‘The More You Write, the Better You Get’ 

Last year Cuong celebrated the premiere of one of the most personally meaningful pieces he has ever been asked to write. John and Jim is a heartfelt tribute to Ohioans Jim Obergefell and his husband, the late John Arthur, whose lawsuit led to the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision establishing the right to same-sex marriage. John and Jim elegantly recasts elements of Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D and represents a kind of full circle event for Cuong, who married his physician husband, Trevor, in February 2024—on the eleventh anniversary of the day they met.

Growing up in Marietta, Georgia, Cuong fell in love with music while playing percussion in his high school band. At the same time, he was becoming aware of his sexual orientation, and he realized that Pachelbel’s Canon (“the most beautiful piece of music I’d ever heard, a piece that really got me started improvising and composing”) had become an iconic wedding anthem, part of a tradition that would likely never be available to him.

The premiere of John and Jim at the Pride Bands Alliance Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio, in July 2024, just five months after his own marriage, “was just incredible,” Cuong says. “Usually at these conferences they have two concert bands, and they actually combined them for this piece. So there were more than 300 musicians, and they couldn’t fit them all on stage, so they scattered the brass throughout the audience. And at this big climax, when the trumpets and French horns come in with the melody, it was like the sound just enveloped us. Jim Obergefell was sitting next to us, and seeing how moved he was is something I will never forget.”

Cuong’s work has been performed in venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to middle-school auditoriums by an equally wide-ranging assortment of artists, from the New York Philharmonic to Chicago’s Grammy-winning new music sextet, Eighth Blackbird.

His compositions have been described as “alluring” and “wildly inventive”—and they are delightfully unexpected. “I love experimenting with sound,” he says. He has long been obsessed, for instance, with inventing acoustic orchestrations that re-create certain electronic effects, like the echo produced by the delay pedal for an electric guitar.

“I remember as a kid loving the sound of when you run your finger over the teeth of a comb and it has this glissando effect, and then realizing that if I put it on the snare drum it sort of amplifies the sound,” he says. “So there have always been these little sounds where I’m like, ‘Oh, let me bookmark that.’”

One of his most celebrated pieces, Re(new)al, a concerto for percussion quartet, opens with a slowly building bell-like chorus of percussionists manipulating precisely tuned wineglasses held at precisely calibrated angles. “Many years ago I was washing wineglasses and accidentally hit a glass,” he says. “I noticed the pitch kind of bent down when there was water sloshing around in it, and I thought, ‘that’s interesting.’ That became a short piece I wrote for percussion quartet called ‘Water, Wine, Brandy, Brine,’ which then became the prototype for Re(new)al.”

Cuong says writing John and Jim inspired fond memories of his years at Peabody, from 2008 to 2012. Societal attitudes “were just beginning to shift with regard to marriage equality, so while my mentors at Peabody were helping me to begin to find my voice as a composer, I was also beginning to find myself as a person.”

In another full-circle event, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra performs a new Cuong work in January 2025 to celebrate the Lunar New Year. “I went to see the Baltimore Symphony all the time when I was at Peabody, and I remember dreaming about writing for them but never knowing if it would ever be a reality,” he says. “So this, too, is kind of amazing, and yet another dream come true.”