The composer Jan Tausinger studied at Bucharest conservatory with Dimitri Cuclin, Mihail Jora and Alfred Mendelssohn (conducting and composition). In the years 1948-52 he studied in Prague at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts with Metod Dolezil, Karel Ancerl and Robert Brock (conducting) and with Alois Haba and Pavel Borkovec (composition). In 1964 he attended the summer course of modern music in Darmstadt. As a young student Jan Tausinger became a conductor and artistic leader in various instrumental, vocal and vocal and instrumental ensembles. In 1948 he founded and later led the Prague University Art Ensemble. He was active in art schools and in radio. Central in his work was composition yet even in his mature years he occasionally presented himself as conductor.
At the beginning of his career Tausinger arranged folk songs, wrote political songs and cantatas for children and youth in the traditional tonal system. Their leftist ideology was preserved even in his later works, i. e., in the mid-sixties when the composer began verifying the possibilities of new composition techniques (Colloquium for 4 wind instruments, Confrontazione I, II).
The song cycle Scribbling in the sky whose soprano part was premiered by the composer' s pupil Brigita Sulc, is one of the most explicit Czech compositions of the late 1960s. The cantata Ave Maria - also with a soprano part - won 1st Prize in the UNESCO International Composers Tribune in Paris and was often performed as a good example of the effective artistic expression of anti-war ideas. The vocal Sinfonia bohemica, awarded the Prize of the Union of Czech Composers and Concert Artists in 1976 is a tribute to the creative and undaunted spirit of the Czech nation. His Sinfonia slovaca for symphony orchestra represents a mature compositional style of Tausinger's late creative period whose further development was severed by the composer's untimely death.