Initially, he served as a violist in Berlin orchestras, while being self-taught in conducting. He assisted Schönberg during the premiere of Pierrot lunaire in 1912, and soon afterward made his conducting debut with this very composition. His career encompassed work with numerous orchestras, for instance in Riga, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Königsberg, and Winterthur. In 1933, facing the rise of Nazism, he left Germany and settled in Switzerland, where he became the conductor of orchestras in Zurich and Beromünster. Scherchen was known for his innovative conducting style, often working without a baton and using extensive verbal instructions.
He founded the Neue Musikgesellschaft and the journal Melos. He also edited the Brussels-based new music journal Musica viva (1933–36). He premiered many avant-garde works of his time, including three fragments from Berg’s Wozzeck (1924), Berg’s Violin Concerto (1936), and Hába’s Matka [Mother] (1930). He was active in the ISCM from its foundation in 1923, frequently acting as main conductor during international music festivals. He continued his artistic work after World War II, teaching masterclasses and promoting twentieth-century music. In 1954 he founded the Experimental Electroacoustic Studio in Gravesano, where he resided at that time.
As early as 1930, the Polish composer wrote a review of Scherchen’s Lehrbuch des Dirigierens (Leipzig, 1929) for Adolf Chybiński’s quarterly Kwartalnik Muzyczny. Ars viva was a distributor of performance materials of Koffler’s music. Scherchen led major performances of Koffler’s symphonic works. In January and February 1937, he presented Symphony No. 2, Op. 17 in Lwów. At the inaugural concert of the 16th ISCM Festival in London (1938), he premiered Koffler’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 21. Scherchen commissioned from Koffler an orchestration of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations (Aria mit verschiedenen Veränderungen). The score of this Bach arrangement was found by Maciej Gołąb at the Scherchen archive in Berlin, where the scores of Koffler’s Piano Concerto, Op. 13 and the ballet-oratorio Alles durch M.O.W, Op. 15 are also kept.
In the 1930s, the Koffler couple probably maintained warm private contacts with Scherchen and his then wife, the composer Xiao Shuxian.