Preservation Societies
Two new texts recovering Cambodia's musical heritage
Whenever I pick up an ancient text—a comedy by Aristophanes, say, making fun of Think Tanks in the 5th century BC, satirizing sophists who spend their time counting fly farts—and marvel at how closely the classical imagination mirrors our modern sense of humor (what’s left of it)—I think a prayer of thanks to the long chain of preservationists who ushered texts like these through the Dark Ages.
And lament all the ones that were lost.
These are a fraction of what used to be in circulation. They survived the Arab conquest to be translated by Muslim scholars in Bagdad, were preserved and copied in Byzantium, transmitted through scribes in the court of Charlemagne, and other unexpected fans of pagan literature in Christendom—like the Irish monks who painstakingly copied such forbidden knowledge in handwritten ink; or the poems of Ovid, which were transmuted and bowdlerized by medieval Roman Catholic scribes. Older copies were sought-out and recovered by Italian scholars and poets like Petrarch and Boccaccio, just in time for the renaissance, and the invention of the printing press a century later.
Obviously the stories changed a little along the way, as they were handed down through the centuries, and bits and pieces must’ve been lost in translation, but in many cases their essential spirit remains the same. Unless their translator was a moralizing prude—turning a work of Ovid, for example, into a Christian fable.
As an art restorationist once asked me, rhetorically: What is ‘authentic?’ A fresco that remains as vibrant as the morning Giotto completed it, because it’s been repainted and preserved by modern brushstrokes; or the one that remains untouched since the artist’s last brushstroke, but faded and barely visible?
It’s the old question about the “ship of Theseus” : if every board and nail has been slowly replaced, one at a time, over the course of a thousand years, the boat appears the same—but is it the same ship?
Preservation is an art, requiring its own philosophy and decisions.
Sometimes they’re made hastily. Like this painting of Jesus from 1930, which was fading fast from a church wall in Borja, Spain. Until an 82-year-old amateur took it upon herself to “fix” it in 2012, and drew a lot of media attention in the process. She may have desecrated Ecce Homo, but she also saved her local economy, and the town itself, through tourism (after the incident went viral, people flocked to view her work).
In the English-speaking world, 2023 was a good year for the preservation of Cambodian musical history, with the release of two new texts—a written history and a graphic novel.
Away From Beloved Lover: A Musical Journey Through Cambodia
(As I mentioned last week) worldwide interest in Cambodia’s second golden age during the 1960s (the first was during the Angkor empire) was kindled in 1995, with the release of Cambodian Rocks, a compilation album featuring some of the period’s greatest hits.
Dee Peyok, author of Away From Beloved Lover: A Musical Journey Through Cambodia, explains the unlikely origins of the album:
Compiled by an English teacher named Paul Wheeler from six cassettes he bought in a market in Siem Reap [Cambodia], the songs had already been remixed in Long Beach, California, for the Chlangden label by a Cambodian refugee named Thoeung Son - who added electronic drums and keyboards to refresh his original cassette dubs - before these remixes made their way back to the markets of Siem Reap, and into Wheeler’s hands.
Ethnomusicologist Professor David Novak and the Cambodian Vintage Music Archive’s co-founder Nate Hun tried to track down Thoeung Son in 2019, only to find that they were too late: Son, the man responsible for the derivation of much of the Cambodian rock compilations in circulation, had died two years earlier.
Putting aside the interesting parallel between touching-up the brushstrokes on a fresco and adding “electronic drums and keyboards to refresh… original cassette dubs,” this incident speaks to the urgency of the preservationist’s mission, when it comes to oral storytelling.
In this case, the preservationist is the author, Dee Peyok:
I entered into this voyage in the spirit of preservation, of culture, and memory; of adopting the same storytelling traditions that have preserved centuries of Cambodia’s history, literature and proverbs, by listening to the voices of those who lived this story and committing their memories to paper for all time. I wanted to capture Cambodia’s golden age of music before it was forever silenced by the deaths of its last remaining survivors…
A hundred miracles must’ve coincided to bring the tracks on Cambodian Rocks from Cambodia to California, and back again—the 45s this music came from were hidden, buried, or scattered across the globe by the lucky few who escaped Pol Pot’s regime, in some cases carrying with them the only copy in existence. The full story of Thoeung Son, the refugee who remixed these tapes in Long Beach, is too late to be told.
Which is why Dee Peyok’s Away From Beloved Lover is so important, and timely. It’s the first comprehensive written history of Cambodia’s musical heyday, a milestone. Undertaken ten years ago, in 2014 (a year before the release of the subject’s first comprehensive documentary, John Pirozzi’s Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten), it was finally published last year.
I’ve much more to say about this project (it’s ambitious), and the stories it reveals (even in the first hundred pages). But one thing is unshakeable, which bears mentioning, when it comes to preserving the stories that Dee Peyok attempts to recover—from a void.
The Khmer Rouge brotherhood—Angkar, as it was known in Cambodia, “the organization”— was anti-art and anti-intellectual. It’s safe to say it didn’t have a sense of humor; it policed everything that was sung and said. While claiming to be anti-imperialist, anti-Western, and anti-bourgeoisie, the “Paris Set”—as Pol Pot and his cronies in party leadership were known—all derived their Marxist-Leninist ideologies from elite university educations in the West. (In France—Cambodia’s former colonizer, in the parlance of our time.) These they brought home and mixed with an extreme form of Maoism.
Around the same time, French and American students, along with self-declared Western revolutionaries, could be seen “carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,” and toting copies of his Little Red Book, as an ignorant form of Maoism entered the popular culture (to the consternation of John Lennon).
Using a foolhardy, relentlessly-ghoulish U.S. bombing campaign as a pretext (more tonnage was dropped secretly on Cambodia by Nixon and Kissinger than by all the allies combined, in both the European and the Pacific theaters, during WWII), “the organization” recruited terrorized peasant farmers into joining their elitist utopian fever dream in the name of “the people,” enlisting them to kill their fellow countrymen in an autogenocide. Ethnicity and skin-tone were a factor, as was the urban-rural divide: non-ethnically-Khmer people were singled out, and city-dwellers were targeted (especially artists and musicians), distinguished from sunburnt farmworkers by their lighter skin.
The stated goal of the Khmer Rouge was to use the state, what remained of one, to ‘rewrite history’ in opposition to the kind of liberal Western values and intellectual and artistic freedom formerly on display in the capital, Phnom Penh. Or more accurately, to erase the past: the Year Zero.
Food for thought.
The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock’s Lost Queen
I confess, I’m a lit snob.
Graphic novels have rarely appealed to me—even after a friend sat down to lunch with Art Spiegelman and convinced me to read Maus, the first graphic novel to win a Pulitzer in 1992, I resisted the form.
A combination of snootiness and ignorance, in reaction to the growing sense that America’s obsession with the “comic book,” as I thought of such texts, was another indicator of our shrinking attention spans and inexorable slide into illiteracy.
And my conviction that super hero franchises—“comic book movies” after Superman—were ruining Hollywood.
So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that The Golden Voice, about singer Ros Srey Sothea, “the golden voice of the royal capital,” a peasant woman from the rice paddies of Battambang who went from picking snails to singing for the royal court— began life as a film.
I ordered this book as an afterthought, suggested by Jeff Bezos’ algorithm when I purchased Dee Payok’s history (see above). When it arrived, not realizing I was staring at the cover of a graphic novel, I thought it looked a little kitschy for a history.
Never judge a book by its cover, or genre.
Pitchfork—before it collapsed last month and merged with GQ—called it “One of the best graphic novels of the year.”
Gregory Cahill (producer of Mad Men, and the animated comedy Hell & Back with Bob Odenkirk), created this book with illustrator Kat Baumann (whom I was pleased to learn is based in Portland, OR).
In 2006—one year before the first season of Mad Men, and John Perozzi’s Dengue Fever documentary Sleepwalking Through the Mekong, nine years before Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, Cahill wrote the film version of this graphic novel. Which makes Cahill’s The Golden Voice the first film, that I know of, about Cambodia’s lost rock and roll.
Where the Marvel franchise films I mostly loath began life as comic books, this illustrated history originated as a film.
The illustrations are beautiful, the story moving (dramatized, but mostly true), and perhaps most innovative of all, The Golden Voice comes with a soundtrack of Cambodian songs both pop and traditional—great songs, many of which I’d never heard—that the reader is prompted to play at specific illustrated panels.
Readers will recall The Third Ear is preoccupied with the age-old link between music and literature, Literature and Rock & Roll, and aside from Lou Reed’s “The Gift”—a short story narrated over the sounds of the Velvet Underground—or the trend of writing soundtracks for classic novels (covered a few years ago in The Guardian), this is the most innovative wedding of modern music and literature I’ve come across lately.
Cahill and Baum’s Golden Voice takes less than two hours to read, and listen to, a fine introduction to the musical and political history of Cambodia (1963-2023). Told through the eyes of its most revered female singer, Ros Serey Sothea, who lived through three increasingly-repressive political regimes before she disappeared sometime after 1975.
This “comic book,” as I once might’ve derided it, preserves what remains of her legacy in three media.
Great stuff. Embrace the graphic novel!