ABOUT

A Portrait of Composer Chinary Ung
by Adam Greene

80th Birthday Tributes

[This is a revised and updated version of remarks originally delivered at the Cambodian Studies Conference: “Imagining Cambodia” at Northern Illinois University in September 2012 during a lecture period that was followed later that evening by a concert featuring several works by Chinary Ung.]

Introduction

It is my honor and pleasure to have the opportunity to offer this introduction to the life and work of Chinary Ung, whose accomplishments in the areas of musical composition, education, and preserving the cultural legacy of the Cambodian people are, in fact, too numerous to describe here in full. It is my intent to use this time to offer a glimpse into these activities and to suggest a sort of framework for understanding Ung’s work as an emblem of his unusual biography. His is a music that seeks to dissolve boundaries, to open ears, to create a link between ancient and modern practices and sounds.

As it happens, this is an opportune time to look back at Ung’s life and work in this way, even though he is a relentlessly forward-thinking individual. In just two months time Ung will reach the age of seventy, and this evening’s concert is one of several that will happen in venues around the world during this next year that will celebrate his music. It starts here, in DeKalb, where (as some of you know) Mr. Ung began his career as an educator by serving on the faculty in the late 1970s. This is also where he met the violist Susan Pounders, who would

become his wife. The two of them have not only built a marriage and a family together, but also a rich artistic collaboration that has resulted in several musical compositions, numerous recordings, and countless performances.

I pause to note that as happy as these events were, the late 1970s were a particularly troubling period for anyone with an interest in Cambodia. For Ung, who had been in the United States since 1964, it had been a long decade of worry. Indeed, he had not composed a note of music since 1974 and, with one exception, would not resume his composing until 1985. What Ung did during this hiatus from composing would have a profound effect on all his subsequent work.

Susan and Chinary Ung
Susan & Chinary Ung
Chinary Ung at 10

Chinary at age 10

Child Song

Chinary Ung was born in 1942 at his grandparents’ home in the village of Prey Lvea, in Takéo, a small province in the south of Cambodia. He was the second of ten children. His father was just starting out as a municipal bookkeeper in the city of Takéo (currently known as Doun Kaev) and his mother was a fruit and vegetable vendor. Despite their labors their income was insufficient to support both Chinary and his older brother. In considering the boys’ health and wellness, it was decided that Chinary should be sent to Prey Lvea to live with his grandparents. Prey Lvea is a small village surrounded by rice paddies located approximately 30 kilometers northeast. Ung would stay there, living the village life and learning from his grandparents until he was about six years old. Ung possesses a remarkable ability to recall small details of his life, even at an early age, and his time as a child in that tiny village formed an integral part of his identity. Village life was largely a pre-technological experience, where running water and electricity were not available to most residents. The preferred method of transporting goods was an

ox-drawn carriage. The occasional truck or bus managed to traverse its way through the dirt roads of the village, but they were not at all common. One imagines that life in 1945 was very much like it might have been in 1895, or perhaps even earlier.

According to Ung, music was all around. There were folk musicians and troubadours, there were salesmen who played their instruments and sang while hawking their goods, and there were mysterious sounds of drumbeats and chanting during the night. On one occasion, Ung awoke to hear faint musical sounds coming from across the neighboring field. As he stepped out to investigate, he was surprised to encounter a traveling pinpeat ensemble, with musicians raised up on litters that were carried by attendants. This presence of music in sometimes-unexpected circumstances indicates music’s ubiquity in village life. In the case of the pinpeat ensemble example, music quite literally occupied an elevated position of importance in the culture. Ung recalls the care with which his father went about retuning and restoring the family roneat-ek(which is a sort of xylophone) prior to playing it for the first time in years. It was a process that took hours, and the young Ung was rapt with anticipation. Music was important, and one need not be a specialist to be a practitioner.

Ung would exercise his own musical inclinations with the materials immediately available to him: a folded banana leaf became a sort of kazoo, bamboo sticks were percussion instruments, and giant clay jugs that collected rainwater for the family were vast resonant chambers to sing in. He learned early on that not all children were so equipped to make music when his friends would fail to replicate sounds and patterns he had demonstrated to them (with great patience, no doubt). Improvising with his older brother a series of tunes, patterns, and clapping games, he thought to himself how useful it would be to have a system of notation that could represent these things.

A Sonorous Path

In 1960, years after the family reunited and moved to the capital city of Phnom Penh, Ung was accepted into the first class in what was then the new L’Ecole Nationale de Musique, which would later become Royal University of Fine Arts, or RUFA. This was a conservatory in the European mold, perhaps an odd thing for the government to do in the post-Colonial period, but they were determined to produce exemplars of western classical music that would demonstrate the talent and accomplishments of the Cambodian people by mastering a language westerners could understand. Ung had heard nothing more of Western repertoire than French military band music at that point in his life, despite his years as an urbanite, and when it was determined (by lot) that he would play the E-flat clarinet, of all things, he pursued his studies with alacrity.

Ung was fortunate that others recognized his appetite for musical knowledge. He recalls fondly that his French instructor gave him a stack of records featuring the music of Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Lalo, Saint-Saëns, and others, which occupied untold hours as he poured over their many intricacies. His studies were a period of intense engagement with the ideas, techniques, and sounds of European music from the latter part of the 19th century. He became enthralled with Mahler. The dramatic trajectory of this music, and the kaleidoscopic colors of the orchestra were a revelation.

To risk repetition, it is worth noting that for a boy in his late teens from Prey Lvea to be steeped in the music of Gustav Mahler represents a fairly unlikely, if not bizarre, cultural confluence. It is a hallmark of Ung’s openness that he absorbed the lessons of Mahler and others without supplanting those he had learned from his village boyhood.

In 1962, Ung heard a performance by the visiting New York Woodwind Quintet. In that program was a work by Mozart, and it was the first time Ung recalls hearing Mozart’s work. Freed from an imposed cultural framework, he heard the music without the weight of Mozart’s position as a cultural founding father who demanded respect. Without this baggage, the music soared unencumbered, and Ung remembers being impressed by “how the music was put together.”

This brings us to a critical point when thinking about Ung’s work: context and perspective make a world of difference in how one regards creative opportunities in music. Those who grow up with the Western canon can find it to be a restrictive and ossifying presence, one that suggests the work has been done, the great music is written, and we are left with very limited space in which to establish an individual voice. Coming from outside this context, Ung certainly respected these avatars of great music, but in music itself he saw only opportunity.

When he had completed his program at RUFA, there was little question whether Ung would continue his musical studies. The question was “where?” He and his father determined that France and The U.S. were the two best options.

In 1963 Ung won a grant from the Asia Foundation to study in New York, where he had an invitation to attend the Manhattan School of Music. But international politics threatened to derail the plan when Prince Sihanouk accused the CIA of making military strikes in the Northeast, where there were known North Vietnamese air bases. The CIA had been in the country since at least 1955, but the escalation of military activity placed Sihanouk’s policy of neutrality in serious jeopardy. All aid from the US was cut off. It was, for all intents, a diplomatic embargo. This included all travel of Cambodian nationals to the United States.


There was Ung, with an exciting future just out of reach, possessing talent and abilities into which the government had invested much through his education. In desperation, he made a mad dash across the city aboard a motor scooter, accompanied by his principal instructor, in an effort to make a personal appeal to the Minister of Education. Not only did they survive the harrowing ride, somehow the plea succeeded: Ung was given a waiver. He arrived in New York, speaking almost no English, early in 1964.

At this point it is worth remembering that Chinary Ung was not yet a composer; he had come to New York to continue his study of the clarinet. His inclinations became clear, though, and he was soon introduced to Chou Wen-chung (1923-2019), the Chinese-American composer and one-time student of Varèse who taught at Columbia University. After a concert that featured Chou’s Cursive, played by Chou’s pianist wife Yi-an and the flutist Sophie Sollberger, Ung approached Chou and asked if he could study composition privately with him. Initially circumspect, given Ung’s lack of experience, Chou eventually relented.

Ung’s studies at Manhattan were characterized by a complete immersion in the techniques and materials of Western Classical music. Meanwhile, through Chou’s teaching, Ung became versed in some of the newer techniques pioneered by recent generations of composers. This disciplined acquisition of skills and knowledge is common to any field, but a musician’s education relies substantially upon exposure to live musical performances, and it is here that Ung profited greatly from being in New York City, a place replete with music in a fantastic variety of forms, from Jazz, to the entire history of Classical music, to the current vogue in Pop, to non-Western genres. It was an exciting place at a particularly exciting time. The Beatles came to the U.S. in 1964, too, of course.

When he completed his degree in 1968, Ung wanted very much to stay in New York to continue his studies in composition with Chou, but the term of his visa was about to expire, as was his grant from the Asia Foundation. The situation in Cambodia had become increasingly tense. Ung’s father, a bureaucrat in Sihanouk’s government, was

Chinary

perhaps more equipped than most to recognize the inherent instability of the political structures. The National Assembly had swung to the right after the 1966 elections, the military was asserting its own political independence, and the Khmer Rouge had begun its insurgency. Sihanouk’s position of neutrality toward the conflict in Vietnam seemed untenable. It was obvious that if Ung were to pursue a career in music it would have to be outside Cambodia. Recognizing this fact and discovering the means to make it happen are two different things, of course, and it set off a scramble to arrange for funding. While Ung was at the Cambodian Representative’s office in New York to say goodbye and thank some friends who had helped him to adjust to life in the U.S. he had a chance encounter in an elevator where an acquaintance offered to shepherd an application for support through the JDR 3rd Fund. A solution had presented itself, deus ex machina.

Thus, Ung returned to Cambodia, but for only one month. It was the last time he would set foot in his homeland for thirty-four years, and the last time he would ever see several members of his immediate family, including his father.

When he returned to New York, Ung continued his studies with Chou Wen-chung, enrolling in courses at Teacher’s College at Columbia University. Eventually he was accepted into the doctoral program in music at Columbia University, a degree he completed in 1974. Chou’s instruction included technical skills, of course, but being a composer requires more than perfecting a sort of tool chest of musical devices; it requires one to explore one’s own identity in order to establish a personal voice. Later, Ung would coin the term musical fingerprint to describe a composer’s identifying characteristics. “Fingerprint” is not merely a synonym for “style.” Style is a fairly clumsy word, and is often misused in order to categorize an artist’s work, grouping it with that of other, presumably likeminded artists. A fingerprint is both inherent to the individual and it is something made—deposited as an impression of one’s actions. A composer’s musical fingerprint is comprised in part of a collection of sonic predilections, but also of the ideas that animate the music itself. When one considers a fingerprint, one doesn’t dwell on the object itself but rather on the multidimensional being that produced it.

Chinary Chinary Ung was a fundamentally different individual in his second sojourn in the United States than he had been in the first. When he first arrived in 1964 his purpose was clear: to pursue his dreams of being a musician, and to learn what he could from an exciting, vibrant cultural center. In 1968, however, he could not help but look back and see Cambodia falling into turmoil. His studies with Chou reinforced a sense of responsibility towards his roots in order to find his personal voice, but also as a broader ethical sensibility. Chou, who had emigrated from China in his early twenties, had to reconcile for himself how to honor his native cultural legacy while contributing to his adopted land’s richness, and he encouraged his international students to do the same. He writes:

One must search beyond the procedures of a musical practice, discern its original esthetic commitments, and trace how its tradition has evolved. If one is blessed with a cross-cultural heritage, one must then regard it as a privilege and obligation to commit oneself to the search in both practices.
   “Sights And Sounds: Remembrances” – Chou Wen-chung

There is no straightforward path towards accomplishing this sort of unity of purpose. It is so grand a goal that no fledgling composer is likely to achieve it. Ung perceived a chasm between the technical skills he had acquired—the constraints they imposed on music-making—and the identity, the individuality he knew came from his village upbringing. He felt it was time to learn about traditional Cambodian music from the inside out. A superficial view of these matters would be insufficient. The sad irony was that Ung could not return to Cambodia to engage in this sort of study. It was simply too dangerous,

particularly after the military coup of 1970.There are a myriad of personal concerns that arose when it became clear that Ung was not merely on a study sojourn, but rather living in exile; however it is worth focusing our attention on his attitude towards traditional Cambodian culture. As one may recall from earlier in this discussion, Ung had heard a variety of folk musics from his earliest days in Prey Lvea, and there was often music in the home since his father was, among other things, an amateur musician. Ung himself had toyed with the roneat-ek and other instruments, but not in the sort of concerted manner that left him with true expertise. Nevertheless, the music always fascinated him—from the time he heard that traveling pinpeat ensemble from across the fields, to the first time he heard a mahori ensemble, which he overheard on a neighbor’s radio in Phnom Penh. He responded strongly to this music, but always from afar.

The distance had become greater than ever, of course, but like the proverbial mountain dweller who has to move into the valley before noticing he was on a mountain to begin with, Ung learned many things about his culture while in the United States, from music, to cooking, to Buddhism. In order to gain a more thorough understanding of traditional music, Ung began collecting recordings. He was fortunate enough to have contact with people who traveled frequently to Southeast Asia and were able to bring back recordings of traditional Cambodian music. Some of it essentially had to be smuggled out of the country. Eventually, Ung became concerned that an existential threat to the culture was inevitable, so the purpose of the record collection changed from being a personal reference library meant for study to an archive meant to preserve a fragile cultural heritage. Chinary Ung is known as a prolific composer, so when one hears that he took an eleven-year hiatus from composing, it is important to delve into the issues that precipitated the break. The last piece in Ung’s catalog before he stopped composing was Mahori, which had its premiere performance in 1974. It represented a step forward in the process of combining elements from East and West (the title, of course, refers to the traditional ensemble featuring wind, string, percussion, plucked instruments and voice), but both he and Chou viewed the piece as merely a preliminary step. Living in the United States, and New York City in particular, had introduced Ung to a bewildering variety of musical experiences, and to some degree he needed time to reconcile these with his own sensibilities. Perhaps, as events transpired, it was simply not the time to compose.

The rise of the Khmer Rouge and its policies confirmed Ung’s fears regarding the threat to music and culture in Cambodia, as the practice of music was banned in the country and musicians were either killed or sent to forced labor camps. The devastation wrought by the regime through its four-year reign was so utterly complete that it is almost incomprehensible, yet Ung was able to compartmentalize the agony of personal loss into a project of preservation, and ultimately, of hope. To have agency in the midst of calamity was a privilege. Over the next several years he would make contributions to the preservation of Cambodian culture through three, often interrelated, roles: Archivist, Teacher, and Performer.

Album cover

Archivist

In 1975, Ung won a grant from the Ford Foundation that allowed him to complete his recording archive of traditional Cambodian music, and to edit and package it for a commercial publication. Two volumes of recordings were released in 1978 and 1979 by the Folkways Records label, which would later become Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Each featured liner notes by Ung and was dedicated to those whose lives were lost in the Cambodian genocide. The music ranged from folk music on individual instruments, to ensemble music like mahori and pinpeat. Though the distribution of these albums was never massive, it was sufficiently broad to bring this little-known music throughout the United States (particularly in university libraries) at a time when the situation in Cambodia was in the daily news.

Chinary and refugee students
Chinary with Refugee Students

Teacher

Ung’s early academic positions at the University of Northern Illinois and Connecticut College were in music composition; however, while in Connecticut he also taught courses in Southeast Asian music that focused on Cambodia. Serendipitously, Connecticut College won a grant to purchase a collection of instruments from Southeast Asia, many of them of Cambodian origin. This allowed Ung to engage for the first time in a practical and detailed study of the instruments from his homeland. He established a pinpeat class, so students could learn the practice of this complex art.

After the Khmer Rouge were displaced from power in 1979, there was a huge influx of refugees from Cambodia to the United States. Many of them were orphaned children who had suffered indescribable brutality. Some had been child soldiers. Ung was one of several Cambodian immigrants who led the establishment of the Khmer Studies Institute in 1980, which was initially situated at Connecticut College. The purpose of this Institute was to offer summer courses for young refugees that would teach practical skills such as health and cooking, but also to bequeath them their cultural heritage with instruction in the Khmer language, in the cultural history of Cambodia, in Buddhist philosophy, and in traditional music and dance. The instructors were sometimes academics, like Ung, but often they were elders who shared his sense of responsibility toward the refugee community.



Performing
Chinary Ung performing on the roneat-ek
photo by Sokhan Eng

Performer

After producing the Folkways recordings, Ung took up the study of the roneat-ek, a xylophone-like instrument featured in the pinpeat ensemble. Ung had a sentimental attachment to this instrument since it was the first one he heard his father play when he was a small child. Pinpeat music plays a major role in Cambodia’s courtly traditions, appearing in various spiritual ceremonies, weddings, Buddhist rites and festivals, and accompanying shadow plays. Ung perceived that its central position in the culture made it particularly vulnerable to the scourge of the Khmer Rouge. Along with other Cambodian musicians and dancers (who were mostly refugees), he established a new pinpeat ensemble and over the course of approximately ten years played hundreds of concerts throughout the United States, including a performance at the Reagan White House. One notes that this was an ingenious method of advocacy for the cause of Cambodian freedom.

These professional and community activities consumed a great deal of Ung’s time and energy. He also expanded his musical research to include a broader survey of Southeast Asian music during this period, seeking out analogs, cognates, and extensions, if not origins of the Cambodian practices. Meanwhile, he was deeply engaged in the process of determining what had happened to his family. During the rule of the Khmer Rouge, there had been no communication with family and friends who remained in Cambodia. Ung and his mother, who was in the United States, began an intensive search in 1979 through various contacts in the region in order to discover any news. What they learned was devastating: three of Ung’s brothers, a sister, and several nephews, uncles, and other extended family had perished. However, other family members had been located, mostly in refugee camps along the Thai border, and in those dangerous times that still plagued the area Ung and his mother worried for their welfare. There emerged a plan to hire contractors—mercenaries—to extract as much of the family as was possible, through a variety of bribes and subterfuge. It was a risky plan and an expensive one, but it proved to be a success, and more than thirty relatives were shepherded out of the region and eventually to the United States and Australia.

Rising Light

Clearly, one could expand upon any number of these episodes in Ung’s life during this crucial period of 1974-1985. The rescue mission has tempting similarities to certain Hollywood spectacles, and one cannot help but note that Chinary Ung may be the only composer to have ever had his own private army. But, of course, the purpose of this rather breezy summary of major events is to give texture to the broader notion that Ung’s identity and understanding of his place in the world changed during this period of time, and this of course affected his attitude towards music. To repeat an earlier observation, being a composer requires one to explore one’s own identity in order to establish a personal voice.

Ung made one significant and highly successful effort at realizing this goal with Khse Buon, in 1980: his only compositional outing during what was otherwise a complete break from writing. Khse Buon means ‘strings four’ in Khmer, referring to the four strings of the ‘cello. One might appreciate a few things about the title. There exists a single string Cambodian lute called the Khse Diev, so perhaps the implication here is to invent a mythical four-stringed Cambodian instrument. The title ‘strings four’ removes the ‘cello from a European cultural context, viewing the instrument as a physical object, a repository of possibilities, a sort of raw material for music making.

Ung has cited numerous influences in his string writing, including Indian saranghi music, which is characterized by drones and slides along with “tails”—flourishes appearing at the ends of phrases. Ung’s work also refers to Japanese koto music along with the solo string playing of Chinese, Indonesian, and Khmer origins (like the aforementioned khse diev). Yet, perhaps remarkably, in Khse Buon Ung’s approach appears fully formed and coherent. No mere patchwork of ecotourist appropriation, it displays a highly wrought, synthetic musical language that is indebted to east and west, but bound by neither. Although this work appears as an island in the middle of the composer’s compositional hiatus, the approach to string writing it displays is still fully a part of his current practice.

The use of the term “synthetic” is purposeful, here, and should not be understood as pejorative, as somehow opposite to “organic.” Ung himself is what one might call an analogical thinker: he draws connections between disparate ideas through a chain of similarity. In even a brief conversation he may refer to Socrates, the Buddha, Carl Jung, and Yoda. Thus, when Ung received a commission from the ‘cellist Mark Johnson, of the Vermeer Quartet, it was only natural that he would think about all the methods of string playing he had heard and how they might be brought together to form a new, unified approach.

This unity defies attempts to extract individual threads in order to assess their origins. Ung has been plagued for years by the efforts of (no doubt well-intentioned) theorists and critics to catalog these issues in his work. An analysis of pitch structure often yields materials derived from modes from Southeast Asia, but rarely does such an observation seem particularly meaningful in light of other aspects of Ung’s music. I would assert the most salient issues of Ung’s musical language reside in two categories: time and nuance.

Ung’s view of musical time reveals his sympathy for Asian aesthetics even more than does his treatment of pitch and instrumental color. In Western classical music, time governs all. Typically, time is relatively constant (at least in the context of a musical passage) and is divided and subdivided into orderly meters and note values. The patterns that emerge according to this template of sound events produce rhythms, metrical emphasis, and phrases, which is the stuff that composers have written for hundreds of years. Performers can adjust and bend these temporal values in order to elicit interpretation, but they dare not bend them beyond the breaking point or risk unraveling the entire structure. Ung’s music is largely un-metered—although note values are given, there is an inherent flexibility ascribed to the temporal domain. Khse Buon features long fermatas that remove the sense of point-to-point succession while placing emphasis on the moment. Consider this brief example from the score:
Khse Buon Example

In Ung’s music, one rarely encounters an orderly succession of events that corresponds to the Western tradition of musical time. Rather, one often experiences suspension and silence. The latter is considered sacred space in the Buddhist tradition, while suspension would seem to be a companion idea. Space, or suspended time, is considered to be inherently spiritual, whereas the standard passage of time according to the clock’s progress is of the mortal plane and therefore transitory. When a Westerner speaks of the mortal and the celestial, she often means the real and the fantastic. Buddhist cosmology inverts these realms, so the spiritual, being eternal, is more real than is one’s physical, mortal existence. Such a provocative formulation can be a remarkable ally for a composer, and Ung has addressed it on many occasions throughout his career.

Consider Ung’s own words, concerning time in traditional Cambodian music:

The concept of the “downbeat” exists only in the minds of the players—the “beat” exists more in the sense of the listener’s perceiving the total gestural pulsation than a strictly defined rhythmic interplay.

In this respect, the imprecision of the beat has a natural quality that serves to diffuse several interacting rhythmic layers and creates a psychological sense of space and elasticity, enhancing the flow and interplay among the players, who all share a common theme in their collective mind.
         -Liner notes, Cambodia: Traditional Music, Vol. 1 (1978)


Chou Wen-chung has also referred to an inherent contrast between European and Asian concepts of time, likening the differences to the distinction between typeset Roman characters and Chinese calligraphy. Typeset characters are uniform, perfunctory, whereas in calligraphy there is anticipation as the brush is gathered above the writing surface. Then it moves fluidly in one bound action that is inherently physical, dependent on the body that shapes the character. The character itself, then, is a record of this physical behavior. The suspension and silence in Ung’s music helps to articulate the gestural force of the materials that follow, like a wave gathering force as it forms before releasing its energy in a foamy crash.

Khse Buon seems to emerge out of the ether as evidence of a fully formed musical language, despite its lone position in the midst of a compositional desert. The piece was composed in a matter of a few weeks, which makes it all the more impressive that it remains a seminal work in Ung’s repertoire.


Having discussed time, how might we approach the issue of nuance in order to complement our understanding of Ung’s music? Nuance refers to issues such as inflection, or emphasis, but it affects the entirety of a musical sound—from attack, to sustain, to decay, each component can be altered, modified, or finessed. Ung sometimes invokes the metaphor of a snake to describe musical line, where there is a head, body, and tail.

Although there’s no evidence of direct mimesis in his writing, the metaphor makes for a potent mental experiment: apply a sustained sound to the undulating shape of the snake and you are likely to hear a dynamic musical event.

Speakers of tonal languages have an inherent understanding of the importance of nuance since it determines meaning, not just expression. Consider the role of inflection in determining whether one is speaking in Pāli or Sanskrit. French speaking composers, who speak a romance language with important tonal characteristics, often tend to pay high regard to tone quality in their music. The various bends in Ung’s music may defy precise categorization, but they certainly appear to be meaningful, embodied, even ‘vocal,’ perhaps mournful. The implications are rich, and their position in the music is as important as any interval or mode.

Ung’s compositional career can be organized into three broad categories. The first refers to the early works prior to the hiatus. The second applies to the works from 1980-2002, and could be called the “Period of Consolidation.” The pieces composed therein cover a broad range of instrumental combinations and they include the first several instantiations of the “spiral” series that would become central to his output, as well as the groundbreaking Inner Voices, for orchestra, which gained great acclaim for Ung when it won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition in 1989. The long incubation period during his hiatus resulted in a fluency that allowed him to produce several works in rapid succession. He demonstrated a penchant for instrumental color and orchestration, as well as the ability to draw enormous creative vitality from visual concepts. In Spiral I, the notion of return is explored in a myriad of ways, yet Ung found so much richness in the idea that he never seems to exhaust its potential, returning again and again with new pieces in the “spiral” series, of which there are now fifteen.

Chinary Ung and Chou
Chinary Ung and Chou Wen-chung in 2018

The third, and current, period of Ung’s compositional career was initiated by a significant life event: a visit to Cambodia in late December 2001, his first in thirty-four years. He had received numerous invitations over the years to come back. In 1995, when I first met him, he was deeply circumspect about the motivation behind these entreaties. Not that he anticipated any abuse; rather, he was concerned about the potential politicization of his appearance, that somehow he could be seen to be endorsing a regime that had not yet proven itself.

Chinary Ung
When he finally did make the journey, it was on personal business in the company of his wife, Susan, and their two daughters. They visited Seam Reap, Phnom Penh, and made offerings in memory of his father. They received blessings at the temple in his mother’s village. These were intimate experiences long in the making, and long in the waiting, and they reacquainted Ung with the personal sorrows that had faded into the mists of time. Renewed, they now mingled with the legacy of suffering and heartache he could detect in the people he encountered. Now approaching sixty years of age, Ung felt it was time that his music served a greater purpose. If before his music was a personal expression of unity, drawing together disparate conventions and calling attention to the inherent richness of Southeast Asian musical traditions, his new music would have a more emotional project: to alleviate suffering. His target audience was Cambodians, including, one surmises, himself.

He approached this project via several means. For example, he took Cambodian musical forms and implanted them in new works. Aura, a large ensemble piece composed in 2005, features a veiled transcription of the Sathukar, a piece of music played by the pinpeat ensemble at the beginning of important ceremonial occasions. Traditionally, this music is a sort of song without words featuring a shared, “hidden” melody. Ung’s version is characteristically idiosyncratic and personal, but it taps into the DNA of the traditional source in an effort to reach into the Cambodian musical consciousness. His intention was for Cambodian audiences in particular to recognize this connection. Ung’s work has also invoked Buddhist conceits to animate the expressive role of a musical passage. His 2006 work Rain of Tears includes a section dominated by the principle of shunyata, a complex idea sometimes referred to as a void or bubble, but which Ung equates to spiritual openness. He expresses this concept as a broad registral space around which sound the highest and lowest instruments in the orchestra. Ung believes the purpose of this openness is to invite compassion, thereby dispelling suffering. The startling array of behaviors and colors Ung creates are construed as “textures of compassion” in which the listener becomes immersed.

However, the main vehicle for this new role of healing has been the voice. In most of Ung’s recent work musicians are asked to perform vocal behaviors and their instrumental parts simultaneously—no small feat considering that the combination of acrobatic gestures and subtle timbral shadings that populate Ung’s scores is enough to engage the abilities of most performers. To ask them to do something for which they have not studied and practiced to perfection—singing, humming, whistling, chanting—requires a leap of faith on the part of the composer and the performer. In some ways this alludes to folk music, in which it is common to play and sing simultaneously. In Ung’s music, the demands are heightened, and there is enough independence in both tasks that one does not hear the situation as one of melody and accompaniment.

The voice has an extraordinarily powerful effect on the listener’s experience of this music. One relates to it in a visceral sense, perhaps even more strongly to an untrained voice, which is usually what one encounters in these works that combine singing and playing. There is an inherent sincerity, a vulnerability to the voice. In Spiral XI: Mother and Child, for viola, the vocal line is at once wedded to yet independent of the viola line—they are in the same hemisphere but take slightly different paths towards a single expressive goal. It is a highly unusual scenario for a work that is classified ostensibly as a solo, but the overall sense one gathers from experiencing this music is not its newness or strangeness, but rather its unity, its intimacy, and its timelessness.

Chou Wen-chung, had this to say regarding this approach:
Naturally, the practice of accompanying one’s own voice with something as simple as hand-clapping has been around as long as human history. But in Spiral XI (2007) for viola solo, the virtuosity demanded of the soloist is in the intertwining of the performer’s two “voices,” as if they were the two “vehicles” for attaining enlightenment in Buddhism.

Clearly, the interpretational demands of this music are not only technical. Ung draws the performer’s voice into the work in order to gain something more, something greater than the instrument alone can provide. Chou’s interpretation—that the voice and instrument represent different means or traditions towards a common goal: enlightenment—is particularly striking. He amplifies further:



I have the feeling that when Chinary began using vocal expressions of performers there was a spiritual urge to use another means to produce sounds that would be even more personal in feeling than anything that can be achieved by manipulating an instrument. When a singer sings, the vocal chord becomes one’s instrument. But when a performer sings while playing on an instrument, simultaneously or alternately, it seems there are two layers of emotion, one being maneuvered extra personally and one directly from one’s heart. I do not believe Chinary was thinking of something equivalent to the same person playing two instruments. Therefore, subconsciously perhaps, he was trying to express in his music what a Buddhist would describe as two “vehicles,” one to be heard and one to be felt.

Ung has the remarkable ability to invite grand, unanswerable questions through his work, and they are invoked here in the context of a viola solo lasting approximately seventeen minutes. It is a sort of “micro-epic,” an intimate odyssey; it transports us listeners far while drawing us into its rich, distinctive sound world. In Ung’s work, the performer’s voice establishes a poignant, intense humanity even as the instrument (and the performer’s whistles) access ethereal planes. If music is to have the capacity to dispel suffering then it has to confront pain and provide the opportunity for catharsis. Ung has provided the opportunity for this experience, but the challenge to engage lies with the listener.

© Adam Greene 2021, All rights reserved
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