From the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s, a pop and rock music scene emerged in Cambodia, revisiting French and US pop, Caribbean rhythms, and Filipino styles through a uniquely creative lens. While integrating many musical elements from foreign scenes, Cambodian artists infused their music with their own cultural references, whether through lyrics, vocal styles, or instrumental arrangements. This musical movement was abruptly interrupted in the mid-1970s, when leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime banned the music and outcast its artists, many of whom died. However, Cambodian pop and rock music from the pre-war time remains very present today through the vast circulation of bootleg copies of recordings, online diffusion on social media sites, contemporary arrangements for karaoke or social events, and other means. Since the Fall of 2020, The Angkor Dance Troupe Organization, a Cambodian American performing arts association based in Lowell, MA, the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association, also in Lowell, and the Music Department at Tufts University, initiated a program based on this genre of music. It aims to gather voices from Cambodian American families to piece together an oral history of musical life, youth, and society in pre-war Cambodia. As younger participants shared the intimate space occupied by this music in their relation to their parents, we assess the music’s legacy. In this talk, I discuss the emergent results of this ongoing project, reassessing assumptions about the role of music in cultural knowledge transmission and questioning the articulation between memory process and cultural heritage.

How does cultural production contribute to the ongoing creation and fluidity of traditions, identities, and lived histories among the Cambodian/Khmer American community in Long Beach? I focus on how the musical Khmeraspora (2023), written and directed by the renowned local rapper and filmmaker praCh Ly, transmitted the various stories and experiences in the Cambodian diaspora to portray multivocality. Musically, the show combines elements of the Cambodian pinpeat with opera, rap, and a Western symphony orchestra. The Cambodian Americans performing in this musical included a mix of immigrants, refugees, teachers, students, and descendants of genocide survivors. Over two hours, six thousand audience members watched and listened to the stories of hardships and survival under the Khmer Rouge regime, the resilience of refugees in the challenging experiences they face in the United States, and birds migrating home through dance and music. Drawing from my ethnographic experience as a dancer for Khmeraspora and interviews with Cambodian American performing artists, I argue that this musical attests to the powerful effect of performing arts as an active cultural phenomenon facilitating a space for the exchange of memories and of narratives across generations. I further claim that Khmeraspora is one musical performance that transmits stories intergenerationally through sparking conversations regarding the Cambodian American experiences from the past and present.

Much research in ethnomusicology emphasizes the political power of music-making. Scholars have depicted how people use music in the service of building, maintaining, and transforming relations of power, but less research has focused on the tensions that arise among interlocutors between endorsements of music’s political potential and the insistence that music remain apolitical. In this paper, I explore how Romani musicians express conflicted perspectives on the politicization of music. I focus on opinions about the use of music to commemorate the persecution of French Romanies by Nazi and Vichy governments during World War II. Musical media is often said to afford expressive possibilities for the narration of trauma that is considered unsuitable for more direct forms of testimony, and some French Romani musicians have taken part in public-facing commemorative projects to this effect. But the subject of Romani genocide remains extremely sensitive and even off-limits for other interlocutors, and they avoid participating in such projects or engaging the subject altogether. Most musicians I have worked with fall somewhere between these positions and adapt their stances according to context. This paper asks: how can ethnomusicologists productively and respectfully address the ambivalent, sometimes inconsistent stances our interlocutors may disclose? I argue that attention to these varied iterations of enthusiasm and distaste for politicized music can afford richer perspectives on both music’s political appropriateness and our interlocutors’ understandings of traumatic historical events. With these interventions, this paper contributes to recent ethnomusicological discussions on research ethics, political participation, music and trauma, and memory studies.