Shownotes
Cage “loved the way I prepared the piano”, Margaret Leng Tan, one of the foremost interpreters of his music, tells us in this episode of Making A Scene. In preparing the piano, she was influenced by the diverse music of her multicultural upbringing in Singapore. But for this Juilliard-trained pianist, it was also her encounter with Cage’s Asian-influenced artistic outlook that sparked a new engagement with her own cultural roots.
That’s just one way the subject of diverse cultural influences comes up in this spirited conversation between Tan and composer Huang Ruo, moderated by Esplanade programmer Lynn Yang. For China-born Huang, who is also a Juilliard graduate and based in New York like Tan, musical genres from different cultures are just one dimension of sound that inform his expansive creative process.