Wednesday, 21 October, 2020 UTC
Summary
Master Vocalist Chek Mach and Arn Chorn-Pond
The music of Cambodia had a Near Death Experience.
A thousand years of formal Courtly performance and folk music for getting life’s work done was shut down in the most brutal way imaginable. The Khmer Rouge, with absolute control over the country from 1975–1979, made it an explicit policy to kill all the artists. Then they carried it out.
People estimate now that 25% of the overall population was killed — and 90% of all the artists.
The story of the survivors and the slow restoration of an entire culture is partly summarized in the image above of a one-time Superstar singer and the young man who rediscovered her. There were a few others too, who had pretended to be barbers or taxi drivers and managed to live.
Arn Chorn-Pond had also survived the Killing Fields and he survived the tortuous journey to the Thai refugee camp, where he was cared for and adopted by an American who took him away, to Vermont. By the time Arn finished high school and college, the Khmer Rouge were out of power and Cambodia was slowly starting to breath again.
All he wanted to do was go back and find the artists. It was preposterous. He didn’t even know if there were any. But he was relentless and very persuasive and so with help from a few big-hearted Americans he did it.
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Arn Chorn-Pond combed the streets and alleys of Phnom Penh in the 1990s. One by one, he found whoever was left.
Women who had once sung for Kings, now homeless. Men who were heard on the radio all day every day, now alcoholics. Arn helped them find themselves by setting up little schools where old Masters could teach young people who wanted to learn.
He formed an organization, Cambodian Living Arts, now over twenty years old, still nurturing young talent and honoring the few Masters still alive to see the rebirth.
Arn and his partner Seyma Thorn also formed a special project with the help of others to take the music back where it started, back to the Cambodian people in remote villages where their own songs had not been heard in two generations.
The Khmer Magic Music Bus has logged thousands of hard miles since 2013, over dirt roads and flooded streams:
To Restore Cambodia’s Rich Musical Heritage
One Village at a Time
Now the Bus is stalled. The music stopped again. No shows every night for the tourists in Phnom Penh. No road trips on the Bus. No traditional instrument demonstrations in the schools.
Like the Khmer Rouge, Covid-19 is especially hard on artists who perform live for people, which is the entire purpose of the Khmer Magic Music Bus. Take the artists to the people and put on a show.
But how?
Seyma Thorn and Arn Chorn-Pond avatars in VRIt takes a certain kind of artist to be willing to try out new venues, new formats, whole new ways of performing. Very few have been willing to try virtual venues, VR as a stage where the world can come together.
John Legend has. Reggie Watts. A few others. And the Khmer Magic Music Bus.
Arn and Seyma drove into AltspaceVR in July to put on four shows that were something like a dress rehearsal. There was a lot to figure out technically and creatively. The sound wasn’t perfect. Neither one of them knew how to move around easily in avatar form.
None of that stopped them. About 20–30 people attended each show, mostly people from North America and Europe. It went surprisingly well.
Now the sound is better. The shows will keep getting better as we learn to use virtual venues not just to reproduce the live music experience, as we are doing now — but to create new worlds for performers to inspire us in ways we can barely imagine.
We will build a Virtual Cambodia. People will spawn in at the edge of a jungle and they will heat music being played faintly in the distance. They will find their way to the clearing where singers and dancers are blending ancient and modern instruments and creating something new and beautiful.
But there are a few more steps along the way.
The musicians are with us in the new series as avatars on a virtual stage in a virtual theater, with large images projected behind them, showing what they look like, showing what Cambodia looks like. Real people are somewhere in Phnom Penh, singing and playing instruments, their sounds mixed and sent over the Internet into the AltspaceVR app.
The series celebrates Master Artists who survived and the ways the music is kept alive in Cambodia today, with the first show featuring sounds and stories of legendary Master Kong Nai and the Chapei, a United Nations World Heritage Instrument.
Master Kong NaiArn Chorn-Pond doesn’t work from a script. When he shares his memories and tells about the life of a blind Master Artist, the words come straight from his heart to the audience.
Later in the show, Arn describes the programs for young people to learn chapei today and introduces us to Kong Gea, an enthusiastic student.
All four shows are different, different Masters, different young people. Different songs from Seyma Thorn and the Khmer Magic Music Bus Band.
The first show is October 22 and they are FREE. If you think it’s a good idea — some musicians in Cambodia bringing their show to VR on their own — you can buy a Ticket as a Donation even if you can’t come.
We’re hoping lots-of-people-doing-a-little Fundraising can work for the Arts.
Don’t forget to give us your 👏 !
https://medium.com/media/1e1f2ee7654748bb938735cbca6f0fd3/hrefTaking the Bus into VR was originally published in AR/VR Journey: Augmented & Virtual Reality Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.