Workshop
Workshop and Film Screening: Margaret Leng Tan, piano
May 25, 2011 - 3:00 PM
Brechemin Auditorium
FREE
The School of Music welcomes the Diva of Avant-Garde Pianism, Margaret Leng Tan, to the School of Music May 25 and 26, 2011 for a two-day residency that will include a workshop, film screening, and recital. All events are open to the public.
Workshop:Breaking the Sound Barrier: The New Piano (3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.)
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. In this workshop, Margaret Leng Tan introduces the avant-garde piano, offering her insights into the magical sound world of "the three C's,"Cage, Cowell and Crumb, the three pioneering composers of extended piano techniques. She will demonstrate John Cage's famous invention, the prepared piano, the cluster and string piano pieces of Cage's teacher, Henry Cowell, as well as the timbral diversity of George Crumb's interior piano universe.
Also included in the discussion will be the notational challenges faced by composers of new music. There will be ample opportunity for questions. Open to composers, pianists, other musicians, and all with a lively curiosity.
Film Screening: Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan (90 minutes) (4:30 to 6 p.m.)
This 2004 film, directed by Evans Chan, earned rave reviews from the Washington Post, which called it "not only an exciting work of art in itself, but one of the very few films that manage to communicate some real and substantial information about the art of music."
Margaret Leng Tan also performs a concert that pays tribute to Henry Cowell, John Cage, and George Crumb and their groundbreaking transformations of the piano on Thursday, May 26, 2011, 7:30 p.m., at the Meany Studio Theater. Details and ticket information are available here.
ARTIST BIO:
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she “plays” in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Born in Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, but youthful restlessness and a desire to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music and that of the West led her to Cage. This sparked an active collaboration between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his death, during which Tan gained recognition as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Cage’s music, partly through her New Albion recordings, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle and The Perilous Night/Four Walls. After Cage’s death in 1992, she was chosen as the featured performer in a tribute to his memory at the 45th Venice Biennale.
Tan takes a lively interest in the musical potential of unconventional and unlikely instruments, and in 1997 her groundbreaking CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Point Music/Universal Classics elevated the lowly toy piano to the status of a “real” instrument. Tan is certainly the world’s first professional toy piano virtuoso. Since then her curiosity has extended to other toy instruments as well, substantiating her credo “Poor tools require better skills.” (Marcel Duchamp)
Tan favors music that confronts and defies the established boundaries of the piano and her toy instruments and has collaborated with like-minded composers to create works for her, such as Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Julia Wolfe, Toby Twining and Ge Gan-ru; she is also a favorite of composer George Crumb.
Tan’s authority on matters of Cage has evolved from that of an expert interpreter to responsible scholar protecting the textual integrity of his work; Tan edited the fourth volume of Cage’s piano music for C. F. Peters and in 2006 gave the premiere of his newly discovered 1944 work Chess Pieces, which she also edited for publication. Tan’s Mode DVD of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes includes a video in which she examines the original, 1940s era preparation materials for the work.
Photogenic and comfortable with the camera, Tan is the subject of a feature documentary by filmmaker Evans Chan, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, which has been screened at numerous international film festivals including Vancouver, Melbourne and AFI/Discovery Channel’s SILVERDOCS where it was a Best Music Documentary Nominee. Sorceress of the New Piano and a bonus film by Chan, The Maverick Piano, is now available on DVD on Mode Records (mode 194). < Back
Workshop:Breaking the Sound Barrier: The New Piano (3 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.)
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. In this workshop, Margaret Leng Tan introduces the avant-garde piano, offering her insights into the magical sound world of "the three C's,"Cage, Cowell and Crumb, the three pioneering composers of extended piano techniques. She will demonstrate John Cage's famous invention, the prepared piano, the cluster and string piano pieces of Cage's teacher, Henry Cowell, as well as the timbral diversity of George Crumb's interior piano universe.
Also included in the discussion will be the notational challenges faced by composers of new music. There will be ample opportunity for questions. Open to composers, pianists, other musicians, and all with a lively curiosity.
Film Screening: Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan (90 minutes) (4:30 to 6 p.m.)
This 2004 film, directed by Evans Chan, earned rave reviews from the Washington Post, which called it "not only an exciting work of art in itself, but one of the very few films that manage to communicate some real and substantial information about the art of music."
Margaret Leng Tan also performs a concert that pays tribute to Henry Cowell, John Cage, and George Crumb and their groundbreaking transformations of the piano on Thursday, May 26, 2011, 7:30 p.m., at the Meany Studio Theater. Details and ticket information are available here.
ARTIST BIO:
Margaret Leng Tan has established herself as a major force within the American avant-garde; a highly visible, talented and visionary pianist whose work sidesteps perceived artificial boundaries within the usual concert experience and creates a new level of communication with listeners. Embracing aspects of theater, choreography, performance and even “props” such as the teapot she “plays” in Alvin Lucier’s Nothing is Real, Tan has brought to the avant-garde, a measure of good old-fashioned showmanship tempered with a disciplinary rigor inherited from her mentor John Cage. This has won Tan acceptance far beyond the norm for performers of avant-garde music, as she is regularly featured at international festivals, records often for adventurous labels such as Mode and New Albion and has appeared on American public television, at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall.
Born in Singapore, Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, but youthful restlessness and a desire to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music and that of the West led her to Cage. This sparked an active collaboration between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his death, during which Tan gained recognition as one of the pre-eminent interpreters of Cage’s music, partly through her New Albion recordings, Daughters of the Lonesome Isle and The Perilous Night/Four Walls. After Cage’s death in 1992, she was chosen as the featured performer in a tribute to his memory at the 45th Venice Biennale.
Tan takes a lively interest in the musical potential of unconventional and unlikely instruments, and in 1997 her groundbreaking CD, The Art of the Toy Piano on Point Music/Universal Classics elevated the lowly toy piano to the status of a “real” instrument. Tan is certainly the world’s first professional toy piano virtuoso. Since then her curiosity has extended to other toy instruments as well, substantiating her credo “Poor tools require better skills.” (Marcel Duchamp)
Tan favors music that confronts and defies the established boundaries of the piano and her toy instruments and has collaborated with like-minded composers to create works for her, such as Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Julia Wolfe, Toby Twining and Ge Gan-ru; she is also a favorite of composer George Crumb.
Tan’s authority on matters of Cage has evolved from that of an expert interpreter to responsible scholar protecting the textual integrity of his work; Tan edited the fourth volume of Cage’s piano music for C. F. Peters and in 2006 gave the premiere of his newly discovered 1944 work Chess Pieces, which she also edited for publication. Tan’s Mode DVD of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes includes a video in which she examines the original, 1940s era preparation materials for the work.
Photogenic and comfortable with the camera, Tan is the subject of a feature documentary by filmmaker Evans Chan, Sorceress of the New Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, which has been screened at numerous international film festivals including Vancouver, Melbourne and AFI/Discovery Channel’s SILVERDOCS where it was a Best Music Documentary Nominee. Sorceress of the New Piano and a bonus film by Chan, The Maverick Piano, is now available on DVD on Mode Records (mode 194). < Back
