As a child he studied the ukelele (his first instrument),
the mandolin (his favorite), violin, viola, bass,
and a little piano. He attended UCLA, UC Berkeley,
and Princeton, studying with Colin McPhee, Seymour
Shifrin, Andrew Imbrie, Roger Sessions, and Earl Kim.
His works have been performed at Lincoln Center, New
York; BBC, London; Radio Cologne; National Theater,
Seoul; Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; InterArts
Hawaii; Symphony Hall, Boston; and Tanglewood; and
in many other locations.
Sur served as a delegate to the
New Music Notation Conference in Ghent, as guest composer
at Musicultura 1974 in Holland, and on advisory committees
of the Asia Society, New York, and WGBH, Boston. He
also engaged in research of Korean court music at
the National Music Institute in Seoul.
Sur received commissions from the Foundation for Broadcast
Culture (for a work for the Seoul Philharmonic), Taejon
International Exposition (for violinist Sarah Chang),
Library of Congress, Collage New Music, Cantata Singers
& Ensemble, Speculum Musicae, Contemporary Music Forum,
and San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. He received
support from the National Endowment for the Arts,
the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities,
the governments of the Netherlands and Korea, and
the Ford Foundation. While writing his largest work,
Slavery Documents, he was granted residencies
at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Cummington
Community for the Arts.
His principal works include Catenas I-III (for
varying small ensembles), recently performed together
for the first time by Collage New Music; Red Dust
(for twenty-nine percussionists); Penumbra, Focus
and Echo (for a film of Martha Hanslanger);
Il Tango di Trastevere (for four contrabasses,
later orchestrated for orchestra of low-pitched instruments);
New Yorker Sketches; Violin Concerto;
The Unicorn and the Lady (based upon the Cloisters
Tapestries); Kumidori Tansaeng (violin, chorus
and orchestra); Lacrimosa (chamber orchestra);
Sonnet 97 (a cappella chorus); Berceuse (violin
and piano); and Slavery Documents (for vocal
soloists, chorus, organ and large orchestra), based
upon antebellum and Biblical texts. Sur was working
on a second, equally large, part of Slavery Documents
when he died in 1999. 
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