ABSTRACT
In 2003, Chou Wen-chung decided to place his musical papers, together with Edgard Varese’s posthumous estate, in the custody of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basle. For the archive, this meant a substantial expansion of its previous range of collecting activities and specific points of emphasis. Although Chou’s compositions are less well-known in Europe than they deserve to be, performances of his music have been given in quite a number of European cities as well as on radio broadcasts since the late 1950s. The Darmstadt Holiday Courses in New Music as well gave a performance of a work by Chou: the Seven Poems of T’ang Dynasty performed under Bruno Maderna in 1961. In the Paul Sacher Foundation, the Chou Wen-chung Collection joined more than hundred other collections covering a very wide range of stylistic currents in the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
