Music of Sound

I was hunting through my archive of photos & videos and came across this video:

Its a live performance by Margaret Tan who came to New Zealand & performed live before each screening of the documentary “SORCERESS OF THE NEW PIANO: The Artistry of Margaret Leng Tan” at the NZ Film Festival and while it was a fascinating documentary, what a joy it was to see her perform! The piece of music in the video was written by John Kennedy & is the last movement of “The Winged Energy of Delight,” a suite of four pieces ‘celebrating the mastery of patterns with four qualities of childhood: exuberance, reflective reverie, joy, and sweet slumber. The last movement, “Lullaby,” calls for the performer to play toy piano with the left hand and rub a sandblock with the right. The title comes from a poem by Rilke:

As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abyssess,
now beyond your own life
build the great arch of unimagined bridges.

According to wikipedia: “In 1981 Tan met John Cage, and since then they continued to work together for the last 11 years of his life. In 1984 she was awarded a US National Endowment for the Arts grant. Between 1990 and 1991 she gave retrospective concerts of Cage’s music in collaboration with artist Jasper Johns. Since then she has since been hailed as “the leading exponent of Cage’s music today” (The New Republic) and “the most convincing interpreter of John Cage’s keyboard music”

Apart from the performances I remember her giving a very entertaining talk about toy pianos aka the ‘kinderklavier’ (child’s keyboard) and apparently ‘Albert Schoenhut conceived of the toy piano with metal sounding bars in 1872 and established the A Schoenhut Company to manufacture the new instrument. By 1917, A Schoenut produced a catalogue showing 10 pages of upright and grand pianos of all shapes and sizes, with one page devoted to miniature piano stools alone.’ And it seems the company lives on: here

Of course, I’ll save you your next google search & suggest if you are interested in your own Toy Piano (sample library) that you might try Bolder Sounds: “here is a lovely 2 octave toy piano which is chromatically sampled in stereo at 24 bits with plenty of tonal character to spare. Key release sounds have also been sampled for each key and can be controlled via your modulation wheel (cc#1) . Various filter settings are also routed to your mod wheel for EQ flexibility.” (ps Boulder have some beautiful sample libraries & also generously provide a number of libraries free! Another freebie I downloaded was the DIY music box, I also already own their crystals and meditation bowls library, which I used on a film project a few years ago)

I’ve only ever come across one Toy Piano for sale in an antique store here in NZ and I was kind of keen, until I looked a bit more closely & discovered that the black notes were painted on!