Perspectives of culture-bearers on the vitality, viability and value of traditional Khmer music genres in contemporary Cambodia (original) (raw)
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Learning and teaching traditional music in Cambodia: Challenges and incentives
International Journal for Music Education, 2017
Substantial efforts have been made since the Khmer Rouge regime to revitalise traditional Cambodian music genres. While they have met with some success, local circumstances still present many difficulties for the transmission of traditional music to the younger generations. This study explores the challenges in learning and teaching traditional Cambodian music, as well as incentives, from the viewpoint of a group of students, teachers and master-artists involved in the transmission activities of one NGO. Better understanding the challenges may help policy-makers, NGOs, and artists themselves to overcome them; better understanding the factors that encourage young people to learn (and older people to teach) may help safeguarding efforts at a critical juncture in the future of these art forms. Based primarily on interview and observational data from fieldwork in 2013 and 2014, the findings of this study underscore three challenges in particular to the transmission of traditional music genres in contemporary Cambodia: musical and technical difficulties, the changing social function of the genres, and economic pressures. In addition to intrinsic motivation, participants identified economic gain as a key incentive for young people to learn these genres. The author makes suggestions for overcoming the challenges and further motivating young people to learn traditional Cambodian music.
Gauging music vitality and viability: Three cases from Cambodia
Yearbook of the International Council for Traditional Music, 2016
This paper assesses the vitality and viability of three Khmer traditional music genres: smot, a form of Buddhist chant; kantaomming, a funeral genre; and chapei dang weng, ‘epic singing’ accompanied by a long-necked lute. The twelve-factor ‘Music Vitality and Endangerment Framework’ is used to assess each genre. The findings identify areas of strength for each genre as well as those that present challenges, in varying degree, to their sustainability. The authors discuss the advantages and limitations of carrying out an assessment of vitality and viability in this way. The research has implications for developing appropriate strategies to support the sustainable future of these and other traditional music genres in a fast-changing contemporary Cambodia.
Finding new ground: Maintaining and transforming traditional music
Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (Ed. K. Brickell, K. & S. Springer), 2017
In their volume Cambodian Culture since 1975, editors Ebhihara, Mortland and Ledgerwood (1994) explore themes around ‘Khmer trying to preserve their culture, trying to define what Khmer culture is, and trying to fit their culture within new contexts’. Focusing on the next 20 years – roughly 1995 to 2015 – this chapter builds on that earlier research, centring its attention on changes in the practice, transmission, and dissemination of traditional music in Cambodia. First, it assesses recent developments in efforts to preserve and revitalise traditional genres, including the nomination of certain traditions for recognition by UNESCO as world intangible cultural heritage. Second, it examines contemporary values and constructs surrounding innovation and recontextualisation, including the influence of a growing Khmer and Western pop music culture. Finally, it reflects on the rising profile of Cambodia’s traditional and contemporary performing arts in the international arena, and explores implications for the trajectory of Cambodia’s music traditions into the 21st century.
Music and Minorities in Ethnomusicology: Challenges and Discourses from Three Continents, 2012
This research highlights one example of ethnic minority community members in the highlands of Cambodia who are actively using their traditional music for intergenerational communication of new information, especially to older members of the community who have always depended on oral means of communication. It looks at agency of community members and demonstrates how the revitalization of music has become a site of contesting not only outside influences such as nationalization but also as a site which contests the preservation of culture as something static, homogenous, and essentialized. Community members are collectively composing and engaging with new songs using their own music system in new contexts that assist the overall community to survive through creatively teaching and promoting vernacular literacy, AIDS prevention, and approaches for adapting to other dramatic changes that are taking place in their everyday life. In looking at how music not only reflects culture but also creates culture this study applies sociolinguistic theory of language revitalization to music and culture shift and endangerment. While well intentioned ‘cultural preservation’ can have a variety of benefits it can also divert valuable time, energy, and resources away from activities that actually contribute to the sustainable maintenance of cultural vitality, or rather, to the continuing cultivation and creation of culture. Music creativity can provide a special medium of cultural reflexivity that is nested in community relationships for providing continuity in the midst of change thus decreasing marginalization of ethnic minority groups while allowing for language and cultural vitality, community solidarity, and survival in a rapidly changing world.
The article studies the reality of practicing and transmitting traditional music within the Southern Khmer community in Vietnamreview from globalization context. This study was conducted in 2018 and 2019, at 10 southern provinces/cities of Vietnam (surveying, interviewing 222 people, artisans and artists) to learn and evaluate the activities of practicing and transmitting traditional music of Southern Khmer of Vietnam. The method of Ethnographic field-visit was mainly used. Research results showed that traditional music genres are still practiced and transmitted in cultural activities of Khmer people in the South of Vietnam, including 3/7 genres of folk songs: ritual music, Chom-Rieng-Cha-Pay, lullaby and 3/12 traditional orchestras: Five-tone orchestra (Pin Peat), Kh'se orchestra and Chhay-Yam orchestra. Traditional music is mainly transmitted by "word of mouth" form which is attached with artisans and artists; the transmission forms of collecting, researching, and introducing have been implemented but are still limited. Based on the results, recommendations are proposed for preserving and promoting traditional musical heritage of the Southern Khmer people of Vietnam in the current context of globalization.
Social shifts and viable musical futures: The case of Cambodian smot
Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader, Volume II, 2017
The artistic, social and liturgical practice of smot has been, in shifting manifestations, an integral part of Buddhist ritual in Cambodia for centuries. Also known as 'Cambodian Buddhist chant' or 'Cambodian Dharma songs', and traditionally performed by a solo singer of either gender, smot faces new challenges in the 21 st century, as its social and economic bases change as rapidly as Cambodia itself. Building on the limited existing scholarly research on smot and drawing on observations and interviews conducted over eight months' fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, this chapter reflects on the current situation of smot and its prospects in fast-changing Cambodia. To illustrate some of the experiences, challenges and opportunities facing the next generation of smot artists, in whose hands lies the future of this tradition, the chapter includes a detailed account of the experiences and views of one young urban smot singer, SreyNy. These issues raised by her account, and the discussion of smot at large, resonate with the recent wider applied ethnomusicological concern with safeguarding and revitalizing musical heritage seen to be 'at risk'.
Cambodia’s recent history of conflict and political instability has resulted in a recognized need to recover, regenerate, preserve and protect the nation’s cultural heritage. Many education programmes catering for disadvantaged youth have implemented traditional Khmer music and dance lessons, suggesting that these programmes share the responsibility of cultural regeneration, and view the survival of traditional art forms as dependent on their bequeathal to these young children. In this regard, the musical future of the country is, at least in part, dependent on the success of the vulnerable. However, these vulnerable students are living in a rapidly changing Cambodia, with higher levels of education, increasing international communications and influences, developing infrastructure, urbanization and fundamentally different ways of going about everyday life, work and leisure, to their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Through semi-structured individual interviews conducted with Cambodian staff and music, dance and theatre teachers from three music and dance programmes provided by non-governmental organizations catering for vulnerable and disadvantaged young people, we explore how the conflicting objectives of conservation and cosmopolitanism are negotiated and navigated in schools. This study explores themes of conservation, coexistence of multiple traditions and education in wider Cambodian society through performance. These themes are discussed in relation to the ethics of arts teaching, which—whilst intensified in the Cambodian context—are relevant beyond this particular case study.
Indigenous Music Mediation with Urban Khmer: Tampuan Adaptation and Survival
Journal of Urban Culture Research, 2014
This paper describes some lowland/highland Khmer points of interconnection for indigenous Tampuan communities from the highland Northeast, Cambodia. Tampuan community musicians respond constructively to a Siem Reap tourist cultural show that depicts their indigenous ethnolinguistic group. Tampuan musicians make trips to the urban center of Phnom Penh to represent themselves in a CD recording, a concert, and a TV program. I contend that some community members are expressing strong cultural values as they mediate with the national and urban culture in spite of a history of Khmerization efforts by lowland Khmer. A strong value of mediation reinforces highland desires to communicate with outsiders perceived as having great effect on highland everyday life. Meanwhile some urban Khmer who may mourn the loss of Khmer traditional culture and support its revival have demonstrated interest in the traditional cultures of Khmer highland communities as they possibly empathize with others perceived to be experiencing levels of alienation and marginalization similar to their own.
"A society with Music is a society with hope," in Southeast Asia Research, London: SOAS, 2012.
Abstract: This paper explores the concept of ‘speaking beyond trauma’ in so- cieties undergoing post-war reconstruction and recovery after decades of colonization and violence. It examines inequalities in the production of knowl- edge and the re-colonization of knowledge economies dominated by well funded ‘experts’. It draws contrasts with the precarious lives of underfunded local knowledge producers, especially musicians and artists, whose compositions transcend methodological nationalisms. The focus of this paper is on the tac- tile aspect of practising and playing music: perceived by, connected with, appealing to the sense of touch, producing the effect of solidity. The paper examines how music can weave, repair, connect, disconnect and reconnect people and affective communities of belonging in a society shattered by colonization, war and ongoing conflicts. Keywords: musiceducationanddevelopment;knowledgeeconomies;tradition and innovation in music and performing arts; El Sistema