Coming to Interpretations: New Music By Chinary Ung and Sean Heim

From NY’s Interpretations:

New Music By Chinary Ung and Sean Heim

Thursday, March 25, 2010

8PM at Roulette

20 Greene Street (between Canal and Grand)

Thomas Buckner’s longstanding series of new music returns to Roulette in March, presenting an evening of challenging and deeply personal contemporary solo and chamber music from a distinguished and renowned elder composer and an acclaimed former protégé. Chinary Ung is the first American composer to win the highly coveted International Grawemeyer Award (sometimes called the Nobel prize for music composition). The evening’s works include Ung’s Seven Mirrors and Heim’s In The Between (Reflections On The Six Bardos), both for solo piano. Other works include Sean Heim’s Holomovements, for oboe, violin, viola, double bass, and piano, and two more solo works by Chinary Ung: Spiral XI – Mother And Child for viola (performed by Ung’s wife Susan Ung, who plays viola and also sings in this piece), and Cinnabar Heart, for solo marimba.

Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung is noted for combining traditional Cambodian musical elements with western instrumentation. Born in Takeo, Cambodia in 1942, he became an expert in Khmer music and a master of the roneat-ek, the Cambodian xylophone. He came to the United States in 1964 where he studied clarinet at the Manhattan School of Music, and then composition with Chou Wen-Chung and Mario Davidovsky at Columbia, and with George Crumb at Tanglewood. He is Professor of Composition at the University of California, San Diego.

Born in Philadelphia in 1967, Sean Heim has developed an imaginative personal language that distills philosophical ideas and musical elements found in numerous cultures, while reflecting the compositional techniques and aesthetic of his own western musical tradition. The many aesthetic and technical abstractions in his work reflect a deep interest in the visual arts, physics, and the natural world.

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