Oral Pedagogy, Playful Variation, and Issues of Notation in Khmer Wedding Music

This study of Khmer wedding musicians’ oral pedagogy explores tensions that arise when prescriptive notation is deployed to preserve a precarious tradition. Presenting detailed examples of the musical variation that oral pedagogy promotes, I argue that this teaching method fosters the skills musicians need to play wedding music in its ritual context. Situating my ethnographic research within broad debates over continuity and change, as well as literacy and orality, I suggest that Khmer wedding musicians have developed a “local bimusicality” and may be able to read notation generatively to produce a song’s variations, maintaining the playfulness central to this performance practice.