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.
