Cover Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
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‘The world doesn’t need me to play Chopin or Beethoven’: avant-garde pianist Margaret Leng Tan tells Tatler why she turned her head from a grand piano to a toy one and how music helped her cope with OCD
When the pioneering pianist Margaret Leng Tan appeared online for an interview this week, she greeted her audience not with grand statements about legacy but with infectious liveliness—switching effortlessly between mischievous laughter and quiet reflection. On the desk in the plain, grey conference room of a West Kowloon office tower sat a toy rotary phone, a toy mobile and a toy loudspeaker.
Retirement, she assures, is not on the cards. This week, the Singapore-born pianist is staging her seminal multimedia theatre piece Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep at the West Kowloon Cultural District in Hong Kong as part of WestK Performing Arts’ Solo Fest, bringing with it a lifetime’s worth of sound, story and self-examination. Do not expect a typical keyboard concert, even if Tan is a professionally trained Juilliard pianist. The show features toys—those seen in the interview and a toy piano—as well as Tan’s lifelong battle with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).
Read more: Meet Aristo Sham, the Hong Kong pianist who won the prestigious Van Cliburn
Above Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
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First premiered in Melbourne in 2020, just weeks before the pandemic shut the world down, Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep is, as Tan calls it, her “sonic memoir”: a performance blending music, theatre, recollection and humour. It grew out of an unrealised plan to write an autobiography. “I thought it would be easier to make a sonic memoir, a sound portrait, than to actually sit down and write one,” she says.
The playfulness of the performance contrasts sharply with its commanding title—a reflection, perhaps, of Tan’s creative spirit and her means of coping through art. The production confronts her OCD, which she has lived with since childhood. “Counting runs through my head constantly: when I walk up steps or brush my teeth, I’m counting. That’s not because I want to but because my mind does it. I can’t control it,” she explains. “Back then, my parents were at their wits’ end. They didn’t know how to deal with what was going on.”
She found solace at six years old, learning the piano and finally discovering an outlet for what she calls “what was driving me crazy”. “In music, you count the beats. Counting finally belonged somewhere. It became creative,” she says.
Above Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
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Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep documents this personal journey, weaving her real OCD behaviours—such as counting steps or toothbrush rinses—into her performance. “The show is about an affliction that has been turned into a work of art,” she says.
For Tan, acceptance became a kind of liberation, inspired by her mentor John Cage’s philosophy and Zen Buddhist influences. Cage—an experimental composer best known for his 1952 composition 4’33”, performed in the absence of deliberate sound—had an unconventional approach to both music and life. He saw error as, Tan recalls, “our inability to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality”.
Through Cage’s example, Tan reframed her understanding of both performance and condition. “Having OCD is not good, it’s not bad—it just simply is. I’ve learnt to accept my OCD; I don’t fight it anymore. In music there are no wrong notes, no mistakes. It’s a very forgiving philosophy. I was fixed on how my playing should be, but sometimes the possibilities that happen by mistake are even better than what you originally had.”
Now, she hopes to inspire others through performances such as Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep. “I can go on stage and share my innermost insecurities and weaknesses, because these are mine. I believe they are worth sharing to help other people who are facing challenges,” she says.
Read more: The art of discomfort: Iceland-based artist Sruli Recht on his uncanny Asia debut in Shenzhen
Above Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
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Her signature instrument, the toy piano, is another example of reinvention. When she turned to avant-garde music in the 1980s, Tan realised that the toy piano offered “a cunning way to introduce audiences to avant-garde music”. While experimental modern music can alienate audiences, the toy piano’s charm disarms them. “It’s really avant-garde, but so listenable. Audiences who would run the other way from an avant-garde concert would come to hear a toy piano performance out of curiosity.”
Gradually, she began to see the toy piano as no less legitimate than the grand concert instrument. When Cage died in 1992, she even performed his experimental piece, written in 1948 for the toy piano, at Lincoln Center. “The programme was so difficult and complex that I had to practise hard on it. That gave me the idea that I had to work as hard on a piece at the toy piano as at the normal adult piano,” she say. “It is then that this toy piano became a real instrument. [Afterwards,] I got all my composer friends excited to compose for this little instrument.”
Since her 1997 recording The Art of the Toy Piano propelled her onto the international stage, Tan has continued to expand the instrument’s possibilities. In Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, she commands a small orchestra of toys—including a Fisher-Price telephone, a megaphone and a police siren—turning them into instruments of satire and rhythm. This approach reflects Cage’s conviction that “any sound can be music”, a philosophy Tan clearly lives by.
Above Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
Toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who will be performing in Hong Kong this week (Photo: Instagram/@margaret.l.tan.7)
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“John Cage believed artists must descend from their ivory towers and do some good in the world,” she says. She cites her performance of Cage’s 0’00”, in which she draws attention to the slaughter of elephants for the ivory trade—each leaflet she stamps echoing like gunfire. “That’s my public service message,” she says. “It’s not just about playing Chopin or Beethoven. The world doesn’t need me for that.”
Her latest project continues that social mission: And No Birds Sing: A Requiem for the Earth explores climate change through new commissions inspired by the Australian bushfires, the Fukushima disaster and ecological degradation. “I believe music speaks stronger than words. If people come away feeling moved, perhaps something changes,” she says.
Despite her age, Tan remains unstoppable. She is currently writing her memoir, aptly titled Toy Pianos Don’t Kill Elephants, and preparing new recordings to preserve her legacy.
When asked what advice she would give younger artists, her reply is as fierce as it is funny: “Conviction. If you’re not convinced by what you do, no one else will be. I’ve never had a critic dismiss me because I never apologise for what I do.”
Perhaps that is what makes Tan so magnetic: her mix of intensity and play. She can be both philosopher and clown, dragon lady and sit-down comic. At one point, she muses, “I have often been referred to in interviews as an avant-garde artist, which encompasses a lot of things. Or they call me a multidisciplinary artist, or a performance artist, or a toy pianist. So it’s hard for me to define what I am anymore. I am still a pianist—but that’s not all I do.”
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Zabrina is the Senior Editor, Arts and Culture of Tatler Hong Kong. She specialises in performing arts, visual art and film. Her wanderlust was first fuelled by the Mighty Rovers Antarctica Expedition 2010. Over the years, she has interviewed A-list artists and filmmakers, including Oscar winners Chlóe Zhao and Tim Yip, Golden Horse winner Sylvia Chang, In the Mood for Love cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Pachinko author Min Jin Lee, and Coachella’s first Chinese solo singer Jackson Wang. She won gold at the WAN-IFRA Asian Media Awards for her 2021 feature on the waves of hate crimes targeting Asian Americans.
