Phyllis Chen (born 1988)
Phyllis Chen started playing piano at the age of 5 and studied at Oberlin Conservatory. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theory and Composition at SUNY New Paltz.
Phyllis Chen is best known as a fan of the toy piano, an instrument that she only discovered as an adult.
Toy pianos are much smaller than conventional piano (although many are larger than the one she’s holding in the photo) and they have a narrower range. The sound in the toy piano is produced by struck metal bars rather than strings. The toy piano has been used by other composers — most notably by John Cage in Suite for Toy Piano (1948) and George Crumb in Ancient Voices of Children (1970) — but none with quite the dedication as Phyllis Chen. In 2007 she founded the UnCaged Toy Piano composition competition and festival to help promote the instrument.
This is Phyllis Chen’s energetic 2009 composition Double Helix for toy piano and bowls, performed by the composer.
Phyllis Chen has also incorporated hand-cranked music boxes in her work, as in Three Lullabies, a 2014 composition for string orchestra, toy piano, and music box:
The composer is sitting within the string orchestra. Of this composition, she has written:
I’ve always been intrigued by lullabies for they are unique songs with a universal function. People all across the world use lullabies to put their children to sleep through sung stories, reflecting their culture and times, whether true or made up. I have found the simplicity yet bittersweetness of lullabies to remind me of the toy piano. Simultaneously simple and complex, these songs that have the sheen of purity and peace often carry shadows and doubts from the parent singing it.
Tell Me A Tale is like a bedtime story that parents whimsically think up to amuse their children. We often have no idea where the story will go, so we pick a place to start that leads us to unexpected places. We sometimes surprise or even delight ourselves in this but quickly bring the story to an end, hopefully drawing on a moral that fits our liking. The S(w)inging Automata uses my hand-cranked music box. Like a player piano, I create my piece by punching holes out of a card strip so that each hole allows a music box tine to sound when cranked through the mechanism. The mechanical nature of the instrument is both haunting yet inexpressive, which reminded me of the wind-up figurines toys I loved as a child. Drawing Slumber uses a live electronic patch that loops samples of the music box and toy piano, while the strings continue to layer the texture with gradual rhythmic loops, evoking the settling of one’s breathing pattern to sleep.