Our final post in Experimental/Avant-Garde music week is about Margaret Leng Tan, who I can barely even use words to describe.
Born in Singapore, she started playing piano at the age of six, and won a scholarship to Julliard when she was sixteen, where in 1971 she became the first woman to ever complete a Doctorate of Musical Arts there. How’re those for some fucking credentials?
Her training was in classical concert piano, but my sneaking suspicion is that she found it a bit boring. So she then went on to playing prepared piano, which is where you put weird shit inside of the piano (nuts, bolts, bits of wood, matchbox cars, Woody Allen’s teeth…) and then either play it the usual way, with the keys, or reach inside and pluck the strings.
Actually, plucking the strings might be called something else. But she definitely got into using some pomo methodologies. And THEN, she met John Cage, and worked with him for the last eleven years of his life. If you’re unfamiliar with John Cage, here is a sentence from wikipedia for you: “A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde and, in the opinion of many, the most influential American composer of the 20th century.”
He’s kind of a big deal.
So after he died, Margaret Leng Tan toured around performing his work, which is legendary for its difficulty. A lot of it is so atonal and dadaistic that I don’t think it was really even meant to be performed. And then, one day in 1993, she wandered into a shop selling toy pianos and picked one up. A toy piano is different from a regular piano because, well, it’s a toy. They’re usually tiny, and thus a lot higher pitched, and often much more difficult to persuade to hold their tuning. And Dr. Margaret Leng Tan can play the absolute living shit out of them.
The toy piano has a way of making the texture of the sound as important as the melody and rhythm. In an orchestra, the piano is often classified as a percussion instrument, and when Margaret Leng Tan plays the toy piano, it’s hard to forget this. You can hear the clack of her fingers on the keys, the sound of the hammers striking the strings– a wonderful cacophony of wood, metal, and plastic– as all of the elements of the toy piano clank together to produce its characteristic tinkling notes. Unexpectedly, in MLT’s hands, listening to the toy piano can be a more haunting and sensuous experience than listening to a “real” piano.
Here’s her playing a song you may have heard of, “Eleanor Rigby”:
There’s a recording of this on her album The Art of the Toy Piano, which is one of my personal favorites.
If you want to see or hear more of her insane, wonderful piano playing, check out the documentary Sorceress of the New Piano, of which you can see a preview here.
Tags: avant-garde, margaret leng tan, toy piano, video
