Showing 1 - 3 of 3
Safeguarding a saga
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 04/02/2020
» Under the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s, Cambodian arts were almost crushed out of existence. The Royal Ballet was famously revived in the 1980s, but Cambodia also had popular traditions of music, dance, drama and puppetry. In 1998, a group started to revive these. They located surviving artists to teach a new generation of children in villages, schools and temples.
From the field to the protest
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 21/09/2015
» The Thai music known as luk thung (son of the field) is difficult to define because it borrows from everywhere and evolves over time. To the ear, however, it is unmistakable. That's a result of its two dominant rhythms, one from Thai folk music, the other from Latin America and an undercurrent of melancholy from the genre's archetypal song about the country boy far from home thinking of the village and the girl back there. Ethnomusicologist James Mitchell defines it simply as "Thailand's most popular music".
Decoding a half-century of writing from the Northeast
Life, Chris Baker, Published on 02/12/2013
» Between the mid 1960s and mid 1980s, three of the most acclaimed writers in Thailand came from Isan, the Northeast. As told in Martin Platt's illuminating account, each took up writing in very different circumstances.