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Music
- Large instrumental works, including Inner Voices (1986) and Antiphonal Spirals (1995), for orchestra; Grand Spiral: Desert Flowers Bloom (1990), for symphonic band
- Instrumental chamber music, including Khse Buon (1980, solo cello or viola), Spiral (1987, cello piano and percussion), Spiral VI (1992, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), and Seven Mirrors (1997, solo piano)
- Vocal chamber works, including Tall Wind (1970, soprano and chamber ensemble), Mohori (1974, soprano and chamber ensemble), Spiral II (1989, soprano, tuba, and piano)
Life
Diploma from L’école de Musique Phnom Penh, Cambodia; DMA, Columbia University. Composer; Ung, born in Takeo, Cambodia in 1942, became an expert in Khmer music and a master of the roneat-ek, the Cambodian xylophone. He came to the United States in 1964 where he studied composition with Chou Wen-Chung and Mario Davidovsky at Columbia and George Crumb at Tanglewood. Since 1979, Ung’s primary teaching positions have been at Arizona State University, the University of Pennsylvania, the Khmer Studies Institute, and Northern Illinois University. Ung has received commissions from the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Meet the Composer/Reader’s Digest Commissioning Program, the Aeolian Chamber Ensemble, the Barlow Endowment Foundation, The Vermeer Quartet, The Philadelphia Orchestra, and others. Among the honors and awards received by Chinary Ung are a Grawemeyer Award for Music, 1989 for Inner Voices (recorded by the American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor, London Records, 1995); The Friedheim Award, 1989 for Sprial (recorded by Aequalis Ensemble, New World Records, 1990); and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1988 and 1981. Ung has received major grants from the Asia Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Chinary Ung is published by C.F. Peters and recorded CRI Records, Folkways Records, New World Records, Sony, and London Records.
Ung’s music is a remarkable blend of two cultures. He uses Western instruments, but his melodic materials are often based on Asian pentatonic scales, and he often calls for pitch bending and microtones that further resemble the music of the East. In works such as his Spirals, the heterophonic textures also are reminiscent of the music of Southeast Asia. His synthesis is, in part, a result of a personal and cultural crisis. As a reaction to the horror of the Khmer Rouge genocide, in which much of his family perished, he devoted nearly a decade to the study and performance of Cambodian music and aesthetics.
In his own words...
"I believe that imagination, expressivity, and emotion evoke a sense of Eastern romanticism in my music that parallels some of the music-making in numerous lands of Asia. Above all, in metaphor, if the Asian aesthetic is represented by the color yellow and the Western aesthetic is represented by the color blue, then my music is a mixture – or the color green...Composing for me is truly a spiritual path."