The chapei

The chapei is a long-necked lute carved from a single block of wood, and its player is singer, poet and storyteller at once. This trail follows it from the ceremonies it has long served, through the years when few great masters survived, to the teachers, researchers and young musicians who brought it back, as far as a hip hop single heard around the world.

Start at stop 1: Chapei Dang VengFollow in the Explorer

Illustration, as an impression, of a chapei, the long-necked Khmer lute.

1. 1

   Chapei Dang Veng

   A banyan-leaf body, a neck near a meter long, two double courses of strings; the singer or sponsor picks the tale to suit the event.

2. 2

   Kong Nay

   Blind from childhood, he began the chapei at 13, sang propaganda songs under the Khmer Rouge to save his life, and later taught a generation of players.

3. 3

   Cambodian Living Arts

   Founded in 1998 by the musician Arn Chorn-Pond, it began by pairing young students with surviving master artists to save endangered arts.

4. 4

   Patrick Kersalé

   A French ethnomusicologist who rebuilds instruments carved on Angkor's reliefs; UNESCO and Cambodia's culture ministry commissioned his chapei research.

5. 5

   The Cambodian Space Project

   A Phnom Penh rock band that has worked with Kong Nay, some of whose members studied the chapei with him.

6. 6

   Time To Rise

   In 2021 Kong Nay's verses met VannDa's fast Khmer rap in a song urging the young to carry on, naming Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Sereysothea.

7. 7

   VannDa

   A Sihanoukville rapper who taught himself production in internet cafés and took "Time To Rise" across Asia and to the 2024 Paris Olympics closing ceremony.

End of the trail

The seven stops follow one instrument from ceremonies and storytelling, through the near silence of the 1970s, to a single that carried Kong Nay's verses to an Olympic closing ceremony.

Follow in the ExplorerStart again at stop 1: Chapei Dang Veng

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