Born in a small village in Takeo, Cambodia in the 1940s, Ung was surrounded by traditional Cambodian instruments during his childhood. There was always music in his village: there were local folk musicians, traveling troubadours, mysterious drum beats in the night, and instruments children made out of banana leaves, sticks, and jars. Ung wasn’t introduced to Western music until he was a teenager, and he would eventually enroll in the Ecole de Musique Phnom Penh in their first graduating class. Here, he would learn the E-flat clarinet, and would later move to the US to study composition and “learn the craft of the West.”
After composing a few successful compositions, Ung took a decade-long break from his career as his home country descended into political turmoil under the Khmer Rouge. As the oppressive regime targeted and suppressed the musical arts, Ung became an agent of the arts, recording and transcribing folk music, smuggling records out of the country, and connecting and learning from a network of Cambodian musician refugees. He was also able to save more than 30 of his relatives from prisons and concentration camps throughout Cambodia, and through his activism, he became more involved and interested in Cambodian musical traditions.
Many people praise Ung’s works for their successful “merging of East and West,” but the composer himself doesn’t see these music styles as being separate in his mind. During the compositional process, he naturally incorporates musical ideas which influence him, be it the Mahler symphonies he studied in school, or the Cambodian music styles he grew up with. He has written several pieces for indigenous Asian instruments, and he hopes to use his work to draw attention to the richness of Southeast Asian music as well as work towards healing and creating unity amongst Cambodian people.
