Popular Songs, Melodies from the Dead: Moving beyond Historicism with the Buddhist Ethics and Aesthetics of Pin Peat and Cambodian Hip Hop

Jeffrey Dyer

doi:10.3390/rel11110625

Abstract

This article illustrates how the aesthetics of two types of Cambodian music—pin peat and Cambodian hip hop—enact Cambodian–Buddhist ethics and function as ritual practices through musicians’ recollections of deceased teachers’ musical legacies. Noting how prevalent historicist and secular epistemologies isolate Cambodian and, more broadly, Southeast Asian musical aesthetics from their ethical and ritual functions, I propose that analyses focusing on Buddhist ethics more closely translate the moral, religious, and ontological aspects inherent in playing and listening to Cambodian music. I detail how Cambodian musicians’ widespread practices of quoting deceased teachers’ variations, repurposing old musical styles, and reiterating the melodies and rhythms played by artistic ancestors have the potential to function as Buddhist rituals, whether those aesthetic and stylistic features surface in pin peat songs or in hip hop. Those aesthetic practices entail a modality of being historical that partially connects with but exceeds historicism’s approach to Buddhism, temporality, and history by enacting relations of mutual care that bring the living and dead to be ontologically coeval. Such relational practices bring me to conclude with a brief discussion rethinking what post-genocide remembrance sounds like and feels like.

Highlights

Popular Music and Beyond-Human ListenersLate one night at a Buddhist monastery in rural Cambodia, a small group of people hung out by the central sanctuary, drinking beer, talking energetically, and listening to music
I turn to Cambodian–Buddhist ethics with the goal of finding concepts and language that minimize translation’s inevitable disjuncture
As the band put the stylistic features of saravan into conversation with the sounds of reggae, electronic music, and hip hop,31 Grū Kavei said that those songs did the same thing he does when weaving together variations of pin peat melodies he learned from several generations of teachers

Summary

Introduction

Late one night at a Buddhist monastery in rural Cambodia, a small group of people hung out by the central sanctuary, drinking beer, talking energetically, and listening to music. Describing Cambodian pin peat music, Sam-Ang Sam coined the term “collective melody” to refer to the collectively held nature of the melody that musicians elaborate (Sam 1988) These analyses insightfully describe key components of several Southeast Asian musics, but they do so by considering those components in isolation. These French interventions were, to return to de la Cadena’s terminology (de la Cadena 2015), equivocations that translated one thing as something else, and what was most often lost in that translation were the deceased beings themselves Through their attempts to provide Cambodians with a history, French colonialists collectively failed to recognize, and even did violence to, how precolonial and colonial-era Cambodians recalled and interacted with Angkorean and other predecessors through the incantations and arts of Buddhist practices I turn to Cambodian–Buddhist ethics with the goal of finding concepts and language that minimize translation’s inevitable disjuncture

Cambodian–Buddhist Ethics

Playing Melodies from the Dead

Copresence and Memory

KlapYaHandz:

Epilogue