Margaret Leng Tan (piano, toy piano, toy instruments,
teapot)
Saturday 24 August 2002
Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock,
New York, USA
Presented under the auspices of Maverick
Concerts
Cage:
Bacchanale
Suite
for Toy Piano
Cowell:
The Tides of
Manaunaun
Aeolian
Harp
The
Banshee
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Distler: Three
Landscapes for Peter Wyer
Liben: She Herself Alone
Kitzke:
The Animist Child
Twining: An American in Buenos Aires
(excerpt)
Cage:
Water
Music
4'33"
Satoh: A Gate into the
Stars
Lucier: Nothing Is Real (Strawberry Fields
Forever)
Glass: Modern Love Waltz
Klucevsek: Sweet
Chinoiserie
Mostel: Star-Spangled Etude #3 ("Furling Banner")
"Good people of Woodstock, let's drive these people out of town,"
said a disgruntled local during the question-and-answer session that followed
the premiere of John Cage's 4'33" in 1952. Almost 50 years later to the
day, and in the same venue, pianist Margaret Leng Tan paid tribute to that
notorious piece of cultural history, reminding us that momentous musical events
were happening in Woodstock well before Jimi Hendrix & Co. showed up.
The length of 4'33" was determined by chance, a newly discovered technique for Cage. The score itself requires the artist to play nothing — the three movements are all marked "Tacet." Yet the actual experience of listening to this work has long since vindicated Cage's idea, not only offering an aural canvas of what we normally consider silence, but also sharpening the ears.
Tan placed 4'33" at the very center of this anniversary concert, and she deftly programmed Somei Satoh's A Gate into the Stars to follow. This brief work is lean and tonal, its spare single-voiced writing occasionally livened with diatonic chords — and every note of the piece had exceptional brilliance, a quality that wouldn't have been so pronounced without its predecessor.
While none of the other works on the program were written in anything like Cage's manner, his influence was well apparent. Alvin Lucier's Nothing is Real uses a popular electronic conceit: record a piece on the spot — in this case a single-voiced piano paraphrase of the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever" which was distended by its travels through various octaves — and then immediately play it back. Playback was effected (and further distorted) through an amplified teapot from which the melody was steeped, poured and savored.
The legacy of Philip Glass was apparent as well. The composer's own Modern Love Waltz, arranged by Tan for toy piano, was very effective on that instrument, but the piece itself is undermined by its sustained resemblance to the Fandango by Soler. Jed Distler's Three Landscapes for Peter Wyer (for toy piano), while sporting Minimalist influences, is a three-movement work with its own cheerful identity: the second movement, for example, becomes a music box winding down, followed by a Prokofievian finale (if one can imagine such a thing on such an instrument).
Margaret Leng Tan is a — make that the — toy piano specialist, and in this
concert she demonstrated how well the instrument works alone and paired with other instruments. For instance, Toby Twining's An
American in Buenos Aires, a jazzy work built over a habañera figure,
combines toy piano and (grown-up) piano, with one of the soloist's hands at
each. Laura Liben's She Herself Alone 
twins the toy piano with a toy
psaltery and follows the metamorphosis of a haunting 14-note sequence that
travels between the instruments.
Toybox and kitchen provided the percussion battery for Guy Klucevsek's Sweet Chinoiserie: two toy pianos, a toy accordion, toy percussion, and a melodica (a toy horn with keyboard) were enhanced by chopsticks, tumblers, plates and tuna-fish tins. In Tan's hands, the relentlessly cheerful work shifted rhythmic and melodic patterns through the instrumental array with a feeling of spontaneity that overcame the sense of novelty-for-novelty's-sake. And the work provided a plausible context for Jerome Kitzke's The Animist Child, which portrays an awkward youth banging drums and singing wordlessly against clocklike melodic elements on toy piano.
Raphael Mostel's satire, Star-Spangled Etude No. 3, targets the nonsensical lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the mindless jingoism that sometimes attends the anthem. With a siren, whistle, cap gun and delightfully tasteless toy trumpet enhancing the torn-apart melody, a listener might catch himself thinking, "All the performer needs is the right hat." And Tan had it, a spiky green Statue of Liberty crown.
Four works by Henry Cowell paid tribute to one of Cage's mentors (and his neighbor in Woodstock). In these pieces Cowell made good use of his now-familiar tone clusters and piano-string-strumming, techniques that were shocking not so long ago but are now a familiar part of a composer's toolbox. Similarly, Cage's Suite for Toy Piano and Bacchanale for prepared piano sounded almost traditional in this context — but Tan shrewdly presented them as the concert openers and thus still took the audience by surprise.
A congenial crowd in congenial surroundings helped make this concert a delightful experience, and Tan supplemented her musical skill with an amiability that forces you to stay open minded. The payoff came in Cage's Water Music, another notorious work from that half-century-ago concert.
The score of Water Music was posted on a large easel for all to follow. It's time-specific: the performer must accomplish specific tasks, including tuning in radio stations, at particular time-posts (determined by Cage through a chance process).
Appropriately, the first station was broadcasting a concert live from Tanglewood; Tan punctuated it with plangent chords, then blew a duck call into a bowl of water. No longer were we hearing a concert: we were hearing only a radio. When she tuned in a religious broadcaster in mid-rant and duck-called against his spiel, the whole notion of radio became sublimely ridiculous, and the audience (and even Tan herself) couldn't resist laughing. People had tears streaming down their faces by the end of the piece.
We're so constantly bombarded by sounds and music that this concert proved wonderfully refreshing,
helping — very much in the spirit of John Cage — to
redefine the purpose and quality of all that noise. At least one listener
emerged from this experience choosing to listen to less, and to enjoy it much
more intensely.
