Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Writing, thinking, imagining the unimaginable...

I'm busy finalizing materials for my presentations on the music of Chinary Ung, the first of which happens at Northern Illinois University at the Cambodia Studies Conference. My paper is a portrait of the composer, and it's an awesome responsibility to be tasked with introducing and exploring Ung's life and work. But mainly, I'm reeling from the broader context of this conference, while thinking of the calamity that was the Cambodian Holocaust. An estimated 2.5 million people were killed. Ung lost half his family. The scale of the tragedy is so immense, yet it is also personal and human, and pervasive to the contemporary Cambodian experience.