A select list of music scores

Tsao speaks of the “traces of music: the sound of fingernails brushing against strings, the rattling of snares on a snare drum or the clicking of clarinet keys.” At first, Tsao’s strategy appears subtly yet conscientiously processual, then expressively yet meticulously exclamatory, later via punctilious temporal elongation and adjustment, soon through the prismatic lens of local repetition, and finally through extreme yet precisely timed distention.

One-way Street is perhaps Tsao’s most explicit and extreme study of how the street engineer cuts through music (harmonics, pedals, drones, arpeggiation) in order to explore the manner in which an inexorable line ultimately allies itself with extreme manifestations of objective instrumental production. Thus, the default poetics of Tsao’s generally more ambiguous, fluid and category-defiant material and formal palette is tested and challenged in this work through its conceptual, sobering framework. This is the composer’s most youthful, rebellious…irreverent work, perhaps afforded by the initial concept of the Western itself.

In (Un)cover, for every assertive declaration on the surface, there emerges or appears something that waits, but in this case, waits for an absence that may forever remain an absence. The energies that would drive the work toward reconciliation and redemption are weighed down by this restless repose and ultimately usurped by an almost explicitly undermining deflation and sinking that ends the piece, despite moments of delicate beauty and promise hitherto underrepresented in its explicitly musical garb in Tsao’s oeuvre.