Dr. Tsao is the newly appointed Birge-Cary Chair in Music Composition in the Department of Music at the University at Buffalo, and we are glad that he has agreed to join us as a senior faculty member.
For Ming Tsao, composition is an act of deep interrogation. His music dissects sound and syntax, pulling apart traditional musical structures to expose something raw, intricate, and startlingly new. Tsao brings this rigorously exploratory approach to both the concert hall and the classroom, offering composers an opportunity to engage with one of contemporary music’s most precise and philosophical minds.
Tsao’s work often reimagines the very foundations of musical expression—his compositions unfold with a microscopic attention to detail, where texture, articulation, and phrasing become the building blocks of a radical new syntax. Yet beneath this structural intensity lies a profound sensitivity to beauty, albeit one that resists easy sentimentality. He says:
Mine is a materialist music whose sound world lies outside of consciousness rather than a sound world fully endowed with consciousness, with the hopes of placing the listener in a space where one is required to rethink their personhood within a larger domain of life. Noise and the violence enacted upon my music through rhythm and meter produce a music whose very integrity is damaged and violated, signaling the opposition and resistance that certain lyrical procedures meet or defy. This opposition and resistance can open our listening to a different sense of musical expression, an expression that comprises sounds before they are fully recruited into the action of human agency.
Poetry and text are recurring touchstones in Tsao’s work, not just as sources of inspiration but as integral components of his compositional language. His upcoming large-scale opera, Mudan ting (The Peony Pavilion), is a re-working of the Chinese Ming dynasty Kunqu opera of the same name, which will have its world premiere at the National Theatre Mannheim in 2026. Tsao’s through-lines of poetry, text, temporal displacement of poetic materials, and history (musical or otherwise) combine in this two-hour work.