Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover

Ming Tsao was born in Berkeley, California in 1966. Following his early musical studies, performing violin and viola with the Berkeley Youth Orchestra and the Young People’s Symphony respectively, he lived in Suzhou, China and studied the traditional guqin (Chinese zither) with the renowned guqin performer Wu Zhao-ji.

The music of Ming Tsao constitutes a “speculative turn” in music composition that posits possible worlds as a counterpoint to our contemporary understanding of place, where musical lyricism blended with noise suggests a sensitivity to relations between human impact and presence in the world. In making the connections between the materiality of sound, formal rigor, and extreme expressionistic abstraction, Tsao renews the idea of musical lyricism as fractured, damaged, multi-perspective, complex and problematized in order to negotiate the complexities of the surrounding world.

His performance projects include the opera Die Geisterinsel for the Staatsoper Stuttgart in 2011 and a full realization of Stockhausen’s Plus Minus successfully premiered in the Wittener Tage Festival 2013. His compositions have been performed by ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, ensemble recherche, ELISION Ensemble, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble Ascolta in venues such as the Donaueschingen Musiktage Festival, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage Festival, Maerz Musik, Darmstadt New Music Courses. Music by Ming Tsao can be found on the labels Kairos Music and Mode Records. Books by Ming Tsao include Abstract Musical Intervals: Group Theory for Composition and Analysis. He is currently composing a large-scale opera Das Westzimmer that draws connections between German opera from the early 20th century and Chinese Kunqu opera from the Tang Dynasty which explores ways in which ideas of invention and progress can live alongside ideas of traditional refinement, cultivation and a respect for nature.

He is Professor of Composition at Göteborg University in Sweden and Visiting Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik, Theater und Medien Hannover, Germany. He holds a PhD in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, an MA in Mathematics from the San Francisco State University, and an MA in Ethnomusicology from Columbia University. Further studies have included logic and philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.