Over a decade ago, UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage professed that “the processes of globalization and social transformation” along with “the phenomenon of intolerance” were giving rise to “grave threats of deterioration, disappearance and destruction of the intangible cultural heritage” of the world (2003a). The Convention represented an international acknowledgement of the precarious predicament of many cultural expressions across the world, from languages, music, and dance traditions to worldviews and traditional environmental knowledge. While ethnomusicologists have been engaging for many decades with preservation and protection mechanisms for musical traditions, particularly those of ethnic and minority peoples, the 2003 Convention (and the suite of subsequent UNESCO and UN treaties around culture and heritage) provided further impetus for ethnomusicological engagement in safeguarding and sustainability work. Theoretical and applied research in this area has grown significantly in the last ten to fifteen years on topics ranging from music and tourism (e.g., Connell and Gibson 2005), music as heritage (e.g., Howard 2006), music and cultural rights (e.g., Weintraub and Yung 2009), and music revivals (e.g., Bithell and Hill 2014), to activist or community-oriented approaches to music sustainability (e.g., Pettan and Titon 2015; Schippers and Grant 2016). Sometimes, the loss of cultural practices is of no particular concern to culturebearers. “Old” traditions may no longer serve a social function or may have been replaced by cultural practices more relevant to contemporary life; culture-bearers and their communities may view these processes more in terms of progress than cultural loss. In contrast are those situations in which cultural practices are disappearing against the will of the practitioners or communities concerned. Underlying these situations of “enforced” cultural loss may be power imbalances, social disadvantages, environmental challenges, and political repression (e.g., Marett 2010 on the Aboriginal Australian context; Moyle 2007 in relation to the Polynesian atoll of Takū; and UNESCO 2014 on the years of Taliban repression and war in Afghanistan). Other examples abound, including the setting for this present research, Cambodia, where immense social and political upheaval through the late twentieth century has led to what has been termed a “cultural crisis” (Kallio and Westerlund 2015:2). Situated within the extensive body of ethnomusicological research that relates to music safeguarding and sustainability, this article offers an assessment of the vitality and viability of three traditional Cambodian music genres in the twenty-first century.