This website aims to make available online the extensive and significant work of documenting Khmer musical tradition that Master Meas SaEm undertook throughout his life.
Since the time of the Khmer Rouge (1975-1979) Meas SaEm, a professional musician who had learnt music notation in earlier years, began to collect and transcribe on staff notation traditional Khmer music pieces so that they would not be forgotten. His passion for documenting and notating repertoires continued when he became one of the musicians in the Troupe of the reborn Cambodian National Theatre in the 1980s and later also a teacher at several institutions including the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh.
Meas SaEm has so far collected over 700 pieces, both in an audio version and by means of a transcription on staff notation. With this website, created within the framework of a research project of national interest financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, a research team led by Giovanni Giuriati – who studied with Meas SaEm in the 1980s and 1990s – has created a database in progress in which the initial work has been extended, deepened and made available also through a cataloguing and metadata set that enables searches within this vast repertoire.
The ambition of this project is to make this important collection, the first of its kind on Cambodian music tradition, accessible online in order to provide documentation material for researchers and to constitute a teaching tool for those in Cambodia and elsewhere who wish to learn the repertoires of this musical tradition.