Cage’s Suite for Toy Piano
Notes by TŌN keyboardist Francis Chung-Yang Huang
John Cage was an experimentalist, a pioneer, and a symbol of contemporary music to many, especially in the field of indeterminate music and unconventional instruments. His Suite for Toy Piano is a perfect example of the combination of both. The suite was composed in 1948, shortly after his Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano, where things like screws, bolts, and rubber are placed between the strings to change the sound the piano makes. A toy piano, though it is not modified like the prepared piano, is a unique instrument for classical music.
Unlike the piano, a toy piano makes a sound with its hammers by hitting metal sticks instead of strings. Its sound is brighter, almost like a bell, but does not have much dynamic range. Cage somehow ignores the limited range of the instrument, notating extreme dynamics like fortissimo or triple pianissimo. As it is a toy, there are not 88 keys but usually only 18 to 30, and Cage made it even more extreme by limiting his composition to only using nine of them.
The suite has five short movements, each of which is composed with minimalist motifs and unique characteristics. The rests in this suite also play an important role: they give us some clues that Cage was exploring how silence could be interpreted in his music, which later came to fruition in his famous piece 4’33”. Although the title and the sound of the instrument may initially sound a bit like a childish joke, the Suite for Toy Piano is a serious piece of music. Cage treated the instrument with respect and composed music suited for it.
The orchestra version we are performing today was orchestrated by Lou Harrison. Both Harrison and Cage were students of Henry Cowell; they were friends and admired each other’s works. Probably no one else would come up with the idea of orchestrating a Suite for Toy Piano but Harrison; it’s like a surprise on a surprise. With the rich colors of the orchestra, I almost forgot that there were only nine pitches used in this piece. Harrison not only uses orchestra instruments to interpret the unique tone color of the toy piano, but also brings some new sound to it through the use of percussion instruments.