Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia

On this page

1. Form
2. Title
3. Movements
4. Performances
5. References

On this page

1. Form
2. Title
3. Movements
4. Performances
5. References

Illustration inspired by a quiet concert stage before a rehearsal.

Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (បង្សុកូល) is a 2017 stage work for music and film by Him Sophy (ហ៊ឹម សុភី) and Rithy Panh. Both are survivors of the Khmer Rouge (ខ្មែរក្រហម). It is devoted to the people who lost their lives under the Khmer Rouge regime, and was commissioned by Cambodian Living Arts, an arts organization based in Phnom Penh. The world premiere was at the Melbourne Festival in October 2017.

Form

The work is a stage production that brings together music, film, movement and voice. The score is by Him Sophy and the film by Rithy Panh, their first work together. It started as a piece of music and was expanded into a large staging, with film, movement and community participation.

The score sets a Western chamber orchestra and chorus beside Khmer musicians and singers, among them two soloists who sing in a Cambodian style of religious chant. Its Khmer elements include smot chant and two endangered kinds of funeral music, kong skor and pin peat. Its instruments include old harps, flutes and the roneat pluah, a kind of xylophone. The libretto is by Trent Walker, a scholar of Southeast Asian Buddhism, and Gideon Obarzanek directed the staging. It runs for 65 minutes, without an interval.

Cambodian Living Arts, the Melbourne Festival and ArtsEmerson each called it the first major symphonic work about Cambodia's suffering in the late 1970s.

Title

The work takes its name from bangsokol, a Buddhist funeral rite. In the rite a monk lays a white cloth over the dead and then takes it away, to help the soul move on. The Khmer word comes from the Pali paṃsukūla.

Movements

The show opens in the heavens, passes through a funeral in the countryside to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge years, and closes with the Buddhist rite for the dead. Him Sophy has described several of its nine movements. The first, "Wandering Souls", uses traditional Cambodian instruments, above all the ancient Khmer harp, and simple clay khlŏy flutes. The fourth uses "Victorious April 17th", the anthem of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and the text also takes in slogans of Pol Pot. The ninth, "Wandering souls / coming back to life", ends the work in celebration, with chayam drums of the kind played at festivals.

Performances

The world premiere was at Hamer Hall in Melbourne on October 13 and 14, 2017. Metropolis Ensemble, conducted by Andrew Cyr, gave the US premiere on December 15 and 16 at the Howard Gilman Opera House in New York, for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's 2017 Next Wave Festival. The work then played at the Emerson Paramount Center in Boston on December 19 and 20, 2017. It was also performed in Paris.

The Cambodian premiere was at Chaktomuk Hall in Phnom Penh, with three performances from November 21 to 23, 2019, during events marking forty years since the regime fell. King Norodom Sihamoni attended the performance on November 22.