Cuban Tania León, first woman to win the SGAE Iberoamerican Music Prize

December 5, 2023

Cuban-American composer Tania León became the first woman to win the SGAE Iberoamerican Music Prize Tomás Luis de Victoria which, in its XIX edition, recognized her contribution to the enrichment of the musical heritage of Iberoamerican peoples through her creative work.

The award, endowed with 20,000 euros (approximately 22,000 dollars), is considered the highest public recognition for a living composer of the Iberoamerican community, according to a statement released on Monday by the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE) of Spain.

Tania León (1943, Havana), winner of a Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2021 and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2022, was awarded for "her artistic experience that emerges as a paradigm of understanding and intercultural dialogue," according to the jury.

Along with this, the jury recognized "the external and internal exiles that, as a Cuban in the United States, have marked her compositional output of high international recognition, as well as her position as a human being before the vital coordinates through which her trajectory has run."

"I have always been faithful to my philosophy. I grew up in a family that had very different origins, I grew up in a kind of little United Nations," explained the winner who asserted having "that mental seed that the world should be equal for everyone and not emphasize differences so much."

With more than 40 chamber, orchestral, vocal works and a multitude of operas, her way of creating has managed to elevate Latin music in New York: "Europe is the seed of composition, and in the United States very little was known about the Latin American composition career," the artist stated.

Her music is characterized by a modern style of cosmopolitan character, at once complex and expressive, based on the incorporation of rhythmic practices derived from the Latin American diaspora, fused with European techniques in the Caribbean, recalled the SGAE.

Furthermore, her work has always been marked by her great political commitment. Through music she has confronted rejection and misogyny, the organization explained.

"I have always pursued my proposals and when they told me no, I would not let myself be intimidated: I turned my back on them and continued my way," she said in this regard.

León left Cuba at age 24 to immigrate to the United States. Based in New York since 1967, she did not intend to dedicate herself to composition but rather her dream was to be a concert pianist and she trained as a pianist, but she accompanied choreographer Arthur Mitchell in the Dance Theater of Harlem project and thus began "one of the most brilliant and prolific careers in composition in Latin America," highlighted the SGAE.