For whom the gong tolls

Natural History, Sept, 1997 by Mark Jacobson

Cambodia is a heartwrench. One day you stand stupefied in the courtyard of Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, the infamous interrogation/torture center, now a museum. From here the Khmer Rouge sent thousands to the killing fields at Choeung Ek. You read the posted translation of the security regulations (Rule 6: While Getting Lashes or Electrification You Must Not Cry at All), stare at the seemingly endless photo gallery of prisoners who knew they were about to die, and your mind goes numb. Next day, flown 150 miles courtesy of Royal Air Cambodge, you are equally stupefied as you peer upward at the monumental towers of Angkor Wat, perhaps the most inspiring religious budding in the world.

In Cambodia, scene of virtually non-stop civil war since 1970, one confronts the margins of human possibility. On March 30 twelve people were killed and about one hundred and fifty injured in Phnom Penh when a grenade was thrown into a political rally, but when I arrived a week later, I saw Cambodian classical dance, wondrous in its arcane intricacies, performed across the street from the site of the attack. Such pageantry pervades the tenor of everyday life. A type of music that originated a millennium ago during the height of the Khmer Empire (ninth to fifteenth centuries) can be heard above the whine of motorbike engines, its stately clatter pouring from apartment windows above the stalls of sunglasses hawkers. Internationally known are the elaborate pin peat orchestras that accompany court and masked dances, shadow puppet theater, and religious ceremonies. Other ensembles include the areak ka for spirit worship and weddings, the kong skor for boxing matches and funeral processions, and the mohori for various forms of entertainment.

With the recent reports of hostilities -- and the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot possibly a captive and facing trial or some less formal disposition -- the world is being reminded again of some sobering statistics. According to one estimate, out of 380,000 artists and intellectuals, only 300 survived the Pol Pot regime. Those targeted included traditional dancers and musicians. That all-out assault on the language of the soul (and that language's wounded persistence) was on my mind as I walked through the dawn mist toward the immutable towers of Angkor. Although I had already visited the temple three times in the past thirty-six hours, on this day I had dragged myself out of bed at 4:30 A.M. on the premise that, photographically speaking, the sunrise view is obligatory. I never got to take my little snapshot. I heard music wafting through the jungle and went toward it.

It was an outlandish coincidence, I thought, stumbling through the forest tangle (if there's anything one shouldn't do in a land as heavily mined as Cambodia, it's go off the beaten path), but I was pretty sure I'd already heard the piece being played by the as yet unglimpsed musicians. A few weeks before, and about 9,000 miles away, the selection's aural approximation, in the form of the CD The Music of Cambodia: Nine Gong Gamelan (Recorded Inside Angkor Wat), had been on my compact disc player in Brooklyn, New York. More than likely, after savoring a bit of shimmering melancholia being emitted from the hammered gongs, I had then switched to The Magic and Witchcraft Music of Kenya and Tanzania. Or to South African mbube music. Or Elvis. Such are the dangers of the apparent boon of cross-culturalism, in which one feels free to pick and choose among "ethnic" sounds according to one's subjective aesthetic criteria, ignoring their political, social, historical, and religious contexts.

This isn't to say I didn't have some working knowledge of Cambodian music. I knew that Cambodian music, its distinctive sound notwithstanding, is related to the Indonesian gamelan tradition in the use of metal percussion instruments. The basic pin peat ensemble usually includes one or two bamboo-key xylophones (roneat in Khmer), barrel-shaped drums (sampho and skor thum), one or two circles of gongs (kong vuang), small cymbals (chhing), along with a quadruple-reed oboe (sralai). I knew that most such percussion orchestra music has a sixteen-beat colotomic structure, which gives it a highly formal yet leisurely feel. And the music draws upon Indian culture (many of the songs and dances are interpretations of Hindu tales and Indian poems, such as the Ramayana). But back in Brooklyn, the prospect of coming to any meaningful terms with this heritage seemed hopelessly far off.

This distance closed as I came to a clearing in the forest. The musicians were arranged on a tiled pavement, under a large tin canopy. In front sat three young men striking xylophones with long-handled mallets. In back were several drummers. In the middle were two nine-gong kong vuangs that are the specialty in the Angkor Wat locale. The players were quite a vision: checked Khmer scarves around their necks, they knelt over instruments that looked like upside-down Revere Ware pots affixed to a circular piece of plywood painted with hypnotically alternating rings of blue and red. Perhaps seventy-five local people, mostly old women in sarongs, sat around listening. The session had apparently been going on for some time. Like aN night. That only the day before I'd seen a similar nine-gong instrument depicted on the wall inside Angkor, within a nearly mile-long twelfth-century bas-relief detailing a section of the Ramayana, only added to the apparent timelessness of the tableau.