Meet Composers

Le van khoa

Lê Văn Khoa was born in 1933 in Cần Thơ, South Vietnam. At the age of thirteen, he had a love for music that ran deep, but his family lacked the money that could’ve afforded him the formal training he so desired. It was then that he devised his own system of composition. Three years later, he picked up a music theory book that had been discarded by a French school. He studied and changed his music writing technique according to the information that he hungrily learned from the book. The next year, he drew a piano keyboard on the table and began to “practice” playing piano, and halfway through his eighteenth year, he got to play his first note on a real piano.  That day, he played with his soon-to-be teacher for almost thirty minutes; he, on the piano, and the teacher on her organ. At 19 years old, Le submitted two compositions to a national musical composition contest in Hanoi, North Vietnam. In 1953, the organizing committee announced that both of his submissions had won the contest. In 1969, he won another prize in musical composition and a prize for his photographic work in the President’s National Literature and Arts Competition.

His songs were played on Vietnam’s national radio in 1952-1953, but by then, he had decided to change direction.  Le began to focus his energy into choral and symphonic works with the fervent hope that he could elevate Vietnamese music to a new plateau.  In the field of photography, he entered three categories in a photo contest in Saigon in 1963.  He was given a gold, silver, and bronze medal and an honorable mention. Because he won so many prizes, he was also awarded a trophy for the highest honor in that competition.

In 1967, Lê Văn Khoa co-founded the Vietnamese Artistic Photography Association (APA) and continues to serve as president of the association to this day.  In the field of music, his compositions are performed in concerts in many parts of the world and are used for study in music in academies and colleges in the United States and Ukraine.  Le Van Khoa continues his work in the arts each and every day.