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Introduction
HRH King Bhumibol Adulyadej (King Rama IX) of the Chakri dynasty of Thailand died on October 13, 2016, at Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. He was 88 years old and had reigned since 1946; and at that time he was the longest-reigning monarch in the world. For many Thais, he was the only king they had ever known (fig. 1). A year of public mourning followed. His funeral was held just over a year later, October 25–29, 2017, in a stunning series of rituals both public and private, full of music, dance, chanting, and movement.
We offer an overview of the many kinds of performance featured in this historic event. Without question, the funeral of King Rama IX was a historic event full of extraordinary forms of music, some used only in royal contexts. It was formally titled "The Royal Cremation Ceremony of His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej." In other ways, the funeral was not a single event: it reached across more than a year and across many places, including the entire country and the Thai diaspora. Like all rituals, its beginning and end blur since the frame around it was immensely formal in some ways and in other ways embedded in the practices of everyday life. We address the sprawling, immersive, and even invasive character of the funeral and the national mourning that it demanded. This article concerns the five days of the official royal funeral. We address the many kinds of music, dance, and performance featured in the funeral, with an eye to the long histories of royal performance in mainland Southeast Asia. As ethnomusicologists, we have long-term interests in the long postlife of Thai court performance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, since the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932. We followed this funeral closely from afar—we both live in the United States—and then on the ground: we spent two weeks in Bangkok witnessing and documenting the funeral in October 2017. This article is thus based on ethnographic research as well as interpretation and analysis of the funeral's media coverage.
This series of events defied any possibility of comprehensive ethnographic research. Royal Thai ritual is in some ways conducted publicly and grandly and in other ways is completely out of sight...