Toy Piano MP3s

Closing out the week with more archive.org treats from the Other Minds collection: avant-garde piano virtuoso Margaret Leng Tan doing the Beatles‘ “Eleanor Rigby” on a toy piano. Perhaps it’s the lo-fi quality of the recording, but the piece, with its increasingly unstable counterpoint, comes out sounding like a music box or a distant carillon. The file is only downloadable via FTP, but the site provides clear instructions. Search for “tan rigby” in the “Other Minds Archive” section under “Audio” at archive.org. For a more intense player-piano-inspired piece, a search for “tan nancarrow” yields her performing Conlon Nancarrow‘s Three 2-Part Studies on two toy pianos.