For about ten years, I performed compulsively…

Early in my work teaching my honors seminar in music and identity, I had become interested in propaganda music. Music is a powerful tool for builsing social identity, and I was curious to explore how it might be “imposed” from without, rather than growing from within. After some poking around, eventually discovered a treasure-trove of recorded Khmer Rouge propaganda songs in the archives of the Documentation Center of Cambodia. I started transcribing and cataloguing the songs according to their musical characteristics (pitch collection, structure, etc.) and combed through my small library of historical studies of the and survivor accounts to see what I could find regarding the songs and their impact.

In December 2018, I got a message from the Scottish journal Asia Dialogues asking me to contribute a piece to a special issue they were assembling to mark the 50th anniversary of the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge. This bit of serendipity took me by surprise. Having completed only about ten of the transcriptions, I pitched a “preliminary report” on the process. They accepted the pitch, and as I was working with the material, Youk Chhang, the director of the Documentation Center, suggested I also write a short piece for the Phnom Penh Post.  This pitch was also accepted (incredibly!), and proved quite difficult to write—I was acutely aware of the presumption of writing about Cambodian music and culture for actual Cambodian people, particularly since my research was in such early stages.

After the two publications, I continued the transcription work intermittently while also applying for tenure, and facilitating a revision of the departmental mission and vision. During the COVID-19 lockdown, 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 conference proved very productive: I was able to meet Scott Pribble, an actual Cambodia scholar, and he turned me on to a much-expanded list of survivor accounts. I also had an opportunity to talk to a publishing rep about a book project, and she responded positively to my idea of an expanded study that would contrast the Khmer Rouge material with the elite, urban musical culture of Phnom Pehn under Sihanouk.

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. Sihanouk’s popular songs seemed a good place to start since they were available, there was ample material on Sihanouk himself, and he had supplied English translations of the lyrics. The staff at the Monash University Library, where his archival material is housed, 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 an opportunity to teach the music and identity seminar again. Accordingly, Simon Frith’s ideas were fresh in my mind. I had also 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 Norodom Jenna singing “Rose de Phnom Pehn” to the presentation.

The response was quite positive, and again, I was fortunate to share the panel with a Cambodian scholar. During the discussion, he told me that Sihanouk’s “Phnom Penh” had originally been written as a hymn to the city after a building project that had included the Independence monument. After the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, it had been played over the radio, as a call for return. As such, it was a sentimental symbol of the city and the Golden Age for Cambodians across the world. This is, of course, solid gold material, and I want to check the Phnom Penh Post archives for corroborating accounts.