Barnes & Noble.com: Did you have a toy piano when you were a child?

Margaret Leng Tan: I started on an adult piano. I was too precocious to bother with a toy. I probably would have turned up my nose at it. But now that I'm in my second childhood, I'm absolutely entranced by the toy piano. I started playing the adult piano when I was six, but I've only been playing the toy piano for about the last six or seven years.

B&N.com: When did you first feel an affinity with the avant-garde?

MLT: When I met John Cage in 1981, that was a turning point. BC/AC -- my life is Before Cage/After Cage. I was getting restless with the formality and the restrictions of being a classical pianist. And I was getting my feet wet in exploring music by Western composers influenced by Asian aesthetics. That's how I got to Cage, with his prepared piano -- which reminded many people of the gamelan -- and one thing led to another. Once I lifted the lid of the grand piano, it was like opening up the oyster. There was the pearl within: a whole sonic universe to be explored. I was taking the piano to its limits, and then I just went one step further, fell off the edge, and landed on the toy piano.

B&N.com: People are probably picturing Schroeder from "Peanuts" sitting on the floor with his toy piano. Can you describe your instruments and the logistics of performing them?

MLT: They're quite sophisticated. The ones I have are made by Schoenhut, which is the Steinway of the toy piano world. There are three octaves -- 37 keys -- on my largest one, and 25 keys on my smallest one. I sit on a little eight-inch stool at my little grand piano or my little upright piano; it's a 20-inch high piano, and I'm 5' 6" -- very flexible. I fold myself up like an accordion.

B&N.com: Listening to your work, it's obviously not child's play. What are some of the specific challenges for the performer?

MLT: You can't really achieve a huge dynamic range on the toy piano, yet Cage made lots of demands of dynamic contrasts and subtleties of articulation. Strangely enough, in the act of trying, something happens, and you do get some results. Composers have written such incredibly difficult things for my toy piano. It's spurred them on to unexpected heights of creative frenzy, because it was such a new and exciting challenge. It made me think of that wonderful quote by Marcel Duchamp: "Poor tools require better skills." My skills got more and more finely honed, and when I went back to the adult piano my fingertip control was at such a height of refinement, far beyond anything I had ever dreamed possible. You know what my mother's reaction to my toy piano album was? "For this we sent you to Juilliard?" But it's made me a better musician, a better artist.

B&N.com: People have called your performance style dramatic and choreographic.

MLT: Yes, it's very carefully choreographed -- it's more like performance theatre. It's not just a concert anymore. I'm using all these different toy instruments: toy percussion, toy accordion, cap gun, siren. I never thought of myself as political, but I find that the toys provide a powerful podium from which I can make certain social and political statements. For example, I show the audience all the clever things that my cute little $4 toy boom box can do; then I say, "Made in China," and everybody laughs. And I say in the next breath, "Probably by child labor." Then comes the sobering realization that a lot of these toys are made by children, exploited in factories; so my toys can convey a political message. Just think that an innocuous and innocent toy piano should bring me to that!

B&N.com: You've adapted classics for the toy piano as well. How did you choose them?

MLT: It seemed natural to do the "Moonlight" Sonata, because Schroeder plays Beethoven. I also accompanied Schroeder on screen with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata Op. 2, No. 3, from "Play it Again, Charlie Brown." I played on the toy piano and hand-synchronized with him -- it was really difficult, but I practiced and practiced in front of my TV set. Actually, the fortepiano in Beethoven's day was more akin to the sound of the harpsichord and toy piano than it is to the full-bodied voice of the modern piano. Some things sound better on the toy piano than on the adult piano! The Satie ["Gymnopédie No. 3"] is gorgeous on both. Philip Glass's "Modern Love Waltz" sounds incredibly beautiful on the toy, definitely more magical than on the real piano.

B&N.com: There are magical sounds in Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano too. What exactly are we hearing?

MLT: The Concerto is the pinnacle of the prepared piano repertory; it includes 53 prepared notes, and it took me two full days to insert and fine-tune all the stuff in the strings. It's not just your basic hardware -- the bolts and screws and nuts -- but also rubber, weather stripping, wood strips, felt, a penny, plastic strips that I got from cut-up supermarket mushroom containers. Bolts in thin rubber -- so I bought condoms and wrapped the bolt. Luckily I was OK during the recording, but the next day my cuticles became severely inflamed from all the mangling. They took a week to heal!

B&N.com: What was it like to work with Cage on a personal level?

MLT: He was not a teacher in the conventional sense. He never told you what to do -- that would have been totally against his principles and his personality. He was more a poser of questions than a provider of answers. He would hint at certain things, so that the end result would still be something that I came up with. He made you a collaborator, and that was the ultimate reason why I left classical music -- because I felt things were too predetermined for me there. Cage's work gave me room to be myself. And that is Cage's greatest contribution. Being a total independent spirit, he gave American artists the confidence to be themselves.

B&N.com: It's been argued that Cage's ideas are more interesting than the music itself.

MLT: Yes, this is what so many people say: that his ideas will be in the end what survives. But I don't agree, because I really feel that some of the works from the '40s, like the "Sonatas and Interludes," are truly monuments of the 20th-century piano repertory -- of the 20th-century repertory, period.

B&N.com: Who are some current musicians who interest you, either in art music or popular music?

MLT: For me there's no separation between the different disciplines, and that's a very Cagean influence. Two of my favorite performers are Fast Forward -- an English composer/performance artist who lives in New York who works with junk, transforming it into an artistic statement -- and Toby Twining, who's written extraordinary pieces for my toy piano, but who's in his own right a most unusual vocalist. He transforms the voice into a new instrument, with overtones, undertones, sometimes even making himself into a beat box.

B&N.com: What music would you recommend to someone just starting to explore the avant-garde?

MLT: They should steep themselves first in the classics of the avant-garde [laughs], which seems almost like an oxymoron, but it's true. Meaning the music of George Crumb, who is to me the Beethoven of the 20th century, and Cage, and Henry Cowell -- the three C's. Also, one should really pay attention to the minimalists, because whether one likes it or not, it is music that has a tremendous impact. And some of the younger composers who are writing today, like many of Cage's spiritual children, whose music has been performed on Bang on a Can marathons. Keep an open mind and keep an open ear.

June 26, 2000
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