Scherchen-Hsiao, Tona

Tona Scherchen-Hsiao

(b. Neuchâtel, 12. March 1938)

T’AO — vague —
”Plusieurs silences” d’une grande vague déchaînée
pour grande orchestre (1974-75)

Preface
Swiss composeress Tona Scherchen-Hsiao is the daughter of the legendary German conductor and active supporter of modernism Hermann Scherchen and the Chinese composeress Xiao Shuxian. After twelve childhood years in Europe she went to China in 1950 with her mother and her sister. Her mother taught her traditional Chinese music on the pipa. In 1956 she returned to Europe with her father and studied composition with György Ligeti, Pierre Schaeffer, Olivier Messiaen, and Hans Werner Henze. Since the 1960s she earned a reputation as a composer und won several composition prizes. In 1972 she settled in France. For many years she was internationally successful with her compositions. Since the 1980s she dedicates herself strongly to theatralic performing concepts transcending the genres but outside France she became relatively neglected. Her atonal language combines characteristic stylistic means of European experimental modernism with elements of Chinese origin, but the Chinese influence is more of a conceptual kind than in composing technique. For the majority of her music she found publishers but only very few commercial recordings of her works are available.

T’AO — vague — (or ’Vague T’AO’) for orchestra was written in 1974-75 and premièred in Paris on 30 April 1976 by the Orchestre de la Radio-Télévision Française conducted by Michael Gielen. On 29 September 1976, the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra under Kazuhiro Koizumi played the German première of the piece. On 6 October 1976, Gerhard R. Koch reported about this performance in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: ”Tona Scherchen’s ’Vague T’AO’ evokes in its title as well as in its musical structure the imagination of waves that emerge from long and sustained single tones and begin to pulsate. In between they change into romantic triad fields of the horns and finally transform into long lines.“ Alfons Neukirchen mentioned the wave character of the work suggested by its name: ”… the strict construction is covered by a consonant cloud that – as its colour is obviously female – touches the listener in an unpretentious and likable manner.”

Further performances of the work cannot be located. It is dedicated «à mes très chers Dragons-Farahat».

C.S., June 2017

Performance materials are available from the publisher Universal Edition, Vienna
(www.universaledition.com). Reprint with kind permission of Universal Edition AG, Vienna, 2017