oro has its roots in the rhythmic cycles, tonalities, timbers, textures, and counterpoint inherent in the three ritual batá drums. These drums carry within them centuries of cultural heritage, echoing across continents and generations. My journey with Oro has been about finding new paths and bypassing oblique references. My intention is to synthesize sources.
The original term Oru encompasses the sacred repertoire of the batá drums. In its symmetry and rhythmic resonance, the word Oro takes a subtle departure, inviting us to experience exploration through tradition.
Collaboration has been at the heart of this work, and I’m thankful to Michael Schlapbach, a bachelor’s student at the Zurich University of the Arts, whose input has been invaluable in shaping certain sonic design aspects of the piece. As you immerse yourself in this music, you’ll encounter electronically transformed sounds sourced from the natural world, reminding us of our intricate connection with the environment. And, of course, none of this would be possible without the artists who embarked with me on this journey. From the virtuosity of Dafnis, Brandon, Rane, Chris, Rashaan, Dabin, and Curtis, to the visual storytelling of Alec, each has played a vital role in bringing Oro to life.
I’m deeply grateful to Tania León and Henry Threadgill for their unwavering dedication to authentic expression. In a world that sometimes prioritizes conformity over creativity, your commitment greatly inspires artists like myself.
I hope this music resonates with you.
—David Virelles