The crowd at the Castro Sunday night, at the Asian-Am film fest's centerpiece presentation for Evans Chan's documentary 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
