The Graduate Center Music Program is pleased to share that GC Faculty member and composer Tania León has been commissioned by the University of Central Arkansas to write an opera in collaboration with Henry Louis Gates Jr. as her librettist for the upcoming 60th Anniversary of the “Little Rock Nine” events of 1957. The opera, titled Little Rock Nine, will be based on the historic moment when nine black students enrolled in what had been an all-white high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded a grant to the University of Central Arkansas’s College of Fine Arts and Communication in support of the commission, development, and premiere of Little Rock Nine. Professor León has been an integral part of the composition program at The Graduate Center, CUNY: we celebrate her work as composer and conductor, and congratulate her on this milestone achievement. Professor León, this new commission, and her collaboration with Henry Louis Gates Jr. was recently featured in the New York Times, in an article titled “An Opera About Little Rock Integration, With Libretto by Henry Louis Gates Jr.”

For more information about  Tania León, see: http://www.tanialeon.com/