Visionary avant-garde artist Margaret Leng Tan’s style is designed to surprise, but not always to delight.
With Leng Tan’s pieces such as The Perilous Night and Advertisement during her performance at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on Sunday, traditional lyrical melodies were not always in the cards.
Elegantly dressed, Leng Tan took her seat at a classic Steinway piano, exuding the air of a traditional concert pianist. But the moment her fingers touched the keys, the audience quickly realized this was not an average piano recital.
Leng Tan, a professional pianist, is renowned for her unconventional approach in the concert music space. Rather than adhering to classical music, she challenges her audience to embrace the unexpected. Her instrument is not a standard piano with regular keys and hammers, but a prepared piano that produces percussion, strings and other orchestral sounds.
Her performance featured works by John Cage, Henry Cowell and George Crumb. In Cowell’s The Banshee, Leng Tan invited an audience member on stage to hold down the sustain pedal while she plucked the piano strings in an eerie, dissonant way. The wailing screams of the mythical Irish banshee seemed to echo through the piano, culminating in a chaotic crescendo.
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To call these pieces songs would be an oversimplification. In an unsettling twist, Leng Tan doesn’t just deviate from tradition — she shatters it, obliterating any preconceived notions of what a piano performance should be.
David Li, a freshman computer engineering major, said Leng Tan’s performance introduced Li, a classically trained musician, to a reinvented music world.
“By including different sounds without the need of different instruments, [it was] almost like a one–man army sort of way to produce a full range of sounds and tones,” Li said.
Gone are the rigid visions of Beethoven or Mozart seated upright, clad in powdered wigs as they press the keys. Instead, Leng Tan moves her body fluidly as she plays, leaning into the notes, pushing away from the instrument and shaking her head to punctuate the jarring and jerky rhythms.
When the first few notes rang out, the crowd collectively shifted in their seats. But after a few more songs, audience members embraced the performance art, clapping vigorously after particularly rousing pieces.
Despite the audience’s openness to the experience, reactions remained mixed among the crowd.
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Freshman computer engineering major Anderson Bussard did not expect Sunday’s performance to be as avant-garde as it was.
“Unsettling,” Bussard said. “Not in a bad way, there’s a lot of skill that goes into this, but it’s definitely not happy feelings.”
For those less familiar with concert piano, Leng Tan’s modified approach changed their perceptions of piano performance.
Liahna Rebello, a freshman enrolled in letters and sciences, was particularly struck by how many sounds Leng Tan’s Steinway made because of the instrument’s modifications.
“I didn’t know that the piano was such a versatile instrument,” Rebello said.
