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

Abstract

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