1 - THE BODY IS SPIRITUAL, THE MIND LIKE AN ANIMAL: PALOMA LEÓN: PIANOWORKS,
Ten years ago, at 13, I wrote Étude for Blue Piano in my mom’s Los Angeles apartment, on an electric keyboard she had painted blue. Unbeknownst to me, this was the beginning of a project that would become my life’s work (thus far). Paloma León: Pianoworks, my self-titled LP, coming out in June of 2025, has been in development for ten years. It is not just an anthology of my piano compositions but a tribute to my father, evidence of my survival, and a meditation on the power of memory in music composition.
At 13, it had been a year since my dad died, and therefore, a year since I had a piano lesson. My father, Garby León—a polymath widely and deeply loved by his peers—was a remarkable man. A composer, a concert pianist, a translator, deeply learned, and incredibly difficult. He collaborated with the Beach Boys, played with Iggy Pop during his university days, and, in spite of all his complexity, was an unprecedented light in this world. We loved each other intensely, and even though it will be eleven years this April, I cannot believe he is gone.
(A good visual reference of Garb in his rockstar prime can be found in a collection of photographs from Christine McVie’s (Fleetwood Mac) birthday party, where he was commissioned to assemble an orchestra—and ended up conducting it too. She was the longtime lover of my father’s best friend, Dennis Wilson. He rocked what my stepmother called the “Farrah Fawcett haircut (for men),” was razor-thin, and very handsome)
I’m not going to sugarcoat it—when it came to the piano, he was a whip-cracker. We spent hours in the morning, afternoon, and night grinding out scales, reading pieces, and developing my technique to a very high level. My dad wasn’t a joke and didn’t have much patience for anything less than perfection. He was also persistently frustrated that I wasn’t learning in the traditional way—I think the Suzuki method kept him up at night and he kept me as far away from it as possible. Reading music was never my strong suit, and compared to how I would play, it didn’t always make sense that I wasn’t comprehending music in that way. I would constantly improvise over the repertoire he wanted me to play—I think he almost slapped me when, in my childhood indignation, I suggested that my version of a section in a Beethoven Concerto was better than the original (I don’t blame him)
He sought out these tough-as-nails Russian maestros who had been living in West Hollywood for decades—probably scouting them at Plummer Park, where Eastern European men gather to smoke cigarettes and play chess. I imagine him practically wearing a sign around his neck that read, Whip my kid into shape—she’s baffled by ledger lines, and it’s ruining my life. He was a concert pianist, a musical architect, and came from a generation of composers (primarily forged at Harvard, where Garby received his PhD in composition) who were skeptical of tonal music at large—Schoenberg-lovers who saw the inextricable connection between math and music as not just fact, but doctrine. I, on the other hand, was an out-of-it, seemingly dysgraphic, overly-sensitive, daydreaming gay kid with stomach problems. At our cores, we were very different musicians.
I distinctly remember his no-bullshit way of asking me point-blank if I’d been eating paint chips when he wasn’t looking. And yet, in a confusing tandem with this, he had an unwavering confidence in me—he saw me as something that needed exposure and validation.
Growing up, I thought I was a boy. I dressed like one, looked like one, liked girls. This wouldn’t have mattered much in 2008 Los Angeles, but my parents sent me to an overwhelmingly Russian school in West Hollywood, where I was to play every. talent. show. He would buy me white Calvin Klein suits and Justin Bieber-y Puma high-top shoes—honestly, I think, just to piss everybody off. I would perform in a fedora and suit, showing up the Russian kids with my Beethoven and Brahms. “House of flying fingers,” he called me.The attention wasn’t always positive—a group of Russian mothers once tried to ban me from talent shows because of my gayness (not kidding)—but my father saw it as a test of perseverance and had no interest in letting me lay low. He was a natural PTA charmer, a people guy, a Hollywood hustler and studio shark, he saw the whole thing as entertainment gold, probably. During my (regrettable) child actor phase, he beamed when my first agent said, “She’s like the next Ellen DeGeneres!” Alas, I never got any roles because I refused to play “girl” parts. I couldn’t even get cast as a sandwich boy extra in a Subway commercial because, as everyone knows, you must have a dick to be sandwich boy extra And, I must say, I mean no offense to the Russian and Ukrainian community of West Hollywood—many of my teachers were from this background, and I was often met with formidable kindness and support during some tough times at school.
Anyway, after my dad passed away, I was left with the discipline and training, but I now had this space where I could finally engage my compositional imagination. At first, my rebellion was childish—sometimes, I’d just bang on the piano in adolescent fits of rage. But over time, something more interesting emerged. Letting my hands create strange shapes led me to strange chords—ones I did not yet have the terminology for. I would simply play, and the music spoke for itself. I wove motifs together that resembled what I had picked up in my repertoire. I once confided in my stepmother that I thought I was stealing, and she said, “No, that’s composing.”
There were times when the absence of my father’s structure left me feeling listless. Improvisation is a different process than learning sheet music, but I realised it was a skill that needed to be defined. If I wanted structure, I would have to remember my improvisations. I would make something up using all registers of the piano and then recall it exactly as I had played it—it felt nearly autonomous, like a plant doing photosynthesis, the music was generated and then stored in my body itself.
To be clear, I have written a lot of music for the piano, and I have never written any of it down. No one can play it but me. And I can—exactly the same way, over and over.
Playing the piano became a kinesthetic and deeply emotional practice. My fingers expressed what felt inexpressible anywhere else. I thought of the keyboard intuitively, as if invisible hands were shaping melodies before I even touched the keys. I would quickly form melodies and hear their resolutions. It became more than this—it led me to profound realisations about my emotional states and my inner geography.
Étude for a Blue Piano was the first of these fully realised, fully remembered pieces—a punchy, animated work filled with trills and vivacious textures, singing with confidence and humour. But then, almost out of nowhere, it shifted completely—what took me years to realise was a deeply sad melody inspired by Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Major.
That shift made me realise: I was grieving, heavily.
Muscle memory is imperative for a good classical musician, but this was different—I wasn’t just recalling notes; I was composing entire pieces in real time and holding onto them. My mind was a minefield, and it was so easy to distrust. To this day, it can still be my worst enemy.
I realised my ability to compose was in my body. My dad wrote a poem; the first two lines are:
The body is spiritual
The mind like an animal