Ung, Chinary (EN)

Ung Chinary, *24 November 1942 Takeo, American composer of Cambodian origin. He graduated from the Ecole de Musique in Phnom Penh with a degree in clarinet (1963) and was a recipient of an Asia Foundation scholarship, which enabled him to study at The Manhattan School of Music (clarinet and conducting). He studied composition with Chou Wen-chung and M. Davidovsky at Columbia University, completing his PhD in 1974. He also studied under G. Crumb at Tanglewood and assisted E. Varèse. During the Khmer Rouge dictatorship, he abandoned composing, researched Cambodian culture and musical tradition, studied playing the roneat-ek, and became head of the Khmer Studies Institute (1980–85). He returned to writing music in the mid-1980s, gaining international recognition for his composition Inner Voices, which won the Grawemeyer Award in 1989. He was a lecturer at, among others, the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Arizona State University in Phoenix, and the University of California in San Diego, winner of numerous awards (including the American Academy of Arts and Letters 1981, 1988, 2020) and scholarships (Barlow, Ford, Guggenheim, Koussevitzky and Rockefeller foundations).

In Ung’s work, there is a synthesis of traditional Far Eastern musical elements with Western compositional techniques. In the 1980s, Ung abandoned the post-Webern idiom of the 1970s pieces in favour of references to Cambodian music. The compositions created in the 1990s are characterised by a compilation of romantic harmonics, complex rhythmic structures, and lyrical melodics rooted in Asian pentatonic scales and microtonal shapes. The esoteric mood of Ung’s music stems from inspiration by Far Eastern culture, its nature and geometric structures. Since 1987, the composer has been working on the idea of ​​spiral music, which is characterised by creating successive elements of musical narrative from ready-made groups of sounds and phrases (Inner Voices, Spiral I–XIV).

Literature: C. McCurdy, East Meet West in Chamber Music, “Chamber Music” 1988 no. 5, pp. 20–21; I. Brooks, An American in Paris and other expatriate composers speak out, “Ear” 1989 no. 14 (7), pp. 28–32; M. Swed, American Composer: Chinary Ung, “Chamber Music” 1996 no. 13, pp. 14–15; J.W. Kays, The music of Chinary Ung. A synthesis of Asian aesthetics and Western technique, doctoral dissertation, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbour 2000; Ch. Ung, A. Green, Singing inside Aura, in: Music of the spirit: Asian-Pacific musical identity, ed. M. Atherton, B. Crossman, New South Wales 2008; E. Green, The Cambodian aesthetics of a ‘spiral composer’. An introduction to the music of Chinary Ung, “New music connoisseur. The magazine devoted to the contemporary music scene” 2009 no. 17-1.