The Nature of Music 19

On Thursday December 4, 2025, at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, Other Minds welcomed Singaporean avant-garde pianist and toy pianist Margaret Leng Tan to present And No Birds Sing, her “personal endeavor to call attention to climate change and the dire consequences of remaining passive in the face of an unfolding universal catastrophe.” Named for the refrain of a John Keats poem, And No Birds Sing featured Tan playing works by John Luther Adams, Lois V Vierk, Somei Satoh, Annie Gosfield, Michael Wookey, Eric Griswold, and John Cage.

After the concert, we held a reception for the 80th birthday of The Diva of the Toy Piano in the Ensemble Room of the Littlefield Concert Hall.

This concert was the 19th edition of Other Minds’s Nature of Music series, presented in cooperation with the Center for Contemporary Music, Northeastern University and Mills Performing Arts.

For more information, listen to Charles Amirkhanian’s 1984 interview with Margaret Leng Tan.

This concert was made possible through generous support from the EarthWays Foundation.

Click the image to download the full concert program.

Click here for detailed program notes on the music in this program.

John Luther Adams (b. 1953)

Nunataks (2007)

Lois V. Verk (b. 1951)

To Stare Astonished at the Sea (1994)

Somei Satoh (b. 1947)

And No Birds Sing (2021) (West Coast premiere)

Annie Gosfield (b. 1960)

Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind (2013) Part III

Michael Wookey (b. 1983)

Coney Island Sous l’Eau (2013) (Coney Island under the Water) Solo toy piano version (2016)

Erik Griswold (b. 1969)

Paradise Lost (2021) (West Coast premiere)

John Cage (1912–1992)

0’00” (1962)

Margaret Leng Tan is one of the most iconic performers of new American music. Her practice goes beyond traditional boundaries of discipline and genre, embracing aspects of theater, choreography, and performance. Her daring and disciplinary rigor is inherited from her mentor of 11 years, John Cage. The New Yorker calls her the “diva of avant-garde pianism.” Renowned as a pre-eminent John Cage interpreter and for her performances that transcend the piano’s conventional boundaries, Tan was the featured performer in a tribute to Cage’s memory at the 45th Venice Biennale. Her Cage recordings are critically regarded as definitive performances, and she performs his music in the PBS American Masters films on John Cage and Jasper Johns. Tan was also one of George Crumb’s favorite performers for whom he composed Metamorphoses (Book I), a major piano cycle that Tan has performed to critical acclaim worldwide since 2017. 

The first woman to earn a doctorate from Juilliard, Margaret Leng Tan is recognized as the world’s first toy piano virtuoso. Her groundbreaking 1997 recording, The Art of the Toy Piano, transformed a humble toy into a real instrument. Tan has been called “the queen of the toy piano” (The New York Times) and “the toy piano’s Rubenstein” (The Independent, UK). The BBC, CNN, ABC (Australia), and National Public Radio (USA) have all profiled her career as a concert toy pianist. Tan’s curiosity has led her to other toy instruments and sounding objects, substantiating her credo: “Poor tools require better skills” (Marcel Duchamp). Major works written for her include Curios by Phylis Chen, a solo music-theater piece for toy instruments commissioned by the 2015 Singapore International Festival of Arts. Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep, a dramatic sonic portrait of the artist with music by Erik Griswold, is Tan’s fully-fledged foray into theater in collaboration with Chamber Made, Melbourne. In 2020, Dragon Ladies premiered in Arts Centre Melbourne at Asia TOPA, the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Performing Arts that co- commissioned the work with Esplanade-Theaters on the Bay, where it received its Asian premiere in 2021. Dragon Ladies Don’t Weep won Work of the Year (Dramatic Category) in the 2021 Australian Art Music Awards. Tan’s iconoclastic practice has led to two feature documentaries: Evans Chan’s Sorceress of the New Piano and Chuang Xu’s Twinkle Dammit!, the latter winning Director for Best Feature Documentary at NÒT Film Festival and Best Foreign Language Documentary at Kadoma International Film Festival.

Margaret Leng Tan is a recipient of The National Endowment for the Arts’ Solo Recitalist Award. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the State University of New York in 2011. In 2015 she received the Cultural Medallion, Singapore’s highest artistic accolade. The Phillips Collection honored her in 2020 as a creator of innovative concert experiences.

Becoming Margaret Leng Tan (Marshall Cavendish International (Asia)), a 2023 children’s storybook by Lai Low and illustrated by Dan Kuah, has been acquired by Kokila Imprint (Penguin Random House). In 2025 Margaret Leng Tan will be featured in SG60 exhibitions at Esplanade – Theaters on the Bay and the National Museum Singapore, celebrating the 60th anniversary of Singapore’s independence.