SFIAAFF: Sorceress of the New Piano
The crowd at the Castro Sunday night, at the Asian-Am film fest's centerpiece presentation for Evans Chan's documentary Sorceress of the New Piano was about one-third new music aficionados, one-third Asians who'd played piano in the past, and the remaining one-third seemed to be people who thought a woman who played the toy piano would be interesting to learn about. Yup, the toy piano. Like Schroeder.
Margaret Leng Tan, called "the diva of avant-garde pianism" by the New Yorker, has been exploring the limits of the sounds that can be created by the piano for the last 20-30 years. Tan started out with the standard classical repertoire in her studies at Juilliard, but by the time she began working on her doctoral dissertation there, she was becoming more and more intrigued by the possibilities of the piano beyond the keyboard and more as a percussive instrument in its own right. She worked closely with John Cage on his pieces for prepared piano (where screws, nails, and plates are inserted in the strings of the piano to affect the sound), began playing the works of Menlo Park's Henry Cowell (who wrote pieces not just for the fingers but for the whole arm, where the arm presses down on long spans of the keys -- like when a cat sits down on the piano), and was performing works by George Crumb, involving strumming, pulling, and bowing the strings of the piano.
So what comes after that? A toy piano performance. Yeah!
Picture of Margaret Leng Tan at the toy piano from her publicity stills
No organwork at the Castro today -- the mighty Wurlitzer stayed in the orchestra pit as the techs brought out two itty-bitty toy pianos -- one in the style of an upright, one in the style of a baby grand. After a heartfelt tribute by Bay Area pianist and KPFA classical radio personality Sarah Cahill, Margaret Leng Tan swished on stage, with a Asian-style jacket and a wicked smile. After some pretty funny remarks, Tan settled in on a tiny bench and played her toy pianos -- one complicated tarantella, a cover of Eleanor Rigby, a piece for toy piano on one hand and wood blocks on the other, and two pieces for two toys. (The album is called "Art of the Toy Piano.")
What did that sound like? Well, not unlike a handbell choir. The toy piano doesn't have strings like a regular piano -- instead, the keys correspond to hammers that strike small pieces of tuned metal, so you get a celeste-y/xylophone-y sound. But the pianos are sophisticated enough that you can get some pretty complicated fingerwork in them -- one of Tan's pieces was a Philip Glass work, for instance. Pretty impressive. Anyways, then Tan walked off stage and up the aisle, her upright toy underneath her arm, and the movie started up.
So -- the movie? It's a fairly straightforward examination of Tan's career, through the prism of the history of contemporary classical piano music. Tan performs all the pieces in the movie, and it's really quite fascinating to see the development of musical thinking about the piano as an instrument and the exploration of its percussive qualities. If you were always a piano student who liked to push your hand down on as many keys as you could, this is definitely the movie for you.
That said, as the music got more and more abstract, we noticed more and more people not-so-discreetly getting up and leaving the theater. Guys! Wouldn't you be embarrassed to have been one of those folks who rioted after the premiere of The Rite of Spring? It's not always pleasant to hear this work -- the part where Tan rolled a bottle around on the lower strings of a Steinway and repeatedly slammed her hand down on the bottom-most piano octave were pretty hard for us -- but it's certainly always interesting, and this is one of the most accessible introductions to contemporary classical music we've seen -- no boring conversations about tone rows, just a sense of "what can we do next?"
After Cage's death, Tan began playing his works, rediscovered a piece he had written for the toy piano, and fell in love. She rapidly began working up new performances and commissioning pieces for it, including performances in Brechtian plays, performance art pieces, and a hilarious piece where she plays on the toy piano the Beethoven sonata that Schroeder from the Peanuts cartoon plays (dubbed in the cartoon by a real piano) -- over the actual cartoon!!
Cut throughout are interviews with Tan's family, colleagues, music critics (including our own Joshua Kosman and irritating reactionary NY Times critic Edward Rothstein, reluctantly admitting, with a look of disgust, that Tan's a good pianist even though he hates that modern crud they call music these days), and adorable scenes with Tan's four doggies.
This is a fascinating look at the evolution of piano music and the evolution of an artist -- at the Q&A, someone asked Tan what she thought she'd do next after she finishes her work with the toy. Tan said that she thought maybe performance art, since her work was increasingly relying on the artifice of stage presence. Sort of analogously to Joanna Newsom, in a weird way, this is about a kind of music that seems very accessible and naive at first, but when you look closer, it's not that at all -- it's about an exploration of timbre and sound and rhythm. We hope filmmaker Evans Chan will make good on his promise to work with NAATA to get this film to a wider audience (maybe on DVD, he said) -- and if you're interested at all in classical music and its discontents, you have to see this film.