Grossman Ensemble premieres Tania León's "Ritmicas"
Performance notes:
Tania León's piece "Ritmicas" premiered with the Grossman Ensemble on December 6, 2019.
This is a five-movement work I based on a rhythmic spectrum that creates a rainbow of polyrhythmic inventions emerging from the Son and Guaguancó clave — a key pattern used as a tool for temporal organization and as a ground or rhythmical motive, and which is at the basis of each movement. The clave pattern is a fundamental African derived rhythmic device which consists of the addition of irregular pulses repeated as a persistent structure — ostinato — throughout a piece. This rhythmical tool creates and instills music with a sense of energetic groove and can be found in the music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, throughout the rest of the Caribbean basin, and in Brazil, in Latin America and, in sub-Saharan cultures. Ritmicas was inspired by the legacy and title of a work by Cuban composer, violinist and conductor Amadeo Roldán, who in 1930 wrote the first symphonic pieces to incorporate AfroCuban percussion instruments. The fifth and sixth of Roldán’s Ritmicas, composed around the same time as Edgard Varèse’s Ionization (1929-1931), were among the first works in the Western classical music tradition scored solely for the newly conceived percussion ensemble: an ensemble comprised exclusively of all types of percussion instruments.