Cultivating the Seed: The Compositional History of the Solo ’Cello Part in Chou Wen-chung’s Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra

In 1978, Chou Wen-chung (b. 1923) completed a draft of the solo part of his ’Cello Concerto, but it lay dormant until he took it up again and completed it fourteen years later. The 1992 version differs markedly from the earlier draft, causing one scholar to claim that the finished product “bears only a slight resemblance to it.”¹ Yet Chou himself claims that “original ideas and some of the material for the solo part” from the draft were retained for the finished product.² Close examination of the score—along with study of Chou’s compositional sketches—clearly indicates that the solo ’cello part looks to the draft in significant ways for motives, thematic material, and form.

Historical Background

As part of the bicentennial celebration of the United States, the New York State Council on the Arts commissioned Chou “to write a cello concerto for a young cellist, Paul Tobias.”³ Chou, having never written in this genre, hesitated initially, but ultimately accepted the challenge.

The 1977–78 draft of the Concerto consists solely of thirteen pages of the solo ’cello part that are preserved in fair copy in the Paul Sacher Stiftung. I am unaware of any materials pertaining to the orchestra’s music for the draft.⁴ The manuscript of the solo ’cello part is labeled “in progress” and is written in a fast-fast-slow design—“Con brio,” “Quasi scherzo; as swiftly as possible, but with clarity,” and “Largo.” Chou apparently completed the solo part without any reference to the orchestra, a decidedly unusual approach. When Chou started to compose the Concerto he was

influenced by the fundamental esthetics of Chinese music as initially established for the Chinese zither, the qin. What is played on the instrument represents the interaction between soul and nature. According to this concept, an orchestra accompaniment is extraneous . . . . Therefore my concept was to compose the concerto as a single line without any other elements around that line. Only after hearing that line does one begin to hear other potential lines around it as a kind of reflection from nature. . . . The other instrumental parts actually came to life out of the cello line. This is no different from a flower growing out of the soil from a seed and ultimately expressing itself in a blossom with leaves around it. In other words, the solo part is the seed containing everything there is for beauty to emerge, leaves, branches, and so forth.⁵

In effect, the ’cello solo is the foundation of the Concerto. Thus, my focus in this essay is the relationship of the solo ’cello part in the 1992 published score to the 1977–78 “in progress” solo ’cello part.

Technical Matters

After completing his numerous time-consuming administrative responsibilities at Columbia University,⁶ Chou resumed work on the Concerto in 1992; on numerous occasions he was in contact with the cellist who would premiere it, János Starker (1924–2013), about technical matters.⁷

Chou sent Starker different parts of the solo ’cello part, and after a meeting in New York City and some telephone calls discussing changes, Chou faxed the first and second movements to Starker on 27 August 1992, along with two different versions of select passages from the first movement.⁸ Chou went to Bloomington, Indiana on 12–13 September 1992 to hear the first and second movements and to work with Starker on the dynamics, “phrasing and bowing in preparation for copying the score.”⁹ Chou completed the score in December 1992;¹⁰ Starker premiered the Concerto on Sunday afternoon, 10 January 1993 at 3:00 p.m. in Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies.¹¹ The published version of the Concerto is dedicated to Walter and Evelyn Hinrichsen.¹²

Analysis

As mentioned above, the three movements of the 1977–78 version of the concert were written in a fast-fast-slow design; in contrast, the published version has the traditional concerto layout of fast-slow...