Chinary Ung was born in 1942 in the village of Prey Lvea, in Takéo, a small province in the south of Cambodia. He lived with his grandparents in the small village which formed formed an integral part of his identity. Music was all around and there were folk musicians, troubadours and salesmen who played their instruments and sang while hawking their goods, and mysterious sounds of drumbeats and chanting during the night.
Ung arrived in New York, early in 1964 to continue his study of the clarinet. 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. Ung approached Chou and asked if he could study composition privately with him and he did.
In most of Ung’s recent works, 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.