VOA常速英语:Avant-Garde Music for Toys, 'Playing' in New York

Avant-garde musical artists have always liked to stretch the limits of what traditional musical instruments can do. But some artists have gone even further and explored the less orthodox music of familiar objects.

Some of the most modern music in the world is being written for toys. For example, the so-called "Toy Symphony," composed most likely by Leopold Mozart in the mid-1700s, is an abiding favorite with mainstream concertgoers. But today, at recitals like Interval 2.4 - which is part of Brooklyn's MATA Festival for young composers - music that features toy instruments can dispense with the sweeping violin orchestrations.

In "Bicycle Lee Hooker" by Erik Griswold, toy piano virtuoso Margaret Leng Tan played the bicycle bell, the bicycle horn, the wooden train whistle and toy piano in a multi-tasking tour-de-force. 

(Listen: Margaret Leng Tan's live performance of "Bicycle Lee Hooker.")

"The beauty of playing with toys is the whole world can appreciate what you're doing," said Tan. "People don't have to have a classical background [or] … any background in music at all. In fact, they're the best audience, because their ears are totally open and they don't have a preconceived idea of what music should be."

Tan added that classical audiences may have prejudices against people playing with toys, often considering them to be frivolous.

"But playing with toys is a serious game!" beamed Tan.

One piece at the Interval concert was composed for three toy pianos by the young composer Tristan Perich. Perich is fascinated by mathematics and the repetitive motions of machines.

Afterward, Tan said she hears the distinct influence of the popular contemporary composer Philip Glass in the work, and through Glass, her own late mentor, the pioneering postmodernist composer John Cage.

"John Cage, through his use of silence, through his use of percussion, and through his use of noise - all as acceptable sources of music - made it possible for everything from heavy metal [loud, electric guitar-based rock] to 'Indie rock,' [underground, independently made and produced rock] to exist today," Tan said. "John Cage said, 'Rules can be broken, and you can transcend them.' He gave us the confidence to be ourselves [and freed us] from the heavy burden of the great European tradition."  

(Listen: Margaret Leng Tan plays an extended excerpt of John Cage's "Suite for Toy Piano.")

Traditional classical music was all composer and Interval recital producer Angelica Negron had ever learned at the Music Conservatory of Puerto Rico. But later, as a university student, Negron was introduced to non-classical instruments like the accordion, the toy piano and the computer. Soon she began to write her own music far outside the classical repertoire. She said she loved classical music, but didn't feel viscerally connected to it.

"So when I found out about all the new sounds that can be explored and these extended techniques and instruments and other possibilities of textures, I was very intrigued," she said.

Negron was always especially inspired by the diverse sounds that toys could make.

"New music in general [is] so open. There are no limits to what you can do."

Negron's piece "What I'm Trying to Say Is" received its world premiere at the Interval concert. It was expertly performed by "Transit," an ensemble that uses both traditional acoustic instruments and distorting plastic megaphones and other toys to explore the shoreline between what we usually call "music" and what we usually call "noise." But for Negron, context is key.

"… For example, if you are listening to a Chopin sonata, and there is someone sitting next to you making noises with the program… then that's 'noise' for you because at the moment you don't want to hear that," she explained. "But if you're listening in another context in which there is a piece that is actually scored for '10 percussion with paper in their hands,' then that which was noise at some point can become musical. It can be pretty, but it can also be ugly; which one it is, is a reflection of the artist."  

(Listen: Angela Negron's "What I'm Trying to Say Is")

One of the more challenging pieces at the Interval show was "Piece for Tenor Balloon and voice," written by new-music composer and balloon instrumentalist Judy Dunaway and performed by her in a duet with the singer and composer Jennifer Walshe. 

(Listen: Excerpt from Judy Dunaway's "Piece for Tenor Balloon and voice")

Since the late 1980s, Dunaway has been fascinated by the infinitely complex harmonic overtones the pressure and movement of her hands can create on the taut skin of an inflated latex balloon.   

But for Dunaway, balloon music is about history and politics, too. She says it allows her to reject the rigid, 12-tone scale of traditional Western music and to use the "cries" of the balloon to express, she said, the horror of the repression of Brazil's indigenous rubber farmers and the destruction of the rainforest.

The composer is aware that many people find the balloon music to be harsh the first time they hear it.

"But," she said "… if anything, it's the Amazon speaking; it's the Earth speaking; it's the Earth screaming; the Earth saying, 'Stop!' So in that sense, I am just a conduit, and I try very much to follow that 'voice.'"

As an artist, Dunaway is also interested in helping people to perceive in unaccustomed ways.

"People stay in a 'comfort zone,'" she opined, "and I think artists very often reach outside their comfort zone. That's why we end up making things that are called 'creative.'"

Audiences and critics, of course, will have their own ideas about what is creative and what is not. But the new interest in music for toys suggests a healthy urge among today's musical artists to explore, innovate and experiment with sound - no matter the source.

Music used with artists' permission