The Journey from the Arts4Peace Tour
to the Arts4Peace Festival:
Connecting Across Continents

On a rainy morning in late October 2018, I arrived at Logan Airport in Boston. I was there to meet friends who had spent more than 20 hours on airplanes to get there: the Khmer Magic Music Bus, a project of the Cambodian arts organization Cambodian Living Arts, were arriving from Phnom Penh, Cambodia for the three-week Arts4Peace tour. My role was that of driver for the tour, as well as translator, in addition to any odd job that popped up along the way. Volunteering for this role was my way of saying thank you for the access Cambodian Living Arts (CLA) and Khmer Magic Music Bus (KMMB) had given me as a researcher, and the kindness shown to me by these specific performers, especially CHORN-POND Arn and THORN Seyma.¹ Arn and Seyma had let me tag along on many a KMMB trip in Cambodia, and I wanted to return the favor. The group turned our rental van into a miniature version of the Khmer Magic Music Bus, the big blue bus that winds its way across the Cambodian countryside, putting on concerts of traditional music for anyone who wants to hear. However, rather than winding along the dusty, country roads of Southeast Asia, this time we were driving down the massive highways of the Northeastern corridor of the U.S., hoping to raise money and interest from American audiences for a festival to take place in that faraway country. The group hoped that their performance, entitled “Heartstrings,” would reach people’s hearts (and subsequently their wallets), and remind them of the connection between Cambodia and the U.S. In the 1970s, the two countries were brought together when the U.S. began waging unconstitutional, unauthorized war on Cambodia; the powerful one exacting a terrible toll on the smaller, less powerful one. This tour, however, sought to bring the two together for peace: specifically, the Arts4Peace festival, to take place in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, the following year. This chapter will examine the complex ways that the tour and the festival brought together people of numerous different identities—American, Cambodian American, Cambodian, and Indigenous Cambodian—to celebrate the use of the arts for peace. What emerged from the process, however, highlighted the complexities of defining peace. It also illustrated how one performing arts organization, Cambodian Living Arts, navigated the difficult choice between aiming their programming at the international audiences that provide funding for their activities, versus the local audiences who provide fewer funds, but are the intended beneficiaries of CLA’s efforts. The future of the traditional arts in Cambodia hangs in the balance of these issues.

Background

Cambodia is a small country of sixteen million people in mainland Southeast Asia. As the center of the Khmer Empire from the 9th to the 15th centuries, the majority ethnic group of modern-day Cambodia still refers to themselves as Khmer (pronounced “kmai”), a term which also refers to the national language of Cambodia. During the 1970s, Cambodia was taken over and ruled by a communist government that renamed the country “Democratic Kampuchea.” This government is commonly referred to as the Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer. The Khmer Rouge ruled Cambodia from 1975-1979, then waged a civil war to regain power from 1980 to the mid-1990s. In the four years that the Khmer Rouge held power, it is estimated that 25% of the population perished, either from starvation, disease, or political assassination. It is believed that 90% of artists died, leading to anxiety that persists today about the arts in Cambodia dying out. The Khmer Rouge recognized the power of the arts, and, in addition to targeting artists, they also created their own propaganda music, attempting to weaponize music in service of their cause. The loss and trauma of the Khmer Rouge period has left a stain on Cambodian society, one that groups across the country in a wide variety of fields are still working to wash away.

Beginning in the early 1990s, with the war drawing to a close, international organizations (commonly referred to as NGOs, or non-governmental organizations) proliferated widely in Cambodia. These organizations offered services and support in a wide variety of areas, ranging from basic health services to services like trash collection. The Cambodian government, overtaxed by the war and subsequently hampered by debt and corruption, has continued to rely on outside organizations to supply services to the people. By 2015, Cambodia had the second largest number of NGOs per capita of any country in the world. In the arts, an area that has not recovered governmental support following the war, NGOs have become the main entities supporting a wide variety of artistic activities. Cambodian Living Arts was founded in 1998 in response to the war, its aim being to revitalize the performing arts through connecting surviving masters with students. It continues to be one of the major sources of traditional performance in Cambodia today.

Just prior to the war, in the 1960s, Cambodia went through a “golden age,” when the arts, and popular music in particular, flourished. Star singers like SINN Sisamouth and ROS Serey Sothea were incredibly popular across the country, recording hundreds of songs, including many together. Many of the popular musicians of the 1960s died during the Khmer Rouge, and, as a result, their music has now become its own form of traditional music, held up as a symbol of a bygone era. SINN Sisamouth’s most famous song, Champa Battambang, has gained particular significance. This ode to the city in northwestern Cambodia (see map above for reference), a place the singer longs to return to, has become a symbol for a nostalgic longing to return to a Cambodia that no longer exists for “diasporic” Khmer, or those Cambodians living outside of Cambodia in countries all across the world, but particularly in the U.S. and France. The video below features a performance of Champa Battambang at Watt Samaki Cambodian Temple in Brooklyn, NY, by the performers of the Arts4Peace tour in November 2018. Note the audience members who sing along.

KMMB performing Champa Battambang for a Cambodian-American audience

Arts4Peace: From Fundraising Tour to Festival Reality

The Arts4Peace Festival took place over a 10-day period from November 14-24, 2019 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The festival celebrated three important milestones: 40 years since the fall of the Khmer Rouge from national power, 20 years since the founding of Cambodian Living Arts, and three generations of artists coming together to perform, descending from those original masters brought together by CLA in 1998.

In order to stage the festival, a massive amount of funding was needed. To this end, CLA put together the aforementioned three-week Arts4Peace tour across the U.S., featuring the founder of Cambodian Living Arts, Cambodian-American musician and human rights activist CHORN-POND Arn, as well as prominent artists THORN Seyma, Master MEN Man and his daughter MEN Mao, and THUCH Savang. The five performed a multi-media show entitled “Heartstrings” across the northeastern U.S., combining music and storytelling to help raise money for the Arts4Peace Festival. The performances of the tour were primarily for American audiences, though I observed that Khmer-American audience attendance was notable, especially in Lowell, Massachussetts, Brooklyn, New York, and Richmond, Virginia, where the local Khmer community helped to house the performers and host and promote performances. The show was designed to "pluck one’s heartstrings”—each performer told stories about music and survival after the Khmer Rouge and personal losses they had experienced—but with the aim of demonstrating how music had helped improve their lives. CHORN-POND’s opening of the performance makes this point plainly. “Music saved my life,” he said, to open each show.

“Heartstrings” begins in a similar manner to ceremonies in Cambodia, with a buong suong, or a prayer/blessing for the performance.

Audio recording, “Buong suong,” opening performance of “Heartstrings” show, from
November 4, 2018 performance at Watt Samaki in Brooklyn, NY

Partial video recording from November 10, 2018 performance in Richmond, VA

Skor Dai

Tror Khmer

Khim

This buong suong features traditional Cambodian instruments, including the popular and versatile skor dai, a hand drum that is used in numerous musical genres and often heard at weddings; the tror khmer, a spike fiddle that is traditionally Cambodian, but nowadays is often replaced with the Chinese-derived tror ou (and therefore occupies a special place as a characteristically Cambodian instrument); and the khim hammered dulcimer. All of these instruments would commonly be found in wedding or spirit ceremony ensembles. After the Khmer Rouge, the composition of various musical ensembles has become looser, often determined by whichever musicians are available, who then play whichever instruments they know. This has meant that instruments often get swapped out based on their instrumental family: plucked-string instruments can be substituted for one another, bowed string instruments can be substituted for one another, drums can be substituted for one another. One such example in the “Heartstrings” ensemble was THUCH Savang swapping back and forth between the khim and the guitar.

Despite the very traditional opening to the show, the majority of the songs featured in the "Heartstrings" program were popular hits from the 1960s. These songs are frequently combined in performances with more traditional repertoire in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge and have thus become their own category of “traditional” music. Cambodian pop songs from the 1960s are frequently sentimental love songs that work well being played on either Cambodian instruments or Western instruments such as guitar, electric bass, and keyboard. The following example is in this exact vein:

Snaiha ("Love")

The sentimentality and nostalgia that these songs tap into, combined with the real stories of the performer’s lives, evoked strong emotions from audiences, making it an ideal show to not only demonstrate the emotional power of Cambodian performance, enticing people to make a trip to Cambodia, but also to spur American and Cambodian-American audiences to support the cause of the festival. The funds that were raised and the connections forged on the Arts4Peace tour were not only vital for enabling the festival to happen but continue to be key sources of support for CLA and KMMB.

The Arts4Peace Festival: A Different Kind of Performance

Most performances of traditional arts in Cambodia follow the model of the Arts4Peace tour. They are staged for foreign audiences, who are willing to pay higher prices than locals can afford to sample the culture while in the country. Organizations like CLA depend on these ticket sales to support artists, and the funds enable them to offer grants, scholarships, leadership training, performance opportunities, and more. This common model has the benefit of gathering funds from more fortunate foreign audiences and passing them along to less fortunate local artists, but comes with the problem of the exclusion of Cambodian audience members. When the Khmer Magic Music Bus joined CLA as one of their programs in late 2017, it marked a shift in this model. KMMB’s mission is to travel the provinces of Cambodia, staging free concerts of traditional music in rural areas for communities that don’t often have access to live music.

Notably, though, CLA selected two of the leaders of KMMB, THORN and CHORN-POND, when they exported the foreign-funding model on the November 2018 U.S. tour. The Arts4Peace Festival itself, however, marked another significant shift towards presenting for Cambodian audiences—this time for a young, Khmer-speaking audience in Phnom Penh itself. Despite the presence of donors from the U.S., many of whom had bought cultural delegation passes through auctions staged at performances during the tour, the vast majority of events were conducted in Khmer. The six demonstration/dialogues that were organized as part of the festival were entirely in Khmer with no translation offered. Notably, these events were not only aimed at Cambodian audiences because they were in the Khmer language—the content of the events also showed that they were aimed at encouraging dialogue between Cambodians around important social issues specific to Cambodia. This was especially evident at the major exhibition of the festival, the Unsung Heroes exhibition, which opened with a special ceremony on the first day of the festival at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. The opening ceremony brought together the musicians and artists who were featured in this exhibition, with each of them sitting in front of photos of themselves and their responses to what “Arts4Peace” means to them, most with musical instruments in their hands. The focus of the exhibit was on the “unsung heroes” of the arts in Cambodia from all over the country—those who had “dedicated their lives to the arts”² and were finally getting some recognition in this exhibit. Numerous members of the press attended the exhibit, as well as many young Cambodians, and many of the participants were interviewed as they sat in front of their pictures or filmed as they played their instruments. In addition to artists supporting traditional Khmer arts, the exhibit had a number of indigenous musicians and arts leaders from different communities across Cambodia. One such indigenous arts leader was MEAS Hern, head of Yeak Laom Lake Community Arts in Ratanakiri Province, who demonstrated the chapei khloauk instrument for attendees.

Video of MEAS Hern playing the chapei khloauk during the opening of the Unsung Heroes exhibition

The Khmer name for this instrument is chapei khloauk, named for the gourd (khloauk) that functions as its resonator, but it has a variety of names amongst minority groups, who are generally referred to as Khmer leu, or upland Khmer peoples, most of whom live in northeastern Cambodia.³ Behind where MEAS is sitting is his personal statement for the project. It states:

The responses of the artists in the exhibit were varied and fascinating. One artist’s response to the prompt was as follows:

These master artists, “unsung heroes” of their craft, have seen the power of the arts in different uses, both in “enmity”—as it was used as a powerful propaganda tool by the Khmer Rouge during their regime—and in “friendship.” Their wisdom, especially being passed down to the young Cambodians who flocked to the exhibit, will hopefully help to lead a mindful path forward for the arts in Cambodia.

Discussion Questions

• How do the definitions of arts and peace intertwine in the statements from the performers in the Unsung Heroes project? How do their statements compare with the performers from the Arts4Peace tour?
• Explore the various personal statements of the artists presented on the Unsung Heroes website. What does peace mean for you? How about for the other students in your class? Think of examples of the arts being used to promote peace. Can you think of counterexamples (when the arts have been used for violence)? How do your responses compare with the definitions presented in the Unsung Heroes project?
• List out some pros and cons of relying on funding from foreign sources to support traditional arts in Cambodia. What are the benefits of in-country sources of funding? What are some of the drawbacks?

Questions for Music Majors

• What types of instruments are used in the buong suong? How do they correlate with the instruments used in Cambodian pop songs (think of families of instruments rather than specific instruments)?
• Following from the previous question, what is the texture of this music (and justify your answer)?
• How do the various songs embedded throughout this chapter differ in their tonality, their instrumentation, etc? What type of music is presented for an American audience versus for a Cambodian audience?

Further Resources

Suggestion: explore the Unsung Heroes website and look at the artists' varying definitions of what “arts for peace” means.

For short documentaries on Cambodian Music and more videos about the Arts4Peace Festival.