Contact
Elke Moltrechtem@karstenwitt.com+49 30 214 594-227
General Management
Ming Tsao becomes Birge-Cary Professor of Music at the University at Buffalo, taking over the professorship once created for Morton Feldman.
Ming Tsao's Triode Variations, premiered in May by Ensemble Musikfabrik under Emilio Pomàrico, have now been released on CD; the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin have also recorded works by the composer for the album.
In May 2022, Ensemble Musikfabrik premiered Ming Tsao's Triode Variations in Cologne. We caught up with the composer during a visit to his Berlin flat in the run-up to the performance.
Ming Tsao, Not Reconciled
Ming Tsao, composition
Talea Ensemble
The composer Ming Tsao writes music with a sensuality that arises out of a focus on the inherent qualities of sound – what the composer calls its “materiality” – coupled with an extreme formal rigour and a highly precise, finely crafted compositional style. His music is foregrounded by a contemporary conception of musical lyricism, which is fractured, multi-faceted and problematised to reflect the modern experience.
Many of Ming Tsao’s works are the result of a critical and deep-thinking examination of the Western classical tradition, as well as his serious engagement with Chinese traditional music. Increasingly, opera is the forum where Ming Tsao brings these interests together. The chamber opera Prospero’s Garden (2009-2015) consists of two acts that are also separate works: Die Geisterinsel, commissioned by the Staatsoper Stuttgart and premiered in 2011, is a re-working of Johann Rudolph Zumsteeg’s 18th-century opera on Shakespeare’s The Tempest; Mirandas Atemwende, premiered in Berlin in 2015, takes Schoenberg’s Erwartung as the starting point for an expressionist exploration of character. Ming Tsao is currently composing a large-scale music theatre work that reinvents the most important Kunqu opera from the Chinese Ming Dynasty, Mudan Ting (The Peony Pavilion), which will have its world premiere at the National Theatre Mannheim in 2026.
Ming Tsao has composed works for ensembles including the Arditti Quartet, ELISION Ensemble, ensemble ascolta, ensemble recherche, Ensemble KNM Berlin and Ensemble SurPlus and has had premieres at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Donaueschinger Musiktage, MaerzMusik Berlin, Wien Modern and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. In recent seasons his major projects include two works for large ensemble: Refuse Collection (2017), a reaction to the oeuvre of French filmmakers Danièle Huillet und Jean-Marie Straub; and Plus Minus (2012-13), the first full realisation of Stockhausen’s open composition of the same name. In May 2022 the Ensemble Musikfabrik under Emilio Pomàrico premiered the Triode Variations in Cologne, a piece for 18 instruments lasting about half an hour, the recording of which was released in 2023 on the Kairos label. A second realization of Stockhausen's Plus Minus, titled Plus or Minus, will premiere at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik Festival in 2025, with the GrauSchumacher Piano Duo and the Experimental Studio Freiburg, and it will be performed as CD release concert at the Kontakte Festival of the Akademie der Künste in June 2025 in Berlin. An evening-length portrait concert featuring many of Ming Tsao's chamber works will be presented in Mannheim in March 2025.
Ming Tsao was born in Berkeley, California. His father emigrated from China and his mother’s parents emigrated from Austria. He studied violin and viola before travelling to Suzhou, China, to study with the renowned Guqin (Chinese zither) performer Wu Zhao-ji. He studied composition at Berklee College of Music in Boston and Ethnomusicology at Columbia University in New York before studies in Logic, Philosophy and Mathematics. Returning to composition, he gained a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego under Chaya Czernowin as well as studying privately with Brian Ferneyhough. He was Professor of Composition at Göteborg University and Visiting Professor of Composition at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021 for music composition. In 2024, he was appointed as Birge-Cary Professor of Music at the University of Buffalo in New York, a position formerly held by Morton Feldman.
A selection of his chamber works was collected on the portrait CD Pathology of Syntax, released in 2014 by Mode Records. Kairos Music has released his works on three CDs, Plus Minus, Die Geisterinsel, and Triode Variations. A fifth CD will be released in June 2025 under the title Plus or Minus with the Neos label. His music is published by Edition Peters.
2024/25 season
This biography is to be reproduced without any changes, omissions, or additions, unless expressly authorised by the artist management
A list of Ming Tsao's works can be found on www.mingtsao.net as well as on his publisher's website, Edition Peters.
“Unbelievable is the music of the American Ming Tsao: every sound pure, good music.”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Alfred Zimmermann
“On this evening, one wishes that the music never stops sounding.”
Neue Musikzeitung, Verena Großkreutz - on Die Geisterinsel
“Although, from a listening perspective, it involves a fair bit of hanging on for dear life, the shifting tangibility of the words, a multitude of fantastic individual orchestrational details and above all the genuinely dazzling range of invention displayed – no, flaunted – in this piece make it all a magnetic experience. Definitely music that needs repeated listenings, but first contact is pretty damn astonishing.”
5:4, Simon Cummings, 2018 - “The Best CDs of 2017” on Mirandas Atemwende
“In Europe, Tsao is much nearer to the tradition that he cares so much about: the tradition of Western art music which he exaggerates and dissects, quotes, estranges and deconstructs. The aesthetics of his musical thinking, the style and construction of his works, is the product of a highly complex thinking and virtuosic composing that shows he is a damn good composer.”
Rondo Magazin, Raoul Mörchen, 2014
“Alone, in this perfect swelling and receding arc of elastic storm music, Tsao has made a veritable coup. In his 50-minute opus, he breaks the prejudice that New Music after Strauss has lost its capacity to be sensual. The kaleidoscopically shattered rhythmic and metric structures, the strange, fragmentary allusions to Zumsteeg’s high classic style, in short: the artifice of the entire work vanishes, as it were, into the foaming waves of a plastic, often noisy music that goes straight into the body of the listener.”
Opernwelt, Albrecht Thiemann, 2014 – on Die Geisterinsel
“I think it is absolutely successful, lasts a good half hour, and is a very powerful sound language that one experiences, quite fresh and actually sounds in every single beat, as if by Stockhausen himself.”
Deutschlandfunk, Jörn Florian Fuchs, 2013 – on Plus Minus
Ming Tsao - Triode Variations: Triodes I
Ming Tsao - Pathology of Syntax
Ming Tsao - Plus Minus Page I
Ming Tsao - Mirandas Atemwende: XI. Against Hurt
Ming Tsao - Zeitlupe HGNM - Interview
Ming Tsao - EBTKS Episode 9 - Interview
Ming Tsao - EBTKS Bonus Clip: Ming Tsao Discusses "Refuse Collection"
Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, Ensemble Musikfabrik, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Emilio Pomàrico, Stefan Schreiber; Kairos Musik, 2022, 0015105KAI
Ensemble Ascolta, Johannes Kalitzke, Kammerensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Stefan Schreiber;Kairos Musik, 2017, 0015014KAI
Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Ascolta, Jonathan Stockhammer, Ensemble SurPlus, James Avery, Ensemble Recherche, Anthony Burr, Charles Curtis;Mode Records, 2014, 268
Staatsoper Stuttgart, Orpheus Vokalensemble, Stefan Schreiber, Ensemble Gageego!, Rei Munakata, Seth Josel;Kairos Music, 2012, 0013372KAI