Creator
Chinary Ung
Cambodian-American composer whose orchestral work Inner Voices won the Grawemeyer Award in 1989.
Chinary Ung is a Cambodian-American composer and music professor whose orchestral piece Inner Voices won the Grawemeyer Award.[1][2] He was the first American composer to receive that award, in 1989.[2]
Early life and training
Chinary Ung was born in 1942 in Takeo, Cambodia.[3] He was in the first graduating class of the music school in Phnom Penh, where he played the E-flat clarinet.[3] In 1964, as a high school student in Phnom Penh, he received a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where he studied clarinet.[4][3]
He went on to Columbia University to study composition with Chou Wen-chung.[3] A 1970 grant from the Asian Cultural Council supported his study toward the Doctor of Musical Arts degree at Columbia's School of the Arts.[5] He completed the degree in 1974.[3]
Career
His early works include Tall Wind (1970) and Mohori (1974).[3] Between 1974 and 1985 he composed only one piece, Khse Buon (1980), written for the cellist Marc Johnson. In those years he compiled and annotated two volumes of Cambodia: Traditional Music for Folkways (1977) and founded the Khmer Studies Institute.[3] He was its president in the United States from 1980 to 1985.[1]
He began teaching at Northern Illinois University in 1977 and later taught at Connecticut College, the University of Pennsylvania and Arizona State University.[3] At Arizona State he was a Regents Professor.[2] He joined the University of California San Diego as a professor of composition in 1995 and is now Distinguished Professor of Music emeritus there.[3][1] He has also been Senior Composer in Residence at Chapman University and Karel Husa Visiting Professor at Ithaca College for 2017 to 2018.[1]
Inner Voices (1986) brought him the Grawemeyer Award in 1989.[3][2] His later works include the Spiral series, Grand Spiral: Desert Flowers Bloom (1990) for symphonic band and Seven Mirrors (1997) for solo piano.[3] Aura (2005) is scored for two sopranos and chamber ensemble. Rain of Tears (2006), a concerto for chamber orchestra, was written for the victims of natural disasters in Banda Aceh and New Orleans.[1] In some performances he has played the roneat ek, the Cambodian xylophone.[1]
His music has been played by orchestras in Philadelphia, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Tokyo, Sydney and Basel.[1] He has had commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford, Koussevitzky and Barlow foundations, among others.[1] He composed the commissioned score for The Rebirth of Apsara, a dance production created and choreographed by Charya Burt. It was set to premiere at Sonoma State University's Green Music Center in early 2024.[6]
Work in Cambodia
He first went back to Cambodia in 2002.[3] That year the Asian Cultural Council gave him and the violist Susan Ung a grant to work with the Royal University of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Cambodia on the teaching of Western music.[5] A second grant in 2012 supported groundwork for a composers institute in Cambodia.[5] He directs the Nirmita Composers Institute each summer.[1]
Honors
Besides the Grawemeyer Award, he received the Friedheim Award in 1989.[3] He received the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award; the Asian Cultural Council lists it under 2013 and the University of California San Diego gives 2014.[5][1] In 2020 he was elected a lifetime member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.[4]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 University of California San Diego Department of Music, Chinary Ung (undated)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Arizona State University, Chinary Ung (undated)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 3.11 3.12 Contemporary Musicians via Encyclopedia.com, Ung, Chinary (undated)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Voice of America Khmer, Renowned Cambodian-American composer urges artists to listen to their inner voices (July 18, 2020)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Asian Cultural Council, Ung Chinary (undated)
- ↑ Mission Local, New life for Cambodian arts with the rebirth of Apsara (January 31, 2024)