`I’m enamored with the sounds of the toy piano,” says Margaret Leng Tan.
Leng Tan’s new album, “The Art of the Toy Piano,” features original compositions as well as interpretations of The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” Philip Glass’ “Modern Love Waltz,” Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 3” and the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata.
“It’s a very simple mechanism,” says Leng Tan, 44, who was the first woman to earn a doctorate at the Juilliard School of Music. “It’s just a series of metal rods graded in length and they’re hit by these little plastic hammers and the hammer is attached to the key.
“You get so drawn into this microcosmic world of the toy piano that you begin to hear all kinds of subtleties and nuances that maybe in the end only I hear.
“What’s interesting for me is that from these hours I spend refining control of the instrument, I’m a control freak anyway, it has done incredible things for my adult piano playing. It’s refined it to the nth degree. The action is very, very light. The keys go down if you just blow on them. The fingertip sensitivity and the fingertip awareness is so finely honed. That’s one of the bonuses of playing toy piano.”
At 16, Leng Tan received a piano performance scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music. She graduated in the 1970s and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“If you want to play the toy piano, you almost have to tell the world, `Hey, but I got a doctorate from Juilliard,’ just to convince them you’re not a charlatan,” says the Singapore native.
“I don’t really regard my life at Juilliard, in retrospect, as that important. I don’t entirely negate my time as a classical pianist, those (skills) have been a great a springboard to develop these other skills, but I wish I had spent less time on that. Really I do. It took me a long time to find myself in this sense.”
One person Leng Tan credits with guiding her in the right direction is avant-garde musician John Cage, whom she met in 1981.
“Everything I do is really an outcome of my experiences with John Cage. He came along for me at the right time. I was desperately searching for something to do with my life that was meaningful,” says Leng Tan, who had taken a self-imposed hiatus from the piano.
“Cage really got me back into music in a whole different way. He unlocked my skills and my imagination. He gave me the confidence to be myself. My whole life really dates from BC to AC — Before Cage, After Cage.”
Once Cage taught Leng Tan to expand her musical horizons, she approached the adult piano from the inside, literally — plucking and bowing the strings, which was showcased on her 1989 album “Sonic Encounters: The New Piano” and 1994’s “Daughters of the Lonesome Isle.”
“There’s a whole world of sound to be explored if you’re not afraid to put your hands into the piano’s entrails,” she says.
Yet it wasn’t until 1993 that Cage’s 1948 composition “Suite for Toy Piano” introduced her to the world of the toy piano.
“I don’t want to be labeled as a toy pianist for the rest of my life. The possibilities of a toy piano are certainly not limitless, but in combining it with other instruments (on the album), I’ve been able to create a lot of variety,” says Leng Tan, whose musical palette includes a toy siren and toy accordion, cap guns, rattles, and soy sauce dishes.
In fact, she ate her way through nine cans of tuna fish to find three appropriate sounds.
“They all have slightly different magnatonal pitches. I might eat a few more and see what I get,” laughs Leng Tan, who has a 12-can collection. “I find myself collecting all types of things now to play. I don’t feel anything is discardable until I’ve tested it out.
“If I did a whole album of nothing but the straight toy piano, God, you’d need an Excedrin after it, maybe two.”
