The 80th birthday of the Khmer-American composer Chinary Ung is next year. In honor of this great occasion, I have created a playlist of his Spiral series. The series began and includes 15 works that began in 1997 to the most recent Spiral XIV. All of these works are available through Edition Peters.

These compositions follow a metaphorical spiral through multiple series of manipulations. Both Asian and Western elements are readily discernible in this series.

Chinary Ung was my first composition teacher. The greatest effect on me was in the area of rhythm. I learned to feel rhythm asymmetrically. One technique to open up my mind to the realm of rhythm was to say a sentence out loud and then notate my reading as precisely as I could. The results were enlightening. My notations would include a mix of duplets, triplets, quintuplets, and dotted rhythms. If I were to speak in a symmetrical way the results were stiff. This is only one example of his pedagogy.

Playlist

Addendum