A brand-new key
Carnegie Hall grands and cheap toy instruments are all child's play for avant-garde performer Margaret Leng Tan, subject of Sorceress of the New Piano.

By Kimberly Chun

JUST A SHORT chat with avant-garde pianist and toy-piano maestro Margaret Leng Tan is enough to get a taste of her protean abilities, captured in full force in award-winning filmmaker Evans Chan's documentary Sorceress of the New Piano. As agile a thinker as she is a player – found plucking the strings inside her Steinway, manipulating the bolts and pegs in a prepared piano, and banging up against a tiny toy instrument in the film and on concert stages around the globe – Tan flits between high and low, personal recollection and music history, with the fever of a feeding swallow or excited molecule, taking up points in contemporary music, references to sweatshop labor, allusions to Peanuts' Schroeder, and moments in Dadaism with equally emphatic enthusiasm.

"The toy piano evolved out of a Fluxus, Dada tradition because people like Cage, Duchamp, and Satie all came out of dada, in a way," she tells me in a part-Mandarin, part-English accent straight out of Singapore, where she was born and raised. "But the toy piano I really see as neo-Dada. Light. It's a lot more positive. "

Of course, she counterpoints that with a description of her toy-piano performance of Raphael Mostel's Statue of Liberty Etude No. 3, in which she dons a Lady Liberty getup. Performed on the eve of the Iraq invasion and punctuated with a gunshot, it made a powerful political statement, as does her occasional onstage discourse on the toys themselves, which are mostly made in China. "I say that I bought this toy piano for three or four dollars – it's slave labor or child labor – and it makes people think about the toys they buy," she explains. "It's the kind of thing that stand-up comedians do – I see myself as a modern-day version of a stand-up comic, but a sit-down comic."

"The toy piano has got me out of the ivory tower," she happily continues, "and I've always wanted to get out of the ivory tower."

There probably isn't much endangered tusk at Tan's Brooklyn, N.Y., digs, populated, as she puts it, by "four dogs, three Steinways, and, at last count, 16 toy pianos," but the internationally renowned concert pianist and longtime student of the late John Cage is nonetheless made of rare stuff – though she's the last person you'd accuse of being a handmaiden for the elite as she holds forth about the tyranny of that "other keyboard," the computer, and her obsessive-compulsive disorder, which she credits for a small measure of her virtuosity. The first woman to graduate with a doctorate from Julliard, Tan worked closely with Cage from 1981 till his death in '92, performing his silent piece, "4'33"," for its 50th anniversary at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, N.Y.; recording definitive discs of the composer's works for New Albion, Mode, and ECM; and recently releasing, on Mode, her interpretation of Makrokosmos, by George Crumb, her current mentor and one of her "three Cs" (which includes Henry Cowell). She recently performed Makrokosmos at Carnegie Hall in honor of Crumb's 75th birthday, but her interplay with other creators continues: her work with full-size and toy pianos has inspired American and Asian composers such as Cage, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Somei Satoh, Julia Wolfe, and Stephen Montague to compose works specifically for her.

Shot on digital video and enriched with inherited and archival performance footage, Sorceress of the New Piano promises to further tear down the tower.

A former China Daily News cultural critic and a translator of Susan Sontag's writings, Chan began filming Tan's performance for a filmmaking class in the early '90s and ended up following her around for more than a decade, putting the project aside when funding dried up and taking it up when it materialized.

"I was interested in her as a personality and her as an artist, and interested in her as a human being – and in terms of a musical tradition," he says on the phone from New York City, describing the film as a "primer in 20th-century piano music" and expressing his satisfaction that the documentary is getting its U.S. premiere in the city where Cowell discovered the Chinese opera that touched his work.

"As an independent filmmaker, I strongly identify with that tradition of maverick music makers. That tradition was about using found objects, using all sorts of means to create music because you simply don't have resources," he adds. "The prepared piano, after all, came into being because Cage wanted to get the sound of an orchestra – he had a piano, and he wanted it to sound like more than a piano. Some of the greatest music has been created in that tradition, and Margaret has demonstrated how sophisticated and beautiful this music can be."

'Sorceress of the New Piano' screens Sun/13, 6 p.m., Castro. Margaret Leng Tan performs before the screening, and a Q&A will be held after it. For prices call (415) 478-2777 or go to www.naatanet.org/festival.