Creator
Him Sophy
ហ៊ឹម សុភី
Cambodian composer who joins Western orchestral music with Khmer instruments and voices, known for Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia.
Him Sophy (ហ៊ឹម សុភី) is a Cambodian composer and music professor whose work brings Western and Khmer musical traditions together.[1][2] He wrote the score of Where Elephants Weep and the requiem Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia.[3][4]
Early life and training
Him Sophy was born into a musical family in Prey Veng Province.[1] He began studying music in Phnom Penh in 1972, at the music school of the Royal University of Fine Arts, with French teachers.[3] His studies stopped under the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979, when he was forced out of the city and worked in a labor camp.[3][1] He went back to music at the School of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh; BroadwayWorld gives the year as 1981.[3][1]
In 1985 a scholarship from the Soviet Union took him to Moscow, where he lived for about ten years and studied piano, composition and musicology.[3] Accounts of his degrees differ. BroadwayWorld lists a Master of Fine Arts in composition in 1993, a doctorate in composition in 1995 and a PhD dissertation in musicology completed in 1998.[3] Metropolis Ensemble says he studied at the Moscow Conservatory and earned his PhD there.[1] With an Asian Cultural Council fellowship he was a visiting scholar in New York in 2001 and 2002.[3]
Career
He returned to Cambodia in 1998 and opened the Him Sophy School of Music in 2013.[1] He has taught music as a professor at the Royal University of Fine Arts and the Royal Academy of Cambodia, both in Phnom Penh.[3]
His early works include a string quartet (1987), A Memory from Darkness for violin, cello and piano (1990), a symphony for large orchestra (1993) and pieces that pair Western flutes with the khloy, the Khmer bamboo flute (1998).[3] He wrote the dance score Apsara: Dancing Stone (1994) and music for films such as Cambodia Dreams.[3]
Where Elephants Weep, with a libretto by Catherine Filloux, was billed as Cambodia's first modern music theater work. Commissioned by Cambodian Living Arts, it was due to have its world premiere in Phnom Penh in November 2008.[3] The soprano Amara Goel has appeared in it.[5] For Sophiline Arts Ensemble he wrote the music for A Bend in the River (2013) and Phka Sla (2017).[6]
Bangsokol (បង្សុកូល)
Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (បង្សុកូល) joins a Western chamber orchestra and chorus with Khmer musicians and singers.[1][2] It was his first collaboration with the filmmaker Rithy Panh, made in memory of the victims of the Khmer Rouge years.[2] The stage work had its premiere in Melbourne in 2017.[4] The Khmer musical forms it draws on are used to honor the dead and are now seldom heard live.[1] Its score weaves in smot, the Khmer Buddhist chant.[7]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 Metropolis Ensemble, Him Sophy (May 27, 2022)
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Radio Free Asia Khmer, Khmer and foreign artists to perform in memory of the victims of the Khmer Rouge (July 14, 2017)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 BroadwayWorld, Where Elephants Weep to have world premiere in Cambodia 11/28 (October 28, 2008)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 Gwyneth Bravo, "(Re)orchestrating Histories: An Interview with Cambodian Composer Him Sophy", Schweizer Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 39 (December 29, 2022)
- ↑ Amara Goel, About (undated)
- ↑ University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2022 Asia Pacific Dance Festival guide
- ↑ Metropolis Ensemble, Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia (December 16, 2017)