Summary: East has been meeting West for some time now, ever since Marco Polo and Debussy. The arrival of Chou Wen-Chung at Columbia and his magnetic attraction for generations of Asian composition students, though, has had a remarkable effect on the U.S. musical landscape. One of his first U.S. students turned out to be Cambodian Chinary Ung, now with a distinguished career at UC-San Diego and other institutions. Here he talks with Philip Blackburn about straddling cultures and the fundamental humanitarian enterprise known as music.
