Who is pianist Margaret Leng Tan?

The New York-based Singaporean pianist has been a favourite of the avant-garde music scene for more than 40 years, and muse to some of its most significant composers.

But who is Margaret Leng Tan? And what stands her apart from her contemporaries?

She established herself as a musical trailblazer whilst at College

Margaret Leng Tan was born in Singapore and began taking music lessons at the age of six. In 1962, aged 16, she won a scholarship to study at New York’s prestigious performing arts conservatory, the Juilliard School. Here, in 1971, she became the first woman to earn a Doctorate in Musical Arts at the school, and would go on to establish a reputation as a leading exponent of works for the prepared piano, including compositions by John Cage.

She spent over a decade in collaboration with John Cage

In 1981 Tan orchestrated a meeting with Cage. The avant-garde composer refused to come and hear her play in her house, so she hired out a 1,000 seat auditorium to play just for him. ‘It was only after meeting John Cage that I knew what I wanted to do’, Tan told The Guardian’s Sian Cain in 2022, explaining that she views her life as B/C and A/C, ‘before Cage’ and ‘after Cage’. He became Tan’s mentor, and the two established a close friendship, collaborating with one another until his death in 1992. Since Cage’s passing Tan has been regularly acknowledged as the leading interpreter of his keyboard music.

‘He believed, and I agree with him, that you can make music with essentially anything. Whether it is a tin can or a bucket, that is music. He was a genius… a unique prophet’.

Margaret Leng Tan on John Cage

Tan bought her first toy piano in 1993

It was Cage’s music that led to Tan buying her first toy piano. Set to perform Cage’s ‘Suite for Toy Piano’ as part of a festival at New York’s Lincoln Center in 1993, she went looking for thrift stores for a suitable instrument to perform on. She settled on a 45cm-high two-octave instrument that she found in a store in the city’s East Village, paying $45 for it. The performance awoke Tan to the toy piano’s enduring connection to childhood, and also to its potential as an avant-garde instrument. She now owns 18 different toy pianos, and was titled ‘the world’s first toy piano virtuoso’ by The New York Times.

‘I was stretching the boundaries of the piano so much that I fell off the edge — and landed on the toy piano!’

Margaret Leng Tan, speaking to The Washington Post in 2014.

Though not a composer herself, much of the toy piano’s repertoire is down to her

Not only is the toy piano a tiny instrument, when Tan began playing it, it also boasted a tiny repertoire with only Cage and fellow American composer George Crumb having written for the instrument. But Tan’s proficiency has led to more toy piano works, many of them composed specifically for her. In 2004, Erik Griswold wrote the six-movement Old MacDonald’s Yellow Submarine, dedicating the work Bicycle Lee Hooker, for toy piano bicycle bell and train whistle, to Tan. Ge Gan-ru’s opera-inspired melodrama Wrong, Wrong, Wrong for voice and toy orchestra is also dedicated to her, as is Crumb’s Metamorphoses (Book I), which he wrote between 2015 and 2017.

She is a long standing champion of Asian composers

Whilst still at Juilliard Tan undertook an Asian tour for which she put together a programme that showed the influence of Asian music and philosophy on Western composers including Debussy, Messian, Hovhaness and, naturally, Cage. And in more recent years her ‘adult piano’ performances have included works from contemporary composers including Japan’s Somei Satoh, China’s Ge Gan-ru and the Chinese-American composer Tan Dun.

She has always been an unusual performer

Before becoming synonymous with the toy piano, Tan was a premiere exponent of works for the prepared piano – a piano which has had its sounds temporarily altered by the placing of bolts, screws, mutes and other objects amongst its strings. She has continued this embrace of the avant-garde throughout her career with her performances often involving elements of theatre and choreography, not to mention unusual props, with Tan ‘playing’ the teapot in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real.

She has written a sonic memoir

This show-womanship is evident in Tan’s new take on the memoir. Though she’d long settled on a title for her memoir – Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep – she could never quite find the time to write it within her busy touring and performance schedule. ‘I was thinking I’d do it when I got old, but then I suddenly realised I’m already old and I still haven’t done it,’ she told The Sydney Morning Herald in 2020. So rather than keep putting it off, Tan found a solution that was typically her. She has created Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep as a sonic memoir, a one-woman biographical theatre show through which Tan tells the story of her life through significant moments.