Tinkle, tinkle little star
By Steven Poole
29 November 2002, The Guardian
It's tiny, out of tune, and emits a bizarre sound. But the toy piano has bewitched many a composer.
Schroeder, the moody baby Beethoven of the Peanuts comic strip, is never pictured without his miniature grand piano, but he is not the only one to play such a tiny instrument. The toy piano has a history more than a century long, and has acquired a growing number of fans among serious musicians.
Next week, Austrian pianist Isabel Ettenauer will give a concert entirely consisting of toy-piano pieces. What is the attraction of the Brobdingnagian sight of a fully-grown adult hunched over a child's keyboard, and why have so many composers become bewitched by the eerie tinkle of this peculiar instrument?
The toy piano, as it is known today, was invented in Philadelphia in 1872 by a German immigrant named Albert Schoenhut, who replaced the glass sounding-pieces of children's pianos with metal bars struck by wooden mallets.
Toy pianos were marketed as educational tools for families who could not afford a full-sized instrument; by 1935, Schoenhut's company had a catalogue of more than 40 different toy pianos costing from 40 cents to $25. This strange bastard cousin of glockenspiel and piano remained exclusively a children's affair until 1948, when that master of unexpected means, John Cage, wrote his charmingly whimsical Suite for Toy Piano, a piece in five movements that uses only the white notes of a single octave. In the 1990s, the small canon of toy-piano music began to be extended and popularised by performer Margaret Leng Tan, a devotee of Cage's work whose impressive repertoire of instruments included not only pianos and toy pianos but a teapot, a soy-sauce dish, a toy accordion and a row of carefully tuned tuna-fish cans.
Cage, who scored music for radio test-signals and flowerpots, as well as full-sized pianos that were "prepared" in numerous ways (such as by dropping keys into the open lid), remains the obvious way in to the world of a toy piano for a modern musician. As Ettenauer explains: "I'm interested in all sorts of extended piano technique - prepared piano, playing inside the piano, and so on, and Cage's Suite for Toy Piano is one of my favourite pieces. I wanted to perform Cage, and then I found out there had been quite a few other pieces." And so began what rapidly became an obsession with toy pianos. "They just are so small," she says. "I was intrigued that I could travel with them and practise in a hotel room, which I could never do with a grand piano."
Do not commit the grave solecism of assuming that all toy pianos are alike. "Each one has a different sound," Ettenauer says. "I have a Chinese toy piano that is fabulously warm compared to the Schoenhut." And so one must acquire a collection. "Now I have 12 toy pianos," she confesses. "I got addicted. When I see a toy piano, I have to have it."
"Pianos for gnomes," chuckles composer Joe Cutler, at the memory of Ettenauer visiting him with all her toy pianos. She will be playing his piece, La Maison de Fred, at her concert. "It's quite a challenge, because you have such a limitation of range, and you can't sustain anything," Cutler says of composing for the instrument. "I was quite keen to do something that wasn't just playing piano; the performer has to perform theatrically. So I used it with text and a whistling voice." La Maison de Fred is about a "mad old lady" reminiscing over her youth in Vienna, "and it integrates Hansel and Gretel as well", says Cutler. Initially Ettenauer will alternate passages of keyboard work with speaking or singing over a single repeated note; by the end, she will be playing and singing simultaneously, and "getting quite worked up", Cutler promises.
Ettenauer also speaks highly of another work she is currently rehearsing, Geoff Hannan's Cover Versions. Toy-piano music can be serious and complex, she insists, and Cover Versions in particular is "very difficult", especially since it uses four toy pianos at the same time: a Schoenhut chromatic concert grand, and three other diatonic pianos - essentially, they have only white notes, and they are all in different keys. Hannan explains the concept behind his piece: "The toy piano is a cover version of a real piano," he argues. "And what I've done as a composer over the past few years is take other people's music and make 'samples' of it to make it my own. So for Cover Versions, I took material from Schubert and Schoenberg - very short samples, one or two seconds long, a chord or something. Occasionally there will be longer quotations, but the toy pianos filter out the notes they can't play."
What does Hannan consider the attraction of the toy piano? "It has a certain charm and ridiculousness," he says, "an innocence, a sense of fun. Also its irregularities and inconsistencies are interesting - it's slightly out of tune. The top half and the bottom half of the range are two different harmonic regions. In the bottom half you can hardly hear the fundamental - you tend to hear a fifth up. So I got Isabel to play every note of all her pianos into a Minidisc recorder, and then I put them all into my computer. So at one stage I had a virtual toy piano in order to be able to compose the piece."
The idea of using modern industrial-strength audio-processing technology to marshal the sonic quirks of a child's toy is the kind of amusing inversion that seems apt to the world of toy-piano devotees. What all the composers emphasise is the instrument's disarming simplicity, which represents a challenge, a set of strictures within which it is possible to make creative decisions. David Sawer chose to score passages for toy piano in a work for its big brother, his Piano Concerto. "It's not sophisticated - it's a toy," Sawer says. "I like that contradiction of trying to write concert music for something that's very childlike. Cage uses it as a percussion instrument, but I wanted it as a different keyboard sound that was quite naive and innocent in the texture. It's the limitation which is interesting for a composer. There's only one thing you can do - you just hit it."
Toy-piano technique differs from that of the grown-up instrument, Ettenauer confirms. "There are no strings, just metal bars, and no dampers or pedals," she explains. "Once you have played the note, you can't do anything any more. It doesn't matter if I stay on the key or leave." And while her Schoenhut concert grand boasts full-width keys, other toy pianos are more fiddly: "I sometimes turn my fingers sideways so as not to hit two keys at the same time." But the most beguiling aspect of the toy piano remains that which is hardest to capture in words - its sound. Its ghostly chiming can put one in mind of Tubular Bells, as used on the soundtrack to The Exorcist: it is a childlike but also otherworldly and faintly unsettling timbre. Cutler suggests that it sounds "like a weird music box", but for Ettenauer, its charm remains strictly unique. "People ask me, 'Is it like a xylophone? Is it like a celeste?'," she laughs. "I think it sounds like a toy piano."
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