Chinary Ung

If you ask composer Chinary Ung about his music, he will answer the way it unfolds: coiling outward, exploring unexpected paths, and looping back to the start.

“I always talk about something else,” he says with a mischievous smile, “because something else governs the music.” Then he asks what you think.

For Ung, that “something else” starts with people—his students and teaching philosophy, his family, his gratitude to mentors. It also encompasses the deep imprint of his native Cambodia and lifelong dialogue with its culture and history.

Ung’s international legacy as a composer is shaped by his merging of Eastern and Western sounds and techniques. His music spans a wide range of colors, forms, and forces: from string quartet to amplified singing violist with Korean traditional orchestra to soprano and tuba.

What emerges from this kaleidoscope is not cultural fusion, but a singular musical language. Ung creates what he calls “futuristic folk music”: honoring vital ancestral traditions while continually reimagining them. Through his practice, he acts as a composer, preservationist, and cultural advocate.

Part of engaging with Cambodian, or Khmer, cultural memory is confronting the war and upheaval that has ruptured the country. For Ung and those close to him, this has meant devastating violence, exile, and loss. His music often engages these experiences, giving shape to both personal and collective grief.

For Ung, this is an artist’s responsibility: to confront reality. “If the music will not heal you, what’s the point of writing music?” he says. The act of creation requires attention in every direction: introspection, and listening to people, the past, and the natural world. Ung points to what his mentor George Crumb called the “dormant psyche.” “That’s where art comes from,” he says.

“Music and creativity are a journey and a spiritual path through life…I’m not just a composer. I also want to be part of the world.”

Worlds of Sound

Ung’s path began in 1942. Born the second of ten children, Ung grew up in rural Cambodia, in a rice farming village, where ox carts far outnumbered automobiles.

Music permeated every aspect of daily life. Ung’s father, an amateur musician, played the roneat-ek, a type of xylophone, and traditional Khmer music filled the streets and the fields. The bright, percussive sounds of pinpeat, or traditional Cambodian ensembles with gongs, drums, and oboes, were essential to public and religious ceremonies, and never left Ung’s ears.

Music moved from the air to the classroom when, as a teenager, Ung’s family relocated to Phnom Penh and he enrolled in the new conservatory. The school distributed what instruments were left over from the military band; to Ung, they handed an E-flat clarinet—unusual for a beginner musician and unforgiving for any level.

In 1964, Ung left for New York with a scholarship to study clarinet at the Manhattan School of Music. The city teemed with musical cultures, and Ung immersed himself in classical, jazz, popular, and global traditions. He also encountered the work of Chou Wen-chung, the Chinese-American composer and professor at Columbia University, who would become his most formative mentor. Ung sought him out and began studying composition with him privately before later enrolling at Columbia.

Chou, a student of Edgard Varèse, was a pioneer in blending Eastern and Western musical traditions and urged his students to explore their own cultural heritage. “If you don’t know where you came from,” he said famously, “how do you know where you are going?”

At the time, Ung didn’t know. He was in a foreign country, steeped in Western classical techniques and “Uptown” modernism and searching for a personal musical identity.

From Murmurs to Song

In this Composer Portrait program, the Del Sol String Quartet traces Ung’s lifelong path to discover his music—and with it, himself. This begins with the public premiere of Ung’s String Trio (1966), his “Opus Zero,” written just two years after he arrived in the U.S., and unheard for 60 years. The piece is grounded in the Western modernism of the time, yet the Del Sol players hear in it the first murmurs of a distinct musical voice.

A new piece written for Del Sol—Spiral XVI—bookends the program, looping six decades of Ung’s ideas back alongside its beginnings.

From Composer to Protector

Ung completed his doctorate in composition at Columbia in 1974, but escalating turmoil in Cambodia steered Ung’s focus from his work to his people. In 1975, the radical dictator Pol Pot and the Communist Party Khmer Rouge seized power, and over the next four years, an estimated two million people died from execution, starvation, and disease.

Ung spent years without knowing the fate of his loved ones; he later learned that much of his family had been killed. For those who survived, Ung carried out the dangerous, clandestine work of helping them escape, and saved more than 30 of his relatives.

As the Khmer Rouge dismantled Cambodia’s cultural heritage—banning music and targeting musicians—Ung worked from exile to protect these traditions from erasure. He recorded traditional Cambodian music, documenting the music of mohori and pinpeat ensembles. During this period, he taught Southeast Asian music at Connecticut College, trained on the roneat-ek, and performed extensively across the U.S.

With preservation eclipsing creation, Ung stopped composing for 11 years. He says, “My music will tell me to shut up—then I shut up.”

Breaking the Silence: Khse Buon

During that decade, one piece broke the silence. Ung composed Khse Buon for solo cello in 1980 in response to a commission from Marc Johnson, cellist of the Vermeer Quartet and Ung’s colleague at Northern Illinois University.

The title means “strings four” in Khmer, a reference to the cello’s four strings and to the khse diev, a traditional single-string Cambodian instrument. The title lifts the cello out of its usual Western context and treats it as a resonant body capable of speaking any musical language.

Khse Buon combines folk traditions from across Asia, including Khmer, Chinese, and Indonesian folk practices, and instruments such as the Japanese koto, Indian sarangi, and the Iranian oud, to form an integrated musical voice.

The score demands nearly every sound a cello makes: drones, pitch bending, brittle bow chatter, percussive strikes, spiky plucks, and aching lines. Ung leaves the rhythm and tempo wide open to interpretation—a degree of license that can feel disorienting for musicians trained in detailed Western notation.

Despite this array of influences and techniques, the result feels singular: an exposed, expressive lament from a lone mourner. Ung considers Khse Buon the first step toward what would become his own musical language. “It was very difficult to compose, because you only have the cello and silence,” he says. “It’s kind of scary.”

Del Sol cellist Kathryn Bates describes the music as “haunting, a heartcry. It is raw and vulnerable emotion.” Composed during an intense moment in Ung’s life, she feels it resonates with the present. "I am grateful to share this piece, and hopefully give people a place to connect with what they may be feeling right now.”

A New Voice Unfurls

When Ung returned to composing in 1985, a surge of compositions followed, now in his own voice—and the world took note. The Philadelphia Orchestra commissioned and premiered his tone poem Inner Voices (1986), which he dedicated to his mentor Chou Wen-chung. Inner Voices received the 1989 Grawemeyer Award for Musical Composition, regarded as the world’s highest honor in composition; Ung was the first American composer to receive the prize.

He later described the crystallization of his distinct methods during this period with an image: a circle with a solid straight line down the middle. “The left side is my music—still somewhat Westernized, with some Cambodian flavor,” he says. “On the right is preservation: the art, the culture, performance.” Years later, the lines became porous, permitting exchange; eventually, all distinction disappeared. Now, he says, “there’s not even a circle. I just erased everything and stopped thinking about that.”

Around the same time, a recurring creative principle emerged in Ung’s work: the spiral. First named in Spiral I (1987) for cello, piano, and percussion, the symbol offered an organic, nonlinear alternative to more progressive Western forms. Musical material moves forward while continually circling back, echoing Buddhist conceptions of time and return versus linear progress. With a smile, Ung says, “I am writing the future.” The approach yielded a series of independent yet related works, with the sixteenth and latest spiral being the commission featured in this program.

First Del Sol collaboration: Spiral X: In Memoriam

Ung first met the Del Sol Quartet at a conference, where he teased violist Charlton Lee about his bright green viola case. Years later, the encounter would lead to a commission for Spiral X, an amplified string quartet dedicated to the victims of the Cambodian genocide and premiered at the Library of Congress.

In Spiral X, Ung works with vocalization, a prominent feature in his music for over 30 years. The musicians sing, chant, and whistle while playing their instruments, singing Cambodian words and phonemes. More often than doubling the instrumental line, the voices move independently, charged with their own intensity—at times martial, at times choral, and at others nonhuman.

Ung’s mentor Chou described the overall effect: the instrumental line is “to be heard,” while the voice is “to be felt.” Del Sol violinist Hyeyung Sol Yoon agrees, and describes how singing changes their string playing: “When we vocalize, it frees up my body to express through my instrument.”

Through years of performances, Spiral X has become integral to the quartet’s identity. Lee shares, “Every time we do it, it’s this incredibly emotional ride. You can palpably sense the audience with you.”

PREAH VIHEAR (Spiral XVI) (2025)

Spiral XVI grew out of this long collaboration. Its subtitle, Preah Vihear, refers to the 11th-century Khmer temple complex and UNESCO World Heritage site on the Thai–Cambodian border, a historic and cultural symbol treasured by both nations.

The temple and its surrounding territory have been disputed for decades. Fighting erupted again in 2025, claiming lives and further damaging the site. Ung notes that the loss is collective. “Everyone was in tears because it was over identity, over cultural heritage, and it's shared heritage—not just for Cambodia.”

Ung was moved recently by a one-minute cell phone video on social media of a Cambodian soldier racing through a forest near Preah Vihear. Ducking explosions, the soldier chants in both Khmer and Pali—the sacred language of Theravada Buddhism—with rapid-fire incantations calling for protection and help blinding the enemy. “He was totally entranced,” says Ung. “There is a mix of cultural belief and religious practice in one single minute.” He transcribed the chant’s rhythms to use for vocal lines.

Ung also drew on older sacred voices, such the Pali chant Namo Tassa, a foundational prayer of reverence to Buddha recited before many Buddhist ceremonies and rituals:

Homage to Him, the Blessed One, the Worthy One, the Rightly Self-Awakened One.

He further created a poetic translation of a powerful bas-relief inscription at Preah Vihear—a type of protective curse commonly engraved on Cambodian stone monuments.

As long as Brahma still has four faces, Vishnu eight hands, and Shiva three eyes,
all those who pilfer or desecrate our ancient temples,
built by the grace of all our ancestors,
shall receive the fury of all the Four Elements,
fall through thirty-two layers of inferno,
and Burn in a sea of fire,
Removed from the cycle of rebirth,
Forever lost until the ends of the very moon and sun.
May they never know the Light, even of the fires that burn them.

In the coda, or the work’s final section, the quartet will intone this text softly over a hushed drone.

Looking beyond conflict to a future shared by those who live with this history, Ung has dedicated PREAH VIHEAR (Spiral XVI) “to the Peacemakers of tomorrow.”

Del Sol is grateful to Lyna Lam of the A Khmer Buddhist Foundation for making this piece possible.

Common Ground

For Del Sol, working with Ung resonates deeply. The connection is partly personal. Yoon points to Ung’s recent KHMERASPORA triptych (2023), written for the Long Beach Symphony, which pairs a pinpeat ensemble with a Western orchestra. Both groups use different tuning systems, and in such cross-cultural collaborations, non-Western instruments are often expected to adjust; instead, Ung kept each in their own systems, and worked with roughly similar “shared” pitches.

“We find commonalities—you stay where you are, and then we are beautifully together,” she says. “As an Asian artist living in the United States and having a home here, the idea that I do not need to change to be here and to contribute is an amazing concept.”

The Sound of Life

Ung learned the necessity of owning one’s identity from Chou, and has since passed it forward to generations of composers.

A lifelong educator—currently Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of California, San Diego, and Senior Composer in Residence at Chapman University—Ung speaks readily of his students. Rather than give them specific instruction, Ung encourages and facilitates self-exploration; to teach someone to compose like anyone but themself, he says, amounts to a “cultural crime.”

Instead, he embraces a discipline of curiosity, and is insistent that learning need not happen inside a classroom. It also includes dreams, imagery, stories, family, and even food. “Everything!...We should try to take off our socks and shoes, and stand on the grass, and touch that tree, and see if there's a connection from our feet to the ground.”

As Ung continues to discover and create, he maintains that in the end, art serves life, rather than the other way around.

“It took me a long time to realize, yes, music is something I love to do, but it’s not at the top of my list anymore. Humanity, friendship, solving the suffering of others—and then there is music.”

“You cannot notate everything. You cannot notate love.”

Katelyn Simone is a writer, music journalist, and oboist. She has contributed to the San Francisco Chronicle and Classical Voice North America and is New York correspondent for San Francisco Classical Voice.

Copyright © 2026 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form, without the prior written permission of the author.