BY DELIA BARTLE
Described as ‘Queen of the Toy Piano’, Margaret Leng Tan is a revolutionary artist who pushes the boundaries of sound as we know it. Performing on instruments ranging from pianos to tin cans and dog bowls, she has played at international festivals including the UnCaged Toy Piano Festival in New York and the Singapore International Arts Festival. Originally, the toy piano was considered an unconventional instrument and few serious works featured it. Tan herself has arranged songs and commissioned pieces which have brought the small but mighty toy piano to the forefront of the avant-garde.
“I started piano when I was six because I wanted to very much,” Tan recalls.
“Since I was starting school the same year, my parents wanted to wait, but I blackmailed them by saying I wouldn’t go to school unless they gave me piano lessons.”
After winning the Singapore-Malaysia Piano Competition at the age of 16, Tan went on to study at The Juilliard School of Music in New York. She’s explored all imaginable types of piano since – playing not only the normal piano, but also the strings of the piano, prepared piano (placing nuts, bolts and screws between the strings to alter tonal quality), and even bowed piano, in which she uses fishing line to bow the piano strings.
Her New York residence is currently home to a collection of 27 toy pianos and three Steinway pianos, with an entire room dedicated to housing the piano family. The toy piano was invented in 1872, rising to prominence in the 1920s as an exciting new instrument. It then lay forgotten as a child’s toy until nearly thirty years later when famous American avant-garde composer John Cage composed his ‘Suite for the Toy Piano’. Cage became Tan’s mentor in 1981, and her fascination with the instrument began when she heard his ‘Suite for Toy Piano’.
“It is so charming, and at the same time very sophisticated and technically challenging to the performer. It’s the first ever serious piece of music composed for the toy piano, and that’s how I fell in love with the instrument,” she says.
Tan’s musical lineage is a timeline of the avant-garde trailblazers. Her mentor John Cage learnt from Henry Cowell, who composed pieces to be played on the strings of the piano as early as 1920. French Dada artist Marcel Duchamp was a close friend of Cage, and the pair often discussed musical ideas over a game of chess. Duchamp redefined the notion of ‘readymade’ objects, items that were simply beautiful and natural sculptures in themselves. Cage went a step further, digging up hubcaps from scrapyard cars and turning them into percussion instruments.
“I’m just part of this junk tradition, if you can call it that,” Tan laughs.
“The toy piano is just one step above junk…I mean, it’s a toy, right? It’s the high end of the junk market. I’m a junk practitioner.”
So how does one read notation that’s essentially written for junk instruments?
“When you’re writing a new language, you make up your own symbols and devise a way of making it very clear for the performer. One work uses a metal chopstick and a coffee can, and you either hit it on the edge of the rim, or in the centre of the can. So you just write a different symbol to show where you want it hit, which creates different kinds of sounds.”
Art music has endless possibilities. It’s accessible, breaking down the distinction between high art and low art. It does this by eliminating the difference between art that serves an aesthetic purpose and art that is functional. Art music also has the power to speak to people of all ages, rekindling childhood memories for many. Tan’s album ‘The Art of the Toy Piano’ has been her most popular, and she feels this is because toy instruments capture the imagination.
“No two coffee cans sound alike. Now every time I finish a can of coffee, I don’t throw it out, because they all make a different sound! Soon, I’ll have a whole coffee tin can orchestra. They become real instruments and you treat them with care.”
Tan returns to Australia in 2015 with a program titled Clangor!, featuring a group of works for toy instruments and pianos. Cage believed music could be made on just about anything that was capable of producing sound, and Clangor! is evidence of this. Tan makes a theatrical entrance playing toy cymbals in ‘The Winged Energy of Delight: Fanfare’ by American composer John Kennedy. The second work, ‘Drunkard’s Dance’, is 22-year-old Ying-an Lin’s first composition for toy instruments, using toy piano and tin cans to represent the imaginary world discovered by an intoxicated individual. Phyllis Chen’s ‘Carousel’ and ‘Cobwebbed Carousel’ are played on toy piano and hand-cranked music box. Chen punched the holes in the paper of the music box, which passes through the inner mechanics and catches on small teeth that play the notes.
In a nod to Beethoven, English composer James Joslin’s work is titled ‘Für Enola’, only this time written for toy piano, spinning top and jack-in-the-box. The program’s namesake work ‘Clangor’ is by Canadian Monica Pearce, described as a lament for toy piano and three bicycle bells of different pitches. Mexican composer Jorge Torres Sáenz’s work ‘Toy Symphony’ is best described as a multi-tasking nightmare, in that it requires Tan to play no less than 16 instruments.
“I’ve always wanted to be a comedian, and the final two pieces give me the opportunity to be a sit-down comedian. I’ve got this piece by David Wolfson called ‘Twinkle, Dammit!’ and I decided to dramatise it and make a version that was reminiscent of how piano lessons were in Singapore as a child, where you were rapped on the knuckles when you played something wrong. So this piece is a wonderful, wonderful chance for me to go to town. Tongue in cheek, I’m getting back at my past piano teachers, and I also just have fun and let other people sympathise. That’s for toy piano, toy hammer and a rattle.”
The program finishes with Jed Distler’s ‘Minute Ring’, which compresses all 15 hours of Richard Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’ into one single minute “with apologies to Wagner”. Tan plays the piece whilst wearing a three-horned helmet, describing the performance as “very visual with humour and nostalgia that brings back childhood for adults”. Does it embody Cage’s philosophy that art equals life equals theatre? According to Tan, “absolutely”.
The once misunderstood toy piano has a promising future. Composers are writing for the instrument in a heightened creative frenzy and repertoire is building quickly. No longer is the toy piano merely the younger sibling of the normal piano; it’s now emerging as a respected instrument in its own right. Tan recalls when the Australian Broadcasting Corporation submitted Erik Griswold’s ‘Old MacDonald’s Yellow Submarine’, a piece written for toy instruments, as their official entry in the 2010 International Rostrum of Composers.
“What does that say about toys? Toys are us, toys have arrived! I love things with irony…being the first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Juilliard, a prestigious music school, and now I play the toy piano. It’s funny, isn’t it?”
Margaret Leng Tan will perform Clangor! on 10 March as part of the 2015 Tasmanian International Arts Festival. Tickets are $45/$38 and can be purchased from www.tendays.org.au/event/margaret-leng-tan. For more details visit www.margaretlengtan.com.
Image supplied. Credit: Jack Vartoogian.
