If Cambodia Can Learn to Sing Again

[Supharidh Hy]

The New York Times
Sunday, December 18, 2005

Music

If Cambodia Can Learn to Sing Again
By PATRICIA COHEN

IT seems fitting that Arn Chorn-Pond should take on the inordinately
ambitious goal of trying to rescue Cambodia's nearly extinct traditional
music. After all, it was the music that rescued him.

His talent for playing the Khmer flute is the reason he survived the
genocidal four-year reign of Pol Pot; the chief of the children's labor
camp liked the way the 9-year-old Arn played the military and patriotic
anthems that were based on familiar Khmer songs. Few were so lucky: among
the estimated 1.7 million murdered by the Khmer Rouge were more than 90
percent of the country's artists and performers. For centuries, musicians
had passed down their knowledge and skill orally, without recordings or
transcriptions; now there are hardly any left. "We are on the brink of
extinction," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "This incredible culture has been reduced
to the Killing Fields."

Mr. Chorn-Pond, 39, was stopping briefly in New York during a fall
fund-raising tour. There was a few days' growth below his sharp cheekbones
and soulful brown eyes. Sitting next to him in a small booth at a downtown
diner was John Burt, a longtime friend and a partner in the effort to
preserve Cambodia's thousand-year-old arts. "John is like my brother," Mr.
Chorn-Pond said, throwing his arm around Mr. Burt's skinny frame. "He
believes like I do."

For seven years now, the two have been working to record and teach
Cambodia's arts, in part by finding performers and putting them to work as
mentors for a new generation. So far they have tracked down 20 master
musicians in 10 provinces, who are working with 300 students. A Cambodian
Buena Vista Social Club.

Yet the men quickly realized that simply preserving the ancient arts wasn't
enough, that without creating original work, the music would be like a
pinned butterfly. They needed to provide new commissions, inspire new young
artists. Mr. Burt recalled hearing that the ruins of Angkor Wat had become
the largest single tourist destination in Asia. "Arn said it was fine that
people were going to see these rocks," Mr. Burt explained, "but what about
the living arts?"

So Mr. Burt, who is a producer as well as a philanthropist, came up with
the idea of commissioning a new kind of opera that would shift the familiar
focus from the Killing Fields and embody their project; it would integrate
Cambodian and American, modern and traditional music, instruments and
styles. He chose opera because it is one of the most popular forms of
musical theater in Cambodia.

"We've never had a Cambodian-American opera," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. It is an
example of "new musical forms growing out of the traditional."

It was also Mr. Burt's idea to base the story partly on Mr. Chorn-Pond's
preservation efforts. In the opera, "Where Elephants Weep," Sam, a
Cambodian refugee who escaped to America as a child, returns years later to
salvage his country's ancient music (only to fall in love with a pop
karaoke star).

Mr. Chorn-Pond's story, unhappily, differs in many important details from
Sam's. Mr. Chorn-Pond did not escape the Khmer Rouge, who took over in
1975. Most of his family, which had run a musical theater for four
generations, were murdered, including 9 of his 11 siblings. Sent to a labor
camp with 700 others, Arn was one of five children picked to learn an
instrument to play military songs. An old man with white hair taught him
the khimm, a dulcimer, warning: "I'm not going to be here long. Learn well,
this is your life." Arn never knew the man's name. After five days, he was
taken to a mangrove field and killed.

When three of the five boys turned out to be insufficiently skilled, they,
too, were taken to the mangroves.

Arn met another music teacher, Yoeun Mek, who taught him the flute, and the
two helped each other stay alive. "I stole food for him," Mr. Chorn-Pond
said, although the penalty for such a crime was death.

Arn's musical ability did not exempt him from the Khmer Rouge's other
requirements: killing, observing daily executions, even witnessing
occasional cannibalism. When the Vietnamese invaded in 1978, he was forced
into the army. "Some refused to take the gun," he said, "but if they don't
take it, they shoot them."

He eventually slipped away and made his way through the jungle to a refugee
camp across the Thai border. Plucked from thousands of desperate children,
Arn and a few others were adopted by the Rev. Peter Pond, a
Congregationalist minister who worked at the camp. In a 1984 interview in
The New York Times Magazine, when he was about 18, Arn told Gail Sheehy, "I
am nobody before"; now, he said, "I am human."

For a few years after coming to the United States, he battled violent rages
and suicidal feelings. Gradually those passed, but he was still haunted by
terrible nightmares and guilt. He related a recurring dream to Sheehy: he
is in a field holding a gun. On one side, the Khmer Rouge are beating an
old woman; on the other, children are playing in a swimming ditch. He longs
to join the children, but he knows that if he doesn't join the beatings, he
himself will be punished.

Mr. Chorn-Pond has probably told some version of his experiences hundreds,
if not thousands, of times during his 20 years of human rights work as a
kind of perpetual expiation. He has raised money for Amnesty International,
helped found Children of War to aid young survivors and started an
anti-gang program in Lowell, Mass., and a community service program in
Cambodia. His work has put him in contact with people like President Jimmy
Carter, Bruce Springsteen, Peter Gabriel and, most important, Mr. Burt.

In 1996, Mr. Chorn-Pond returned to Cambodia to work on a theater project
for Children of War and to locate Mr. Yoeun. They had not seen each other
since the Vietnamese invaded. Now Mr. Chorn-Pond found him, drunk, on the
streets of his own hometown, Battambang, cutting hair for money.

"He's a big guy, looks like gorilla," Mr. Chorn-Pond said, recalling the
reunion. "He cried like a baby. His wife told me he never cried even when
his mother died." When Mr. Yoeun met the Children of War group, he told
them how Arn saved his life - the first time he revealed that part of his
past to anyone. Later the two played together. That was when Mr. Chorn-Pond
got the idea for the Master Performers Program. "Our project gave him a
life," he said.

In 1998, Mr. Chorn-Pond and Mr. Burt, along with the nongovernmental
organization World Education, helped found Cambodian Living Arts, which
includes the master mentoring. The following year he took another trip to
Phnom Penh. "I met a girl who reminded me of Lucy, Lucille Ball, you know,
'I Love Lucy'?" Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "She sells Chuckles, the candy, and
wine on the street, but no one bought the wine, so she drank it herself."

The woman was Chek Mach, one of the country's most famous opera singers. "I
had heard her on the radio as a child," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. "I was looking
for her for many months." She, too, became a master, earning $80 a month
teaching before she died in 2002.

As Mr. Chorn-Pond was walking or bicycling miles to remote villages looking
for musicians, Mr. Burt was searching for someone who could make his idea
for a Cambodian-American opera come to life. He found his librettist in
2000 at a performance of one of her plays at the Asia Society in New York.
Catherine Filloux, a Canadian who once worked with Cambodian refugees, had
written three plays about Cambodians and a libretto for a Chinese-American
opera. (Her latest work, "Lemkin's House," about Raphael Lemkin, who coined
the word "genocide," opens Off Broadway in February.)

Ms. Filloux began working on Mr. Burt's idea, but it took him two more
years to find a composer. He met Him Sophy, who comes from a family of
musicians and was visiting New York from the Royal University of Fine Arts
in Cambodia on an artist exchange grant. Like Mr. Chorn-Pond, he was a
child when the Khmer Rouge took over. Somehow he survived a labor camp and
eventually returned to study at the Royal University. In 1985, he won a
scholarship to study at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and he
stayed 13 years before returning home as one of only three professional,
classically trained Cambodian musicians who could write music.

For three years, Mr. Him has been working on the score for "Where Elephants
Weep," combining Western rock, classical music and rap with Cambodia's
music. It is a meeting of two worlds - like the libretto, which tells a
story of Romeo and Juliet (or Tom and Taev, in the Cambodian version), of
East and West, of the ancient and contemporary.

IN July, Mr. Burt, who lives part-time in Vermont, brought Mr. Him to New
York, and set him up in his own West Village apartment to finish the score,
while Mr. Burt continued to look for backers.

One afternoon this summer, Mr. Him and Ms. Filloux were working in her cozy
Upper West Side apartment.

"I can sing, but my voice is not a singer's," Mr. Him said apologetically,
tapping his chest. He was sitting at a wooden table in front of a laptop
and two small Sony speakers, the cord stretching across the tiny kitchen
like a tripwire.

On his keyboard, Mr. Him sounded a tinny pling: a computerized
approximation of the chapey, a two-string lute. Like the traveling
musicians who used to play as they improvised poetry and social commentary,
Mr. Him began to sing the prologue in a high, warbling voice. His left hand
fluttered up and down at his stomach, as if he were playing:

"You must listen to my story.

I start in the year 63 ...

Halfway around the world, a man called 'King' has a dream

And musicians called the Beatles make the ladies scream."

Mr. Him stopped singing and explained with a satisfied smile, "I make the
chapey player imitate the 'ladies scream.' "

After the prologue, the two went over the libretto line by line. As Ms.
Filloux read, Mr. Him (who learned four languages before English) marked in
his copy which syllable of each word should be stressed so that the music
would match.

At one point, Ms. Filloux asked: "Can we go back to 'ancestors'? I worry
about putting the emphasis on '-cestors.' "

He played it again.

"Our language is easy," he said with a laugh. "You don't need any
stresses."

The complexities of the cross-cultural collaboration were also in evidence
at a workshop this month in which the full opera was sung for the first
time. Robert McQueen, the director, Scot Stafford, the music director, and
Steven Lutvak, the musical adviser, painstakingly combed through the score,
analyzing the lyrics, the concepts and the music. They suggested further
Americanizing Sam's part, adding rock 'n' roll syncopation and some
cursing. The musical changes were all right, but Mr. Him wasn't sure about
the Cambodian audience's reaction to the swearwords. They spent 90 minutes
working on four lines.

Later, Kay George Roberts, the conductor of the newly created New England
Orchestra in Lowell, arrived. Home to Mr. Chorn-Pond half the year and to a
large Cambodian population, Lowell seems a logical place for the American
premiere (after the opera's scheduled opening in Phnom Penh next fall), and
Mr. Burt was hoping that Ms. Roberts would agree to lead a performance of
"Where Elephants Weep." She listened to the tenor and the soprano sing one
of the songs, "No Mothers."

"These two different traditions have come together in an organic way," Ms.
Roberts said later. As for performing it, she added, "I'm definitely
interested."

Mr. Burt was at the session, but Mr. Chorn-Pond was not. He is back in
Phnom Penh. With the opera on its way to completion and the masters program
up and running, he has begun to close chapters of his past. A few years
ago, he was able to find his mother and spend some time with her before she
died of kidney failure. "She was a fireball, always talking," he said. She
made everybody laugh, he added, even the doctors who treated her.

And four months ago, Mr. Chorn-Pond found Sokha, the only other boy of the
original five chosen by the Khmer Rouge to be a musician who is still
alive. "I've been searching for him for a long time," Mr. Chorn-Pond said.
"Then, out of nowhere, I went to this mountain. He still worked for the
Khmer Rouge for 50 cents a day, breaking rocks." (The Khmer Rouge control
some disputed areas near the Thai border.)

"This guy is still a jungle boy," Mr. Chorn-Pond said. He took Sokha,
seriously ailing from tuberculosis, and his wife and three children to live
and work in his house, which is on a half-acre plot along the Mekong River.

During the trip to New York, Mr. Chorn-Pond talked about how much this home
meant to him. "It's very difficult for me to put roots down," he said. He
was turned toward Mr. Burt, his surrogate brother, looking imploringly at
his face and holding his hand, seeming to forget that anyone else was at
the table. "Hopefully, someday I can commit to somebody. I'm still scared."

Yet after talking about his large extended family, Cambodian and American,
noting that he has lived longer than any male in his family and that, for
the first time, he owns his own home, he pronounced: "At this moment, I'm a
very happy man. This land, this house, I don't want anything more."

But actually, he does want something more: to explore his own art, to
discover "who I would have been if it hadn't happened." He laughed,
thinking of Cambodia's pop culture. "I want to be a karaoke star," he said.
"I'm learning hip-hop, I'm learning break dancing, although I have problems
with my body" - a result of repeated injuries during his youth.

Then, somewhat unexpectedly, he said, "I would like to be an artist instead
of a human rights activist" - a sign, perhaps, that he might be ready to
take a break from his self-imposed atonement.

During a recent cellphone conversation from Phnom Penh, he talked about how
everyone can be redeemed, everyone can be forgiven. Did that mean he was
finally able to forgive himself?

There was a long pause, and it was hard to tell if it was the bad
connection or a hesitation. "Not totally," he replied. "It is very easy to
get caught in your own wounds." But with his human rights work, he said:
"There is a possibility I could do that. It is not easy, but I am doing it
now."

So did he still have the dream, the one about the children playing on one
side and the Khmer Rouge on the other?

"Yes," he said, but "I have it less now." He was explaining more, but the
cell reception was poor and his voice kept fading out. In the dream, he
said, he is still "caught in the middle."

"I know I will be shot if I turn away" from the Khmer Rouge, he added, but
at least now a newfound confidence replaces the familiar terror. "I have no
fear and no reluctance." He drops the gun and runs to the boys, to a lost
youth, to innocence, to redemption.[End]