Harmony for three voices

IF Southwest Chamber Music can raise the money, next year it will be the first U.S. group to participate in cultural exchanges with Vietnam since the Vietnam War ended in 1975 and with Cambodia since the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979.

“We don’t have all the funding secured,” Southwest artistic director Jeff von der Schmidt said this month. “But we do think it will happen. We’re working very hard with various foundations, businesses and the governments involved. Should we not get it together for February 2006, we’ll keep working at it until it does happen.”

The three-year project would cost about half a million dollars, with a first-year price tag of $150,000, according to Von der Schmidt. The first year, the Pasadena-based chamber group would take programs of music by Cambodian American composer Chinary Ung to both countries. Ung won the $150,000 Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1989 and has taught at UC San Diego since 1995.

The second year, students from the Vietnamese and Cambodian capitals, Hanoi and Phnom Penh, would come to the U.S. for coaching and workshops. The third, Southwest would present a festival of American music in both countries.

The Vietnam connection came about through serendipity. Southwest hired as its communications director Thu Nga Dan, a pianist trained at the Conservatory of Music of Montreal and at USC and -- it turns out -- the daughter of Thu Ha Tran, director of the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. (Dan’s grandmother, Lien Thi Thai, cofounded the conservatory in 1956 and headed the piano department.)

Dan made the connections, and Tran came to Pasadena in July to extend the invitation to Southwest in person.

“This is the very first time that a foreign group has shown interest in having a residency -- a long-term project -- in Vietnam, not just performing and giving master classes and going,” Tran said by phone with her daughter as the translator. “They really want to have an interaction. It’s an honor for the conservatory to interact with musicians of such a high caliber, as proved by the two Grammys Southwest has won.”

For Ung, the project is personal. Born in Cambodia in 1942, he came to the United States in 1964 to study at the Manhattan School of Music and Columbia University. When Pol Pot took power in Cambodia in 1975, however, he stopped composing, worried about what was happening to his country and his relatives there.

In 1980, a year after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were defeated by the Vietnamese, Ung learned that half his family members had perished under the regime.

Shocked and also deeply concerned about the survival of traditional Khmer culture, which the Khmer Rouge had attempted to eradicate, he devoted himself for nearly a decade to the study of Cambodian music and aesthetics.

That also changed his way of composing. When he came to the U.S. to study, he applied himself to learning the 12-tone school prevalent in academic circles, even though, he told The Times in 1997, he didn’t feel temperamentally attuned to it.

Now, however, he felt an urgency to connect with his country’s musical roots. He broke his five-year silence in 1980 with a solo cello piece, “Khse Buon,” in which he began to bridge Western serialism and Eastern scales and methods.

But it was with “Inner Voices,” a large-scale work commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and composed in 1986, that Ung established his new voice. He gained international recognition when the work won the Grawemeyer Award in 1989. (There’s a five-year window of eligibility for the honor.)

Ung went back to Cambodia for the first time in 2003. “After 40 years or so, I was touched by the amount of talent that those young students have, and at the same time, I have seen their lack of real solid instrumental training,” he said from Connecticut, where he was vacationing.

“I don’t think I’m really unique or special. Compared with the Cambodian youth now, I was lucky to be placed with the right teacher, at the right time. There are a number of them already interested if there will be opportunities that could open up for them.”

Creativity within tradition

UNG sees the Southwest project as one of those opportunities -- a way to help young musicians get instrumental training and to help young composers get acquainted with newer Western music.

“The country has been successfully retraining youngsters in preserving their own culture, but at the same time, personally, I think they need to open up to new creativity,” he said. “For centuries, their ancestors in Cambodia created new art forms constantly. This was nothing new. I want to encourage them to create, to innovate, without destroying their own culture.”

Under the program, Ung would also go to Vietnam, despite the enmity that has long existed between the countries. “To be frank, throughout the centuries, Cambodia and Vietnam have been constantly at war over border problems, territory disputes and so forth,” the composer said. “I hope this is a small opportunity that educationally, culturally, people should focus on the direction of exchange and expanding and really sorting out what is the truth.”

Von der Schmidt, for his part, feels the project has the potential to help bridge a divide that for many still exists between the U.S. and Vietnam. “The Vietnamese recognize that the war closed a door for them creatively,” he said. “They look at this as a way to reopen that door. When we were there discussing these possibilities, the Vietnamese openly embraced us as Americans.

“Vietnam, for us, has to change from being a war to being a country. I think this will happen. There is resolve and friendship on both sides.”