Time to Time

Tania Justina León was born in Havana, Cuba, on May 14, 1943. She moved to New York City in 1967 and in the early 2000s relocated from Queens to Nyack, New York. Time to Time was co-commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Andris Nelsons, Gewandhauskapellmeister.

The score for Time to Time calls for 2 flutes (2nd doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets (2nd doubling bass clarinet), 2 bassoons (2nd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 3 trumpets in B-flat, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players; crotale, agogos, bell plates, Tibetan bowls, tubular bells, finger cymbals, mini hi-hats, splash cymbal, suspended cymbal, bungkaka bamboo buzzers, sandblocks, guiro, shekere, tambourine, bongos, rototoms, log drum, tom toms, medium djembe, doumbek, conga, zurdo, bass drum), harp, piano, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

Tania León won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in music for her orchestra work Stride, and the following year she was recognized for her contributions to the arts at the 45th annual Kennedy City Honors alongside such luminaries as the Irish rock band U2, singers Gladys Knight and Amy Grant, and actor George Clooney. These honors celebrate a professional career that has spanned, so far, some sixty rich, multidimensional years. Growing up in Havana, León had demonstrated musical talent that led her paternal grandmother to initiate what the composer called in an interview “the Tania project”—her family’s goal of providing her opportunity and expanding her horizons. Biographer Alejandro L. Madrid relates that she was given a toy piano as a child, and the family acquired a full upright piano for her and her brother when she was only five, in spite of her family’s limited financial resources. Already interested in the Western classical music she heard on the radio, León studied piano at Havana’s Carlos Alfredo Peyrellade Conservatory concurrently with her academic studies. By her teenage years she was composing informally, but it was as a pianist that she began attracting attention. She was also organically engaged with the Cuban folk and popular music and dance that she encountered in the city.

León’s childhood corresponded to the politically tumultuous period in Cuba that eventuated in dictator Fulgencio Batista’s ouster and dictator Fidel Castro’s ascent to head of state. After graduating from the conservatory in 1960, she hoped to travel to Paris for study, but for practical reasons she earned a college degree in accounting and got a job in that field. Meanwhile she encountered other young composers and musicians, including the now well-known Paquito D’Rivera and the singer-composer Marta Valdéz, who offered León her first paying job as a musician, but she otherwise performed frequently, playing her own and others’ new works. This gave her much of the experience she needed to work as a professional after moving to New York City in 1967, even as she worked toward her master’s degree in composition at New York University, studying with Ursula Mamlock. In 1969, she was the founding music director of Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem, where she served as composer, arranger, pianist, and conductor.

Although already a seasoned professional on several musical fronts, in 1978 León fulfilled an early dream of studying at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Center, where she joined the conducting seminar and worked with Seiji Ozawa and Leonard Bernstein, with whom she developed a warm friendship. León has conducted orchestras and opera productions throughout Europe as well as in South America, Cuba, Africa, and Asia. In the early 1990s she was named Charles H. Revson Composer Fellow of the New York Philharmonic, working under Kurt Masur, but that role was essentially advisory, leading to no commissions or performances of her music. The Philharmonic’s commission and premiere of Stride could be seen as a long-awaited fulfillment of that role’s promise. León is now also a member of the Philharmonic’s board of directors.

As a teacher, León was longtime member of the faculties of Brooklyn College and City University of New York. She has organized contemporary music festivals and initiatives elevating the profiles of Latin American composers, all while composing for commissions from ensembles and festivals throughout the U.S. and Europe. Her opera Scourge of Hyacinths was commissioned for the Munich Biennale; other commissions include orchestral works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Symphony Orchestra, American Composers Orchestra, and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and pieces for Ensemble Modern and the International Contemporary Ensemble, among others. She was composer-in-residence with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and held Carnegie Hall’s Debs Composer’s Chair in the 2023-24 season.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra performed León’s Stride under Andris Nelsons’ direction at Symphony Hall in January 2024, reprising it a Tanglewood in July 2024. Her works have been featured frequently at Tanglewood, and in 2024 she was director of the Tanglewood Music Center’s Festival of Contemporary Music alongside composer Steven Mackey.

As a composer, pianist, and conductor who has worked extensively with dancers, Tania León’s relationship with musical time has both its abstract/conceptual and its deeply physical facets. In thinking about her new work Time to Time, she writes, “The concept of time, occasionally focusing from one event to another, moving forward, now and then...that was for me a source of inspiration.” As an encapsulation of her ideas, she cites a haiku by the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho (1644-1694), whose poem suggested the title of her piece. León was struck by Basho’s use of natural imagery to mirror broader experience:

From time to time
The clouds give rest
To the moon’s beholders

Gazing at the moon in its bright strangeness is an intense practice; clouds that pass over its face, far from being unwelcome, provide momentary relief from that intensity. Bringing this back to time, the motion of clouds and that of the moon are on two very different time-scales from the viewer’s perspective—one fleeting, the other virtually still. This provides a metaphor for the layering of musical activity in León’s piece.

Time to Time is scored for a medium-sized orchestra with a characteristically large and varied percussion section. In addition to her love of rhythmic nuance, León is known for her rich, imaginative treatment of instrumental color, which often involves highlighting specific instruments in exuberant solo passages. Percussion in Time to Time provide both a subtle sense of pulse and the sense of a constantly shifting sonic landscape. 

From its ethereal percussion opening, single, fluid soloistic threads, beginning with woodwinds and expanding through strings and brass, emerge and gradually coalesce to form a full orchestral tapestry in which those individual threads are obscured. A pause in the middle of the piece gives way to a new texture of discrete, pointed gestures, layered with long, sustained notes. A groove figure, a rhythmic ostinato, blooms in the percussion and resurfaces throughout the orchestra; soloistic lines continue to create energy and flashes of color. The piece ends as it started, percussion followed by a final, free-flowing clarinet solo. It’s as though a new cycle has begun and will carry on somehow, even after we’re no longer hearing it.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.