Margaret Leng Tan

Margaret Leng Tan has generated herself as a significant force within American avant-garde; an extremely noticeable, talented, and visionary pianist whose function sidesteps recognized artificial limitations within the most common concert encounter and creates a fresh level of conversation with listeners. Embracing areas of theatre, choreography, performance, as well as props, like the teapot she “takes on” in Alvin Lucier’s THERE IS NOTHING Real, Tan has taken towards the avant-garde a way of measuring great old-fashioned showmanship that’s tempered using a disciplinary rigor inherited from her coach, composer John Cage. It has gained Tan acceptance considerably beyond typical for performers of avant-garde music as she actually is regularly highlighted at international celebrations, records frequently for adventurous brands such as Setting and New Albion, and provides made an appearance on American open public tv, at Lincoln Middle, as well as at Carnegie Hall. Blessed in Singapore, Tan was the initial woman to receive a doctorate from Juilliard, but fresh restlessness and a wish to explore the crosscurrents between Asian music which of the Western world led her to Cage. This sparked a dynamic cooperation between Cage and Tan that lasted from 1981 to his loss of life, where Tan gained identification among the preeminent interpreters of Cage’s piano music, partially through her New Albion recordings Daughters from the Lonesome Isle as well as the Perilous Evening/Four Wall space. After Cage’s loss of life in 1992, she was selected as the highlighted performer within a tribute to his storage on the 45th Venice Biennale. Tan requires a lively curiosity about the musical potential of unconventional and improbable equipment, and her groundbreaking Compact disc in 1997-released The Artwork of the Gadget Piano on Stage Music/General Classics raised the lowly gadget piano towards the status of the “true” device. Tan is obviously the world’s 1st, and so significantly only, professional plaything piano virtuoso. Since that time her curiosity offers extended to additional plaything instruments, aswell, substantiating her credo “Poor equipment require better abilities,” as Marcel Duchamp once place it. Tan mementos music that confronts and defies the founded boundaries from the piano and her plaything instruments and offers collaborated with like-minded composers to generate works on her behalf, such as for example Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, Michael Nyman, Julia Wolfe, Toby Twining, and Ge Gan-Ru; she actually is also a preferred of composer George Crumb. Tan’s specialist on issues of Cage offers progressed from that of a specialist interpreter to accountable scholar safeguarding the textual integrity of his function; Tan edited the 4th level of Cage’s piano music for C.F. Peters and in 2006 offered the premiere of his recently discovered 1944 function Chess Items, which she also edited for publication. Tan’s Setting Dvd and blu-ray of Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes carries a video where she examines the initial, 1940s-period preparation components for the task. Photogenic and more comfortable with the video camera, Tan may be the subject of the documentary by filmmaker Evans Chan, Sorceress of the brand new Piano: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan, which includes been screened at several international film celebrations including Vancouver, Melbourne and AFI/Finding Route¹s SILVERDOCS where it had been a nominee in the very best Music Documentary category. It really is slated for launch on Mode Information in 2008.