Biography of Master Koet Ran

Assistant Master Koet Ran’s father, a former monk, kept a fragile paper manuscript in his house, and in his spare time, he would teach his young daughter the art of smot chanting. These encounters with her father marked the beginning of Koet Ran’s life-long study of smot, a melodic form of recitation that is one of the most complex and difficult traditional Cambodian vocal techniques.

Koet Ran was born in small village in Kompong Speu province, some forty kilometers from the capital of Phnom Penh. Like most families in this district, Keot Ran and her family were rice farmers. Following the traditional way of learning, she memorized and perfected four chants before she was orphaned at the age of nine.

After her parents’ death, she continued to study the chants and developed an appreciation —uncommon for a young woman— for Buddhist teachings. She married at eighteen, but when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, Communist cadres sent her from her homeland. She later ended up near the Thai border, hundreds of kilometers away, working on a communal farm. Soldiers of the regime separated her from her children, sent her to jail, and forced her to watch the killing of her own husband. In the end, she survived and made her way back to Kompong Speu in 1979. She frankly says that her life as an orphan, widow and a bereaved mother allows her to deeply understand smot texts in the Buddhist tradition that tell similar stories of loss and spiritual darkness.

Three years later, she met her current husband, built a new life and has lived with her children and grandchildren in the village of her birth ever since. In the early 1980’s, as Cambodians began to reconstruct their Buddhist culture, Koet Ran took up the study of smot again and was invited to chant at various religious ceremonies, including offerings, sermons, and funerals. Inspired by the resurgence of religion in her country, she memorized many texts—an excellent memory being both a sign of wisdom and a vital prerequisite for the transmission of oral literature— and developed a large repertoire of chants.

Koet Ran lost her vision due to a farming accident in the early 1990’s. Despite her difficulties, she continued to learn and memorize new chants with the aid of cassette tapes and her sighted husband. Three years ago, she was asked to join the faculty of CLA as an Assistant Master, and has been training fifteen young students from local villages in the art of smot chanting since that time.

Koet Ran’s chanting style is plain and unadorned, without an excess of vibrato, and uncannily steady in pitch and tone. Her full and powerful voice expresses the religious stories told by many chanting texts with great feeling, focused concentration, and compassion. Particularly when chanting the texts that connect deeply to her own life and her experiences of loss, her performances often bring her audience to tears. It is rare that someone is not moved by her presence and by her art. One of the chants dearest to Keot Ran relates the story of an orphan:

Night! O night, how long and how deep!
Before I'd sleep, you'd hold me tight.
Mother, you'd sing all through the night
Lest I, in fright, should wake and cry.

Mother, I wail for your grace—
Ne'er again your face will I see.
Alone, I burn in agony.
What misery, day after day.

(my translation of an excerpt from “Orphaned Child.” Unknown author)

In the face of her difficulties as a blind woman and as an involuntary witness to unspeakable atrocities, Keot Ran remains very committed to the ideals that underlie the chants for which she has become known. She considers the teaching of smot chanting to children and youth an important opportunity to pass on the wisdom of reflection and compassion. She insists on the benefits of studying chanting texts as a way to see the impermanence of life and the urgency to give to and treat others with dignity.

In her own words, “When one studies [Dharma song], one studies the teachings that will make one calm and free from craving and defilement. One calms greed, hatred, and delusion…Accomplishing things by one’s own sweat and blood, one knows the importance of others [and] contemplates what is right and wrong.” As she searches for new song to teach to her students, she remains inspired by the power of smot, a power she believes to be essential to the development of Khmer society for generations to come.