UnCaged Toy Piano Festival

The UnCaged Toy Piano Festival is an event that is really dear to my heart. As the premier festival for toy pianos in the world, it is a breeding ground for the exploration of the toy piano in concert music. As such, there are always amazing innovations in modern composition and no shortage of toy instruments to be heard. (In fact, it was the 2011 festival that introduced me to the Typatune.)

This year’s call for submissions requested compositions for toy piano and an unconventional instrument. Naturally my first choice of instrument was the microwave. I composed “Background Microwave Radiation” for microwave and toy piano and submitted it for Phyllis Chen and Margaret Leng Tan to consider with the following program notes:

Background Microwave Radiation (BMR) playfully echoes the cosmic symphony of thermal radiation filling the observable universe, otherwise known as cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). The current CMBR thermal black body spectrum is at a temperature of 2.72 K, translated into BMR as the duration of the microwave heating period. The notes in BMR are chosen in accordance to the overtone series of the particular microwave used in the composition of the piece. Just as CMBR permeates throughout the universe, the microwave in BMR permeates throughout the soundscape.

Sometime in September I received an email from Phyllis asking me if I’d like to perform selections from “a bedtime anthology” for the UnCaged Toy Piano Festival with my accompanying ink drawings projected behind me. (Although Background Microwave Radiation hadn’t been selected, they were impressed with my musical intuition and my newest toycoustic album) I was thrilled to have been asked to be a featured performer at the UnCaged Kick-Off Party at Pianos in NYC.

It’s not every day that you are given the opportunity to perform for your toy piano idols (at their request nonetheless). Needless to say, it was a complete honor to share the same stage with Phyllis Chen and Margaret Leng Tan, the women who inspired me to buy and perform with my very own toy piano and hand-cranked music box.

Read a review of the Kick-Off Party in the New York Times.