New Recording Shows Toy Piano Isn't Child's Play

[AUDIO] I remember as a wee child sitting down at the piano in our living room and punching out sounds on the the same piano keys over and over again. I was awash in exploratory awe, in dogged fascination with the alchemy of combining only a few notes into something that was my own off-the-cuff creation, my own language, in a way. This little game may have been a tad unusual (though I know I didn't invent it), but the seriousness with which I approached it was not. Play is how children work, and it is a wonder to watch the intensity with which they do it: the furrowed brows as tiny fingers placed blocks one upon another, the almost bureaucratic enforcing of the rules of the game - "no, Billy, that's not what you're supposed to do," the mental focus that blocks out Mom, Dad and the rest of the world in preference for play-in-progress. Of course, we lose this Zen-like focus and natural affinity for play as we "grow up" and start caring about the world. And our efforts to retrieve our lost second nature have kept psychologists, yoga studios and vacation travel industries in business. Is it little wonder, then, that the toy piano has such exotic allure? (Didn't know the toy piano had such appeal? Take a look at this 2006 New York Times story announcing the profusion of toy piano festivals and recitals.) The instrument's limited range, bicycle bell tone quality and slipshod tuning are to a professional-calibre piano what crayons are to a Cross pen. As such, the toy piano allows us as adults to revisit the uncultivatedness of our childhoods and to look  with  nostalgia, yet without embarrassment, on our own lost innocence and what followed. In other words, the toy piano is no toy; rather, it takes us back to who we once really were and also forces us to look at who we've become. Heavy. Perhaps the power of this instrument is, in part, what has enabled Margaret Leng Tan to forge a career as a world-class toy pianist. Leng Tan's most recent recording, She Herself Alone: The Art of the Toy Piano 2, is a testament to the multiple levels of meaning this instrument can reach. At first glance, the toy piano looks like parlor furnitue in Lilliputland and, as such, just plain silly: a tiny two-octave (if that) keyboard encased in plastic or plywood in the shape of a grand piano shares the playground with its playmate, a tiny matching piano bench. But sit at this instrument - your knees hiked up to your shoulders, your giant hands all but smothering the pint-sized keyboard - and you realize how far you've come from the child's world, where according to the standards of make-believe this instrument made you a great concert pianist, and how much you regret, if you're honest with yourself, that you can never go back. Virtually every work on Leng Tan's new recording is imbued with this uncomfortable combination of innocence and poignancy. John Cage's Suite for Toy Piano (1948), which Leng Tan calls "the first-ever serious piece of music written for the toy piano," opens the recording with the profound simplicity that, in my opinion, defines the nature of the instrument. Listen to the simple five-note scale at the very beginning, followed by little fast-note flourishes. There is more than a hint of the improvisatory here - like my own childhood pianistic doodles, only, frankly, better: [audio:cage_suite_1.mp3] The meanderings only intensify in the second movement, where repeated notes join the texture of the music. What could be more childlike than the repetitive pounding of a piano? (Remember that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was chastised as childlike for its repeated notes, now arguably the most famous notes in all of Western music?): [audio:cage_suite_2.mp3] And the final movement's march-of-the-toy-soldiers quality calls to mind the "Soldier's March" from Schumann's Kinderscenen, a compendium of piano miniatures on all aspects of childhood: [audio:cage_suite_3.mp3] In the final movement of Eric Griswold's Old MacDonald's Yellow Submarine, the second work on Leng Tan's recording, the toy piano is joined by another childhood icon: the music box. The combination of these instruments plus prepared piano (in homage to Cage) yields a découpage of sounds overlaying each other with apparent randomness. Imagine three children together in a sandbox, each playing sweetly alone, enacting his own inner narrative with his toy spade or bucket: [audio:griswold_6.mp3] Toby Twining's An American in Buenos Aires (A Blues Tango) implies a game of dress-up, when little girls put on their mother's oversized heels and fancy dresses and pretend to have entered the glamorous adult world. (If they only knew.) In Twining's work, there's as big a difference between the refined sound of the professional piano and the raw sound of the toy piano as there is between a mother and the child hobbling around in shoes too big and way too sultry: [audio:twining_american.mp3] Speaking of shoes,  no instrument could be better suited than the toy piano for George Crumb's eerie Put My Little Shoes Away (2008), which Leng Tan arranged for voice, toy piano and percussion. In the text of this song, a child tells of her own imminent death with the fearlessness and plain-spoken honesty that children alone can muster in times of trial. A sound bite paints a thousand words: [audio:crumb_shoes.mp3] Eventually toys either break or are outgrown and left behind, the objects that once purveyed such fascination and joy are silenced by neglect. Ross Bolleter's Hymn to Ruin (2010) for ruined toy piano and ruined piano gets to the heart of what we all experience when we look back at our earliest days: the sense that our youth, to paraphrase Mark Twain, really was wasted on the young; the feeling of dread that those days now lie immovable as the cracked, irreparable - truly ruined - foundations of our lives. Bolleter's work conjures a longing to fix those pianos so they might once again sing forth the splendors of Beethoven, Schumann, Grieg and Rachmaninoff. Alas, they can't go back to what they once were; they are now something rather different: [audio:bolleter_ruined.mp3] And finally we come to the recording's title cut, Laura Liben's She Herself Alone (1996/2002) for toy piano and toy psaltery. Liben composed most of this piece as incidental music for a play. It too has the feel of the improvisatory, as though two kids were teaching themselves how to play these instruments so they could start a band together: [audio:liben_she_herself.mp3] I'll admit that our adult ears might not like what they hear in toy piano music. They might not like the instrument's perpetual out-of-tuneness, and they might not like its incapacity for dynamic subtleties. But if, in fact, our adult ears are uncomfortable with this instrument, I believe it isn't because it sounds ugly, but rather because its honest and unadorned sound forces us to examine our own lives with such profound penetration. The toy piano makes each of us ask, first, What was my childhood about, Have I grown better, worse, even ruined since then?, and, second, Why or Why not? Finally, the instrument forces us to stand alone with those realities, just as a child sometimes must go to sleep with the monster still under the bed. - Jennifer Hambrick