Taking a break from bawdy musical rounds, for this week’s blog I listened with fascination to Tania Leon’s piece Indígena. It was exciting listening to an unknown composer, equally this piece has an excited feel to it. While it starts almost cartoonishly, the piece takes a more serious and urgent feel.
Tania León (b. 1943, Havana) is a Cuban-American composer, conductor, and pianist who has composed a large variety of works including operas, dances and ballets, orchestral works, as well as instrumental pieces for ensembles and soloists. León had originally studied and prepared for a career as a concert pianist, however after moving from Havana to New York City she found an opportunity to work as a composer an arranger and developed her her style and language while immersed in the cultural hot-spot of New York’s music and dance scenes.
The pice I chose for this blog entry is titled Indígena, and it was composed by León in 1991. The piece is written for a custom ensemble of thirteen musicians, including woodwinds, strings, piano, and a single percussionist.
This blog post will focus on some impressions on the listening experience of the piece rather than a detailed analysis. For a detailed analysis of Indígena, as well as a detailed biography and comprehensive review of León’s compositional output and style see Spinazzola (2006).
The first impressions of the piece is that there is a lot going on in all aspects of the written work. The piece begins with a flurry of features, with nearly all instruments having a dedicated passage of solo time with abrupt interruptions. A wide range of what might be called “extended techniques” are present for nearly all instruments, and these are used to a great extent to communicate the programatic nature of the work: what we’re a hearing are chaotic conversations in a busy communal environment.
Rhythmic patterns play a very prominent role in this piece. We hear heavily accented, angular jumps across many of the instrument groups which create a strong rhythmic focus on these passages, even if the harmonic intentions remain ambiguous. Furthermore, the B section of the piece contains unison rhythmic patterns across most of the woodwinds and strings, which serve as a sort of clave for the featured piano solo.
This is a very interesting piece by a composer who has been able to effectively pack a myriad of technique and resources into this composition, but all exclusively at the service of the composition itself. I cannot recommend Spinazzola’s (2006) analysis of this work enough which, although some of the harmonic technical analysis went into very academic detail, it breaks down many of the intentions of the composer in both style and technique.
References: 1. Spinazzola, James, "An introduction to the music of Tania León and a conductor's analysis of Indígena" (2006). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3326 Recording: León, T., Continuum, The Western Wind. Indígena. New York: Anthology of Recorded Music. 2007.