When a new glossy black Steinway && Sons grand piano is being played most people don’t spend much time studying the reflection on the lid. But when New Zealand’s Dan Poynton is playing you can’t help but spend as much time watching his nimble fingers maneuvering inside the piano, pressing, plucking, and caressing the tightly wound strings, as you do watching him pound the keys. Poynton isn’t experimenting for the sake of experimenting; rather he is playing what he calls the “least ethnic” instrument in the most organic way possible. He says he plays the piano the way Chinese eat animals, by not wasting a thing.

Invited on a six city whirlwind tour of China, New Zealand’s award winning experimental pianist stopped in Xiamen last week to hold a master’s class at the Xiamen University Music Department. Poynton warmed up the students by playing a CD of music that inspires him, traditional Maori folk music. Students disciplined in Beethoven, Mozart and Liszt were surprised to hear that such indigenous music could be an inspiration for classical music, but that was just one of the many surprises that Dan Poynton brought to the Xiamen.

While most musicians are content to sit behind the piano with an upright, practiced posture, Poynton breaks conventions using the piano the way a blues musician plays the guitar; he makes it his own. One of the ways he accomplishes this is by taking a cue from the experimental composer John Cage, a composer known for his non-traditional use of instruments, by placing a piece of rubber tubing below several of the strings on his piano, muting the tone of the notes so they sound like a drum. But unlike John Cage, Poynton emphasizes accessibility in his music.
All of this experimenting would mean nothing to Poynton unless it helped him achieve his musical goal of finding his voice and sharing it with others. Throughout his performance he demonstrated other ways that he manipulates the piano to make it his own, including reaching directly into the cavernous piano and plucking the strings himself, which he describes as, “going directly to the notes.”

Dan Poynton leaves no element of the piano untouched. Perhaps naturally drawn to the rhythms in life, he also uses the body of the piano, tapping on the various contours, testing various bits of wood for unique percussion during the performance. In perfect time he is back at the keys without missing a beat, so in tune with the piece he’s performing, his spontaneity and discipline are as balanced as a metronome.

Affection for China
Dan uses Taoist wisdom to explain the way he combines discipline, technique, and feeling to his music; sort of a yin and yang, or balancing of the 5 elements: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. This Zen approach to music isn’t surprising to hear from someone so well acquainted with Asian culture, who has traveled extensively throughout southeast Asia and Japan, and lives now in Cambodia. Although this was his first time in China, he had already developed a strong affection for Chinese music through the music of a Chinese pianist named Lang Lang (郎朗）, as well as an appreciation for the fluid movements associated with playing the erhu and guzheng.
Dan explained to the students the way he tries to incorporate Maori elements into his music, emphasizing a circular rather than linear way of arranging a piece of music. One might assume that someone so sensitive to the organic elements of life would be adverse to city life with its’ rigid patterns and geometric structures, but Dan is able to find the “aesthetic, expressive beauty” in modern cities like Beijing and Shanghai. “Particularly Beijing,” he says of its amazing combination of modernity and tradition. “In the middle of the city you have this great piece of real estate, must be worth millions, but there you have this great space open to the public,” he mused about the Forbidden City, and Summer Palace in Beijing.

Finding folk culture
While Dan has a great appreciation and talent for contemporary experimental classical music, this is actually not his full-time job. Dan has been living in Cambodia on and off for the past 10 years working as a journalist for the Phnom Penh Post. The long hours of practice and writing music had left him “disconnected,” from people, and presumably the culture that had inspired him in the first place, so he set off exploring the world, not as a performer but as writer.
When asked if he performed in Cambodia, he emphasized the point that he was there to write and share with the world what was happening, not try to influence a culture that had been nearly decimated after years of war and genocide. “The most important thing is to preserve the culture,” he said.

What he’s seen first hand he describes as, “the loss of local folk culture.” He warned the students of the trappings of pop music with its emphasis on commerce, glamour, and trendiness, and how it was rapidly displacing folk cultures that relied on being passed on through performance, not just in his home country of New Zealand, but all over the world. With this in mind, Dan’s musical influences do not seem so disparate; he combines his influences in a way that only someone who has mastered the classics and absorbed the culture around him can do, showing his appreciation for world culture and traditions by linking them to the present.