Aura (Full Score): Full Score

Aura demands that singers and ensemble musicians engage with genuinely unfamiliar musical territory. The work challenges both performers and audiences to listen beyond conventional harmony and melody, creating a transformative concert experience. Ung's integration of extended vocal techniques with chamber instrumentation makes this a substantial artistic statement that repays deep rehearsal investment.

Aura creates a textural landscape that feels both meditative and unsettling, drawing the listener into unfamiliar acoustic spaces. The integration of vocal and instrumental timbres produces a sonic world where familiar instruments and voices generate unexpected resonances and overtones, creating an immersive rather than narrative experience.

This score serves advanced vocal ensembles, new music ensembles, and graduate-level singers prepared for substantial technical and interpretive challenges. Conductors programming contemporary music festivals, university concerts, or ensembles with strong commissioning commitments will find a substantial chamber work with genuine artistic weight.

• Study the extended vocal techniques separately from the ensemble context; mark your score with phonetic guides for non-standard articulations and overtone work before full rehearsals begin.
• Balance the relationship between vocal and instrumental lines by identifying which voices carry primary material in each section; use dynamics markings as structural signposts rather than aesthetic choices.
• Allow adequate rehearsal time for ensemble members to develop comfort with the compositional language; the unfamiliar harmonic and rhythmic contexts reward patient, collaborative problem-solving.

Position Aura as a centerpiece work on a contemporary music concert, pairing it with shorter pieces that either contextualize its innovations or provide contrast. The 180-page score suggests a substantial work suitable for a concert finale or as the anchor of a program exploring non-Western musical influences in contemporary composition.

• Extended vocal techniques including overtone singing and non-traditional articulations
• Reading complex rhythmic relationships between voices and instruments
• Responding to non-functional harmonic language and gamelan-influenced timbral colors
• Ensemble coordination across unfamiliar musical syntax