Margaret Leng Tan: Cowell, Cage, Crumb

Henry Cowell, John Cage and George Crumb are regarded as visionary innovators of the piano, using a range of experimental playing styles, so-called extended techniques. Although their pioneering work now belongs to the classical avant-garde and their

influence has been all-pervasive, the soundscapes created by Cowell, Cage and Crumb are still distinctive today. 'They each have their own, unmistakeable sound,' Margaret Leng Tan remarks. Over the course of her career, the New York-based Singaporean pianist worked closely with Cage and Crumb, and she will be performing some of their innovative work in the concert.

Henry Cowell is considered the patriarch of the American experimental tradition. This is due, in part, to his introduction of harmonic clusters: groups of adjacent tones played with the fist, forearm or palm. Pieces such as Advertisement (1914), a depiction of the flashing neon advertisements in New York’s Times Square, and The Tides of Manaunaun (1915), based on a Celtic legend, speak for themselves. In The Banshee (1925) and Aeolian Harp (1923), Cowell also returned to his mythological Irish roots. In both compositions, the pianist plays the strings directly as opposed to the keys, a new technique he called 'string piano'.

With his 'prepared piano', Cowell's student John Cage took manipulating the sounds of the piano one step further. By inserting screws, bolts, pieces of felt, rubber and bamboo between the strings, he transformed the piano into a one-man percussion band capable of producing a variety of timbres. In The Perilous Night (1944), Cage expressed his struggles with his sexual orientation. Due to its powerful autobiographical undertones, the six-movement suite is one of his most personal and expressive pieces. The composition also had far-reaching implications for Cage's further musical development. Following negative criticism and his inability to control how pianists prepared the piano, precipitated a new artistic direction motivated by Zen Buddhism and chance elements.

Four decades later, The Perilous Night inspired artist Jasper Johns' series of paintings with the same title, dark works in which a fragment from Cage's score is embedded. Composer George Crumb depicts one of these Perilous Night artworks in his brand-new Metamorphoses, Book I (2017). For this first installment of his new piano series, Crumb pays homage to Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, offering his personal musical interpretation of ten paintings including Kandinsky’s The Blue Rider and Paul Klee's Black Prince.

Just as in the previous piano cycle, Makrokosmos, Metamorphoses is a comprehensive representation of Crumb’s idiomatic pianistic language. The performer plucks, strums and scrapes the strings, vocalizes and plays a variety of different percussion instruments. For Chagall’s Clowns at Night Crumb's score calls for a toy piano, an homage to his muse Margaret Leng Tan, who performs on many toy instruments in her multi-faceted career.