For someone whose artistic trademark is her intense focus on the subtleties of tone and timbre, pianist Margaret Leng Tan is in a strangely excitable mood. Her conversation is marked by enthusiastic outbursts and quick shifts in direction, which might seem at odds with her fondness for the stark and often meditative scores that she has recorded for the Mode and New Albion record labels. But the Singapore-born performer has good reason to be upbeat. Only hours before, she had debuted a new piece at a tribute concert to artistic innovators John Cage and Nam June Paik, and she's still buzzing with the memory.

“It turned out so well!” she enthuses, reached at her Brooklyn home. “I had these four toy pianos strung together, and I dragged them all around the space. They made the most marvellous clattering sounds, and the sound of the keys and the rods reverberating made the most wonderful music.”

Tan's Homage à Nam June Paik (Toy Piano Drag) makes explicit reference to Paik's Violin Drag, in which the late Korean performance artist tied a string to a violin and tugged it behind him like a recalcitrant puppy. But it also pays tribute to her mentor Cage's most revolutionary concept: that all sound, if attentively heard, is music.

That's just one of the precepts that Tan has absorbed from this American iconoclast, whose music is being celebrated by Silence, a Vancouver New Music–organized festival at the Scotiabank Dance Centre from Wednesday to next Saturday (October 18 to 21). Over the course of their more than decade-long friendship, the pianist helped the composer refine his already-considerable understanding of Asian artistic concepts while in turn becoming one of the leading interpreters of his beautifully enigmatic scores.

“I knew him from 1981 to his death in 1992,” says Tan. “I was putting together a program of music influenced by Asian aesthetics that I was taking on tour to the Far East, and of course I had to include John Cage. Then there was a dancer from my part of the world staying with me, who started choreographing to these prepared-piano works that I was practising....And at that time I didn't know how famous Cage was, or how selective his taste in dance was, otherwise I would never have dared to approach him. But fools rush in where angels fear to tread, so I called him up, and he came to see this song-and-dance act. And he really, really liked us, so that was the beginning of this long relationship I had with him.”

Despite her grounding in the classical tradition””she was the first woman to graduate with a music doctorate from Juilliard””Tan felt an immediate kinship with the aforementioned prepared-piano pieces, in which the familiar keyboard is turned into an otherworldly percussion ensemble thanks to the insertion of various materials between its strings. And now, she's bringing a survey of her late friend's music to the Dance Centre next Friday (October 20).

The program includes works for standard piano, prepared piano, piano and radio, and toy piano, the better to display the full range of what Tan unabashedly describes as Cage's “genius”. Almost all of these, she adds, were inspired by Cage's involvement with various forms of Asian thought, including the oracular poems of the I Ching and the refined aesthetic concepts of Zen Buddhism.

“Cage's life in the 1940s was quite turbulent, because, among other things, he was coming to terms with his own sexuality,” she reveals, adding that after finishing his 1944 masterpiece Four Walls, self-described as “an exploration of a disturbed mind”, he very nearly gave up music in favour of psychoanalytic treatment. “But then he discovered Zen....Zen helped him find a way out of his own personal conflicts, and it opened his mind to a whole other way of thinking about art and music””this whole idea of disengaging yourself from a highly emotional process, which is how art really is in the West, isn't it? So much of art is subjectively emotional self-expression. But through Zen and Asian philosophy, John really got what he wanted, which was to disengage himself from this intense, close-up, emotionally charged involvement.”

Cage went on to write an array of brilliant works based on chance operations, on star maps, and””in the case of his notorious “silent” piece, 4'33”””on his Zen-inspired realization that the world itself is one enormous, ongoing composition. More than a decade after his death, his music and writings remain an immense source of inspiration for contemporary performers, of whom Tan is assuredly one of the finest.