Margaret Leng Tan is one of the most highly regarded interpreters of American experimental music. Her work embraces theatre, choreography, and performance, and she has been hailed by The New Yorker as the “diva of avant-garde pianism.” She is internationally recognized as a foremost interpreter of John Cage, who was her mentor for eleven years.

Born in Singapore, Tan has become one of the most prominent figures in American experimental music, acclaimed not only for her interpretations of Cage but also for her performances of American and Asian repertoire that push far beyond the conventional boundaries of the classical piano. Composer George Crumb, who considered Tan his “favorite pianist,” wrote his monumental piano cycle Metamorphoses (Book I) for her, which she premiered to critical acclaim in 2017 across Europe, the United States, Australia, and Asia.

Tan was the first woman to earn a doctorate from The Juilliard School and is celebrated as the world’s first toy piano virtuoso. Her groundbreaking album The Art of the Toy Piano (Point/Universal, 1997) transformed the humble toy piano into a legitimate instrument. She was dubbed the “queen of the toy piano” by The New York Times and praised as “the Rubenstein of the toy piano” by The Independent (UK). Her career has been featured by BBC, CNN, and NPR. Tan later extended her curiosity to a wider range of toy instruments, guided by her credo, quoting Marcel Duchamp: “Poor tools require better skills.”

She is the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Solo Recitalist Award and Singapore’s Cultural Medallion, the nation’s highest artistic honor. Among the many works written for her are Curios, a solo music-theatre piece for toy instruments by Phyllis Chen, and Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, a dramatic sound portrait created with music by Erik Griswold, which premiered at the Arts Centre Melbourne in 2020 as part of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts.

Tan’s iconoclastic practice has also inspired two documentary films: Sorceress of the New Piano (2004) by Evans Chan, and Chuang Xu’s Twinkle Dammit! (2020). The latter received the “Best Director” prize at Italy’s NÒTFilm Festival and “Best Foreign Documentary” at the Kadoma International Film Festival in Japan.

www.margaretlengtan.com