Restoring History and Peace Within the Khmer Musical Arts

After the traumatic events in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer culture took a huge hit. The reign of Khmer Rouge completely destroyed the Khmer culture. Khmer Rouge attempted to strip away everything the Cambodians had in their previously life, including everything about their culture. Khmer Rouge executed all intellectual and influential people because they saw them as a threat in restoring the culture.

In 1979, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia and drove out Khmer Rouge, the devastating results were seen. Many teachers, merchants, and politicians had been killed, along with musicians, dancers, and artists. It was very hard to restore life after such devastating losses, about twenty percent of the population had died, along with all of their cultural ways.

Immediately the Cambodians wanted to restore their culture because they were very very passionate about their way of life. The Khmer culture has very specific rules in order to maintain respect within the community. These rules are for eating, talking, walking and sitting, dressing, and greeting. All of these rules the Khmer Rouge knew of, and they did everything they could so the Khmer people would not be able to follow them. So going back to regular civilization was hard because they had to re-teach one another the proper ways of their culture.

Another gianormous part of their culture was music and dancing. The pre-war music was very peaceful and heart rendering, which is just what the people needed to hear after the four years of devastation they had gone through. Unfortunately, Khmer Rouge stripped that away from this as well by killing off all famous musicians and breaking all cassettes and recordings of the music. So the few magicians that did survive went to work.

They tried restoring the music bits at a time. The gathered in the nation's capital to put together what they remember and what they had. Tourists and Khmer people that fled the country brought in cassettes that they still had, so some music was still restored. While amazing amounts of the culture had been brought back, it unfortunately has never been the same.

The Khmer culture had some of the best rock n roll music of its time back in the sixties. The major singers were Sisamouth and Sihanouk. Sisamouth was known as the "King of Cambodian rock and roll." And Sihnouk was known for interweaving their music with Western music. Sereysothea was also becoming very popular in the late sixties. Also the music had a certain spirituality to it, which to some degree is still present, but it used to be the heart of the people. Their communication link between earth and heaven.

Unfortunately, the traditional music is not as appealing to the younger generations, and they want to make a new music history of their own. But some Khmers are determined to keep traditional Khmer music alive. They are doing this by remaking songs, to make them more modern for the younger generation. Also, one person is remixing the songs using editing software.