Chinary Ung, Twice in One Week
I was very lucky to study with Cambodian composer Chinary Ung during his time at Northern Illinois University in the late 1970s. He and his wife Susan are long-time friends, though because they live in Southern California and I live in Chicago, we don’t see each other very often. So it was a distinct pleasure that two different musical groups in Chicago decided to perform works by Chinary in the same week.
The first performance was by the chamber ensemble Picosa, in the recital hall of the new DePaul Music School’s Holtschneider Performance Center. I had not been there previously, but the new building holds several performance spaces, and the new recital hall is both intimate and open, with very nice acoustics. Picosa placed Chinary’s work in the middle of a program of contemporary composers, including a well-known work by a composer he worked closely with, George Crumb.
The program began with Nico Muhly’s “Common Ground,” followed by Luciano Berio’s Sequenza IX (for solo clarinet). This was followed by Chinary’s “Child Song,” in a version for flute, violin, cello and piano. This chamber piece featured many of the things I have come to associate with his music: a very free, rhapsodic sense of form, an approach to pitch that is as much about color as it is about the specific note in question (i.e. bending in and out of pitches, or changing vibrato), and what I can only characterize as a heterophonic sense of ensemble. The performers in one of Chinary’s works must work with each other, but their parts often seem to have a complete independence from each other. This is part of what gives the works both a sense of freedom, and a complexity of surface that is constantly shifting and changing. Yet there is nothing harsh or “academic” in this complexity. I was struck numerous times by the sheer sensuous beauty of the sonorities. It is precisely that mixed feeling of complex interaction combined with sensuality that makes Chinary’s music so distinctive.
After intermission, Picosa’s program continued with George Crumb’s “Vox Balaenae,” which was performed under blue lighting and with the performers wearing masks, as specified in the score. Some of the same qualities that I admire in Chinary’s work were present in Crumb, though Crumb’s music also felt somehow simpler and more direct in its methods. Jennifer Higdon’s lively “Smash” ended the program.
Five days later, at the Chicago Cultural Center, we got hear Chinary’s music in a very different context. Crossing Borders music and the Cambodian National Heritage Museum presented a program of Traditional Cambodian music, performed on Cambodian instruments, and the string quartet from Crossing Borders Music played Chinary’s Spiral X “In Memoriam.” The cells of the quartet, Tom Clowes, also performed Chinary’s Khse Buon for solo cello.
I have to say that hearing Chinary’s complex music in the midst of a program of folk music was both enlightening and a bit of a disconnect. Yes, absolutely, some of his free approaches to ensemble clearly come from the heterophony of Cambodian folk music (where everyone is decorating the main melody a little differently). But if one expected to hear folk tunes in Chinary’s work, they would have been disappointed. Khse Buon, for example, owes as much to the Indian sarangi as it does to anything Cambodian, and the music’s gradual unfolding is anything but direct or easily “song” like. Similarly, Spiral X has the performers vocalizing as well as playing. This makes the work very challenging indeed, and I know that Chinary was a little apprehensive about whether the performers would pull things off. Crossing Borders managed to achieve much of the work’s crucial character, though I sense that it’s the kind of work that one would need to play for a couple of years before it would become truly idiomatic.
All told, it was a delight to have Chinary here in Chicago, and to hear his work in such very different (but appropriate!) contexts.
