Tsao Chieh learnt the piano from age six and was trained under the famous piano teacher Victor Doggett, obtaining the Licentate of the Royal Schools Music (LRSM) diploma for piano performance at age 18. However, as the product of a young nation focused on economic development, music was regarded as an embellishment of life and not a viable career. Academically brilliant, Tsao was primed for bigger things – he was a military engineer sent by the Singapore Armed Forces first to the University of Manchester (1972 –1975) for his bachelor of science in electrical engineering and later to Stanford University (1980–1985) to do his PhD in the same discipline.
Despite having a promising military career, Tsao’s musical passions burnt as strongly, and it was in Stanford that his musical development blossomed. While still pursuing his PhD, he also signed up for the masters programme in musical composition. There, under the tutelage of Professor Leland Smith, Tsao wrote prodigiously and even won a composition award, beating the PhD composition students.
Tsao Chieh spent a lot of time at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford – one of the major centres of computer music development in the world. There, he used extensively Professor Smith’s music notation software for his compositions.
On his return to Singapore, his works were performed by the national orchestra and Tsao Chieh was hailed as an emerging composer, even being recognised as Outstanding Young Person of the Year in 1986. Unique among the majority of Singaporean composers, Tsao was deeply interested in the ways that sound could be expressed, and he found in electronic and computer music technologies, new possibilities. By the early 1990s, he was using electronic and digital synthesisers as well as Kyma, a state-of-the-art computer programming language. Although none of his electronic and computer music works were heard publicly in his lifetime, his widow released them on a CD in 2000, and is today an example of some of the earliest recorded pieces of electronic and computer music works in Singapore.
Through archival photographs, news reports, correspondences, media artefacts and other documents, mostly from the collection of his widow, this section offers a glimpse of Tsao Chieh’s musically most prolific decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.