Ung receives Fromm Foundation grant

UC San Diego composer caps big year with marimba quartet commission

U-T San Diego | Dec. 23, 2013

Chinary Ung, who has been a professor of composition at UCSD since 1995, plays the roneat-ek, a Cambodian xylophone. Howard Lipin • U-T

Chinary Ung, a member of the composition faculty at UC San Diego, has been awarded a grant from the Fromm Music Foundation.

Based at Harvard University, the foundation is one of the most enduring and distinguished supporters of contemporary music. Past recipients have ranged from Luciano Berio and Elliott Carter to UC San Diego composers Roger Reynolds, Rand Steiger, and Lei Liang.

The commission will support the composition of a new work by Ung for marimba solo that will be performed by percussionists Gregory Beyer, Beverley Johnston, Lynn Vartan, and Stephen Solook. All have been champions of Ung’s music and have contributed performances to the three volume-set of Ung’s music on Bridge Records. 

“We are each drawn to the strength and poetry of Chinary Ung’s musical voice,” said Beyer, who is based at Northern Illinois University, in a letter supporting the grant. “(We) believe that an extended work for solo marimba, an instrument so closely related to Chinary’s own instrument of choice in the realm of Cambodian music, the roneat-ek, will be a great gift not only to the global percussion community but to the world of contemporary classical music.”

It has been an auspicious year for the Cambodian-American composer, who turned 70 in 2013.

His wife, Susan Ung, premiered his new viola concerto with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project earlier this year and Ung conducted his “Aura” in a concert with the New York New Music Ensemble at New York’s (le) Poisson Rouge dedicated to his music.

The New York New Music Ensemble and Ung also participated in the Nimitta Composers Institute, a project focused around young Cambodian composers, and Ung was involved in a Thailand — Asian Composers League event at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand this summer.

UC San Diego honored Ung in November with a symposium on his music and a concert dedicated to his work. Ung, a faculty member since 1995, also received a promotion to distinguished professor of music.