Singaporean musician living with OCD uses toy pianos and cat food tins to tell her story

At 80 years old, Margaret Leng Tan is a meticulous timekeeper – not just of days and years, but of the silent spaces between the notes she plays on her toy pianos. The Singapore-born, New York-based musician has left her mark on the history of 20th century avant-garde music. A classically trained pianist, she became the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree in music from New York’s Juilliard School, in 1971, a decade after winning a scholarship there. Later, she became a key interpreter of the...