Cuban-American composer Tania León receives the 19th Tomás Luis de Victoria de Música Iberoamericana Prize awarded by the SGAE.
The Cuban-American composer Tania León (1943, Havana) has won the 19th edition of the Tomás Luis de Victoria Prize for Ibero-American Music, awarded by the SGAE Foundation. With numerous international awards to her credit (including the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2021 for her piece Stride), León becomes the first woman to win this prize, which is endowed with 20,000 euros and is considered the highest public recognition for a living composer in the Ibero-American community.
As can be read on the website of the copyright management organisation, León has declared that she feels “very grateful and excited. Receiving this kind of award is always a surprise. When I picked up the phone, my jaw dropped. Professionally, I would like to highlight the variety of genres that are recognised in this call for entries, and personally, I always remember my grandmother, my beginnings and all my relatives who joined in with an idea and are not here today. They are still alive in me”.
The jury of this edition – made up of the composer (and 2016 Tomás Luis de Victoria Prize winner) Tomás Marco, as well as the musicologists Luis Gago, Isabelle Hernández, Carmen Cecilia Piñero Gil and Álvaro Torrente, who acted as president – has decided to award this prize to the Cuban-American composer in “attention to her artistic experience, which is projected as a paradigm of understanding and intercultural dialogue, together with the external and internal exiles that, as a Cuban in the United States, have marked her compositional production of high international recognition, as well as her position as a human being in the face of the vital coordinates through which her career has unfolded”.
The composer succeeds Harold Gramatges (Cuba, 1996), Xavier Montsalvatge (Spain, 1998), Celso Garrido-Lecca (Peru, 2000), Alfredo del Mónaco (Venezuela, 2002), Joan Guinjoan (Spain, 2004), Marlos Nobre (Brazil, 2005), Antón García Abril (Spain, 2006), Gerardo Gandini (Argentina, 2008), Luis de Pablo (Spain, 2009), Leo Brouwer (Cuba, 2010), Josep Soler (Spain, 2011), Mario Lavista (Mexico, 2013), Alcides Lanza (Argentina, 2014), Xavier Benguerel (Spain, 2015), Tomás Marco (Spain, 2016), Roberto Sierra (Puerto Rico, 2017), Horacio Vaggione (Argentina, 2019) and Leonardo Balada (Spain, 2021).