Conference Papers and Publications

Khmer Rouge Propaganda Songs

• “The Musical Legacy of the Khmer Rouge.” Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs Conference, October 2020 (virtual)

• “Musical Style and Social Identity in Khmer Rouge Songs: A Preliminary View.” Asia Dialogue, January 9, 2019.

• “Music – A Propaganda Promoting the Khmer Rouge Socialist Identity.” Phnom Penh Post, December 24, 2018.

As I taught my first honors course, HNR 3603 Music and Identity, I had become interested in music as propaganda: is it possible to impose a social identity deliberately from without? We explored this briefly in case studies of Socialist Realism in the USSR and the Moranbong Band in North Korea, but the Khmer Rouge archive seemed a perfect opportunity to go in depth. My first idea was to transcribe all the songs in the archive and catalogue them according to their style characteristics, thinking I could publish them in a sort of annotated “song book.” The work went slowly and presented several problems of heterophonic music. Each song could have as many as ten strophes, each of which was sung slightly differently: should the transcription include every detail or present a sort of aggregate reduction? The former would be prohibitively cumbersome and probably unnecessary, while the latter would present a version that never actually appeared in performance. The problem is compounded by the even more elaborately ornamented versions of the essential melodic outline performed by the instruments. I had tentatively elected to err on the aggregate side, and worked on the transcriptions while also assembling my tenure file and facilitating a revision of the departmental mission and vision.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I started compiling my observations about structure and pitch organization into rough categories, and as many professional conference were going virtual, I took advantage of a call from the Midwest Conference for Asian Affairs to develop a proposal for a longer paper. The proposal was accepted and the conference proved very productive: I met Scott Pribble, who was very supportive and sent me a much-expanded list of survivor accounts. I also set up a meeting with a publishing rep on an impulse, and pitched a book-length study of Cambodian musical cultures that would contrast the Khmer Rouge material with the “Cambodian Rock” from the 1950’s and 60’s. She was also very positive and I started working on the proposal.

Norodom Sihanouk’s Commercial Songs

“Sihanouk’s Greatest Hits.” Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs Conference, October 2021 (virtual).

The Apsara Dance

“Dance, Cultural Prestige, and Authenticity in Cambodia, 1845-1970.” 62nd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, January 2023. (Richmond, VA)

Back in October, I noticed that the proposal deadlines for SEC-AAS and ARC both came due at the end of the week. I banged out two 300-word abstracts, and delightfully, both of them were accepted. I had wanted to do some work on Pen Ran, but the language barrier was proving too difficult to ignore. As with the Khmer Rouge Propaganda songs, I will eventually need to address the content of the lyrics, and I’m just not in a place to either do it myself or hire a translator. So instead, I took a closer look at how the style of music that Pen Ran sang got to Cambodia in the first place. The usual story was that it had come through the Philippines, but the timeline didn’t make any sense. I had a lot of fun researching brass bands and found that Filipino musicians had been the principal conduit for Western/European music to both Southeast and East Asia as early as the 1830s. This paper was well-received, and I was fortunate that Gavin Douglas, an ethnomusicologist from UNCG, was the session chair. In the discussion period following the presentations, he mentioned that the big bands—Duke Ellington, Count Basie, etc.—had toured Southeast Asia. I was a little embarrassed not to have know this, and followed up on it for the presentation at the Bringing Southeast Asia Home workshop four months later.

The expanded paper explored the Jazz Ambassadors program, through which Benny Goodman visited Cambodia in 1956. While there is a wealth of information about Goodman’s stop in Thailand, including a live recording of the performance in Bangkok, all that seems to remain of the Phnom Penh performance is a photograph of Goodman being honored by Sihanouk’s father, Norodom Suramarit. I had speculated that, rather than promoting Americanism, Benny Goodman would rather have affirmed Sihanouk’s vision of modernity for Cambodia. As I continued my research after the conference, however, it appears that by the time Goodman arrived, in December 1956, US-Cambodia relations ad deteriorated to the point where Sihanouk had likely not attended the event. The episode is significant, however, in setting the stage for Sihanouk’s debut film Apsara (1966), itself a propaganda piece with goals similar to those of the Jazz Ambassadors program.

The project is currently shaping up into a trio of case studies exploring the cultural and political intersections involved with the transmission of musical style, particularly as evidenced in propaganda: King Norodom I’s court bands and the goodwill tour of 1872, the Jazz Ambassadors incident, and Sihanouk’s response in Apsara.

The difficulty of pursuing the book project, in addition to wrapping up a paper on Toshiro Mayuzumi’s Bunraku, navigating the return to in-person teaching during COVID, and facilitating a substantive revision to the music curriculum, proved considerable. I finally elected to table the Mayuzumi study and work on the book chapters as individual papers, just so there would be some measurable progress. As I brainstormed the next step, I remembered visiting King-Father Norodom Sihanouk’s website some years earlier, and being delighted to discover that he had written sentimental songs. His site had been closed down for some time at that point, but I was able to find it on the Wayback Machine and get access to the piano/vocal scores and sound files. I also contacted the University of Monash Library, who were extremely gracious, supplying me with scanned documents and securing permission for use of the material  from the Cambodian Royal Family, even as they struggled with much stricter COVID restrictions that what I had in the States. I worked on the draft pretty much continuously through my Fall Break in October 2020, and was gratified, if frustrated, to find that there were several avenues left to explore. If I had been worried about being able to find enough material for the 10,000 words, I could relax.

While my work with the Khmer Rouge songs was principally concerned with the deterritorialization of the refrain (after the approach I had used for the Yun and Mayuzumi projects), in the semester prior to starting the Sihanouk research I had discovered an article about virtual reality by Isabella van Elferen that proved something of a catalyst. Her argument that music creates an “augmented reality” helped me to connect the hybrid style and identity construction pieces, and provided a nice through-line for the paper. In effect, I argued that Sihanouk used music to actualize his ideal reality until the pressures of the economy and the war in Vietnam made it impossible to maintain. He then shifted his attention to the cinema, where he could actualize his vision on the screen. At the very last minute before the conference, it hit me that the idealized memory of the late 1950s to the early 1960s as a “Golden Age,” indicated that his augmented reality had become the shared memory. I batted out a quick revision to the conclusion to that effect, and added a video of Sihanouk’s granddaughter Norodom Jenna singing “Rose de Phnom Pehn” to the presentation.

This was perhaps less a music and more a sociology project: I was interested in the invention of tradition involved with the Apsara dance and ended up taking a rather deep dive into modern Cambodian history, following the re-inventions of Court Dance from Ang Duang’s “restoration” in the late 1840s, through the colonial period, Sihanouk’s “Golden Age,” and the period following the Khmer Rouge. I was particularly happy to be able to interview Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, one of the great masters of Cambodian Dance. While my unpacking the French perspective on Cambodian art is perhaps a little speculative, I felt I could make the case. The paper was well-received at the SEC-AAS conference, and I was privileged to have a dance scholar present, who gave me some good feedback. Dr. Kevin Fogg of UNC-Chapel Hill also recruited me to his Asia Scholars Network. Sadly, I was in Prague with the Honors program during their 2023 conference, but I am planning to go in 2024.

Philippine Bands

“The Transmission of Musical Style as Signifier: The Philippines and Cambodia.”

• 63nd Annual Meeting of the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, January 2024. (Winston-Salem, NC)

• 2nd Annual “Bringing Southeast Asia Home” Workshop of the Carolina Asia Center, May 2024. (Chapel Hill, NC)