At home

And so we are in Sweden again.

It feels very strange to be back. It's too cold and there're too many things other than Vietnamese music that demands my attention. Tomorrow we have a concert. SIDA and the two schools (National Academy of Music, Hanoi, and Academy of Music, Malmö) will have a meeting in Malmö, and we will give a performance. We are also going to talk a little about our views on the project. What we have been through. Maybe something will surface that contributes to the paper...

...the paper now need structure, a plan for the writing process... I need to call Esbjörn.

The last week

This is the last week in Hanoi. Helena left today (due to obligations in Sweden) and her departure reminded us that it is very little time left to do all the things we have planned to do. There are a few more interviews that I need to do, and I need to get one of the interviews translated. Today me and my teacher talked about microtonality and the way it is taught in the Academy and in the Chéo theatre. He also let me know how he feel about the notation of Chéo music... at least that is what I hope. Since I don't understand a word of Vietnamese, and he doesn't understand English, it is hard for me to tell what we really talked about. Tomorrow I will hopefully get a translation from another teacher.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed...

Learning Chéo from a master

My teacher, Diêu, is a performer at the Chéo theatre. His way of teaching is very different from the way of the Academy. For instance he doesn’t use notation. He occasionally takes a quick look in my Chéo book, but he only seems to check the lyrics. Another difference is that he is very inconsistent in his playing. I always record the whole song when I learn a new piece, and then we move on to learning it phrase by phrase. The full version is always a little bit different to the phrase by phrase-version. For example how he use the ornaments, in the full version they are always more fluent and it is hard to discern what is really going on in the left hand. Some melodic movements are completely different and sometimes he performs, with such ease and subtlety, a rhythmic variation that has me completely bewildered as to where the beat is until he, with equal subtlety moves out of the variation. He can play an elaborate scale movement one time and the next time limit the phrase to a mere skeletal framework. Over time this gives me a fairly clear image of the framework, lòng bán, of each song that we play.

In the phrase by phrase-version he is more set in what he teaches me. He only changes a few of the phrases from time to time while most of them remain the same. In a teaching situation (or maybe this is a learning situation) it is very tricky to remember the whole melody because of this. I mainly use the lesson to practice different ways of performing each phrase but when it comes to putting the piece together, I prefer to do it by my self, at home. Listening to the full version over and over again. When I come back for another lesson, my newly acquired version is rapidly changed and improvised upon. In this way I, once again, am able to discern the important pitches in each phrase. Although it is time consuming and demands a whole lot of work from my part, I think it is a very good way of learning this kind of traditional Vietnamese music, Chèo.

What I try to remember is that every phrase both is and isn’t…

Some teacher difficulties

I stayed at the hotel this morning to get some practice on my own. I´ve recorded Anh playing some tunes and now I need a to listen and try, without having somebody showing me all the time. It's also very nice not having to go to the conservatory every morning as I also want to think about our essay. The Sona is working out ok, its easier this year but still I wouldn't refer to the sounds I'm making as music. The last three or four lesson my teacher have played the same frase from a Tuong piece over and over again, and I'm trying to follow. In my ear it sounds more or less the same but he is not giving up! I would really like to have an explanation of what part I'm missing! Maybe I will ask Tra My to come and help to translate what he wants me to do. Another interesting thing with the lessons at the conservatory (or academy?) is that quit often there might be two or more other people in the room (these ar small rooms!), just hanging out or playing something completely different. In the beginning it felt a bit annoying but you get used to it.
The Sao is the real headache this trip (as the last one). As I've never played any transverse flutes before (just whistles and different reeds) I'm having real troubles with the basics of getting the right sounds out of the instruments. Trying to explain to my teacher that I want help with my embouchure seems like mountainous task. I tried last year with mr. Le Pho, his answer was "it will be ok". This felt reassuring of course, but as I only had three weeks I stressed the matter to get some more focused exercises. This seemed to annoy him a little and he answerd that the tecnique was indescribable: "What shall I do put a small camera in my mouth?". This year Tra My asked Tiên Vu'o'ng (Anh's teacher when he was at the academy) about exercises and according to him Anh now loads of them so Tra My promised that she will help me to talk to Anh about it. On the whole most of the trouble I've been having ends up with communication problems, somethings are very hard to explain without words. Showing a trill or a finger variation is not that hard but trying to explain the feeling you should have in your throat to hit the hi notes is more difficult if you dont speak the same language. (the picture shows Anh and one of his friends trying out a new Sao Meo, while I´m trying to play Sona)

Notation... Make it better

The notation of the Vietnamese traditional music is often used as a framework, cái suòn [“the frame”], cái can [“the root”], or chân phuong [“standard”]. (Lòng bán is the name I have been taught to use when referring to the framework, so that's what I will do.) It can be described in a few different ways. The ones that I have come across so far are the western notation and the Chinese signs both in its original form or written in roman letters: ho, xu, xu, xang, xe, cong, phan/oan. (The two xu:s are actually meant to be two different ones, but I’m unable to add some of the intonation marks of the Vietnamese language in Word. This also affects some of the other Vietnamese words in this document. A Vietnamese reader may have difficulty understanding them, and for this I am sorry.) The framework, after being learnt, is processed by instrumentalists who, through improvisation, add their own style to the piece. This practise is referred to as biê´n hoá lòng bán [“variations on a basic framework”]. It is this kind of improvisation that I refer to later in this post.

Le Tuan Hung speaks of two different levels when elaborating the lòng bán. The first level adding pitches to the framework, the other decorating it with ornaments. I’m not exactly sure which of the following methods belong to which level but the adding of hoa lá cành [“flowers, leaves and branches”] and chê´ chu [“inventing pitches”], sound like they could belong in the second level while thêm chu [“adding pitches”] could belong to the first. That is my interpretation at the moment.

When I talked with one of our teachers in an interview about notation, she explained that the music books that you can buy from the music store in the National Academy of Music are only one persons’ opinion on the music, revealing only one variation for each instrument. All teachers don’t have to agree on that variation, but it is the variation chosen by the school to be printed. That doesn’t mean every teacher has to use that notation. They are free to use their own variation to give to their students. The fact that there are five different teachers for the Dan Nhi alone, suggests there could be many different variations of each song taught at the academy.

It’s also not very likely that the variation once printed is up to date. I happened to walk through the Dan Nhi-part of the school last week and stumbled upon a student practising. We started a conversation using poor English, worse Vietnamese and the universal language of Sign and it turned out I had been taught by his teacher last year. I also noticed that he had the same music book as me, so I asked him to play a tune that I knew since we obviously must have the same variation, sharing both book and teacher. Although I could recognise my old teachers’ sound in the students’ playing, many things were different in this “newer” variation. Maybe this doesn’t prove anything. Maybe I changed my way of playing the tune when I returned to Sweden. Maybe the student played his own variation inspired by our teacher. Maybe he didn’t mean to play the notation at all. But it’s highly probable that it is the source of the variation being taught i.e. the teacher that is changing his variation. Maybe there should be a different way of recording the main melody, without printing a detailed prescriptive notation that try to explain a melody that might be changing slightly each year.

One of our teachers has previously let on to us that students at the National Academy of Music don’t know how to improvise in Vietnamese traditional music anymore, something that could be a result of the use of notation and printed variations. If the students learn something very detailed to begin with it is harder for them to determine which is the framework and which is the improvisation. She also points out that it is harder to change an elaborate version into another version. She wants the students to be able to use the notation or the framework to correctly extract the music prescribed in it, but believes that the system for notation used today is inadequate. She definitely thinks that western notation can be used for Vietnamese music, but it has to adapt to the traditional music of Vietnam. Someone has to make it better…

Preview..

By the way, here's a little sample of todays ensemble lesson. 

At least what it sounded like.

Questions.... and worms.

It seems like the more we try the less we understand. Today Esbjörn and I went to practice in a room by ourselves and started working on Tuong tu khuc, a Hué piece (from Hué the former capital of Vietnam). Like a lot of Vietnamese music it is pentatonic... except the notation suggests it is heptatonic. We puzzled over this for a while, until Esbjörn suggested that the pitches making the piece heptatonic (in this case B and E) could actually be variations of pitches in the pentatonic scale (in this case A and F). When looking in Le Tuan Hungs Dan Tranh music of Vietnam - Traditions and Innovations, it seemed to us that this could be a highly possible explanation. We will get back to this issue when we have read more about it.

Then we compared Tuong tu khuc to Ly con Sao. That presented us with another can of worms...

Thoughts on Miranda Aranas book: Neotraditional Music in Vietnam

I remember reading the phrase Nhac dân tôc hien dai (roughly: neotraditional music) in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music one year ago. As I can recall it didn’t say too much about it but concluded that it was a politically endorsed genre that had connections to The Hanoi Conservatory of Music. Since the beginning of this project I’ve thought about what we are really learning and the difference between some things we have learnt from our teachers and some of the acts we have seen by Vietnamese musicians in Sweden and Vietnam. Things like: what’s the deal with the Trung and strange czardas renditions? Playing happy apparently homemade tunes on the K’ny while making fun of the different sounds you can make with a piece of bamboo? And why were some teachers on the conservatory upset when one of our Vietnamese teachers in Sweden taught us the “do re mi” system of Court music (we didn’t hear about that until a few years after)? I was very impressed by mr Tezan’s (this is not how it’s spelled only how his name sounds) K’ny playing, but the whole thing was a bit unnerving. After I’ve read Miranda Aranas book I feel a lot more prepared to handle these matters. Even though a lot seems to have changed at the conservatory since 1994 the book pinpoints some things I’ve felt been hinted to us during our stays in Hanoi and from our teachers in Sweden. It would have been interesting if we knew about this book two or three years ago. Could we have had a deeper discussion about traditions (both in and outside the conservatory) with our teachers or would it just been loads of misunderstandings and people taking sides? Even though I wish we had read the book earlier it was probably good that we didn’t. We have had loads of misunderstandings already without having to dig our fingers into apparently very sensitive matters. I have a feeling that the friendship we have with our teachers at this point (which we might not have got if we had harassed them with questions about politics in traditional music) will give us the opportunity to discuss these matters anyway.

Getting started

We are on our fourth day in Hanoi and we have had our first lessons. Today we'll hopefully recieve a schedule for the rest of our stay. Olof has made his first interview and I have read Miranda Aranas book. I will probably write more about the book later today as I will stay at the hotel coughing today instead of playing the flute. 

Yesterday we visited a Ca Tru performance in a village just outside Hanoi, it was our Ca Tru "maestro", Mai Hue (the woman on the picture), who brought us there together with one of her Dan Day students. It was very nice, almost all of the musicans were children from the village trying to learn the genre. Some of them didn't look that enthusiastic but most looked like they were having fun. According to Hue most of them started to play Ca Tru just a few months ago and in that case it was very impressing. Some time during our stay we will visit Hue's Ca Tru club in Hanoi, it will be interesting to see and hear what have happened since last year. 

Hanoi!

We have arrived! Tomorrow at 8.30 we will go to the Academy to find out what will happen. But first we have this afternoon free to adjust to the new enviroment. I just caught the worst cold in years so there will be no Sona for some days I´m afraid. Thats all for now, Olof is to exited to write anything at the moment as he just repaired his Dan Nhi with dental floss.

New books!

During this week we have received some new books from the USA and Australia:

Dan Tranh music of Vietnam - Tradition and Innovations by Le Tuan Hung

Neotraditional Music in Vietnam by Miranda Arana

Ca tru - A Vietnamese chamber music genre by Barley Norton

We also received two books from The Music Library of Sweden:

New perspectives on Vietnamese Music - Six Essays, Phong T. Nguyen ed.

From Rice Paddies and Temple Yards - Traditional Music of Vietnam by Phong T. Nguyen and Patricia Shehan Campbell

I haven't had time to read so much than the introductions yet, but one of the chapters of Le Tuan Hung's book can be find on the internet (Here). Miranda Arana's book might shed light on some questions on political influence on tradtional music in Vietnam that I have thought about. Nguyen and Campbell's book turned out to be a textbook in Vietnamese music complete with a tape for beginners. As a music teacher student, it will be very interesting to see which methods they use to explain the subject. Both Le's book and New Perspectives on Vietnamese Music have large bibliography and discography chapters that may be useful later on. I will write more about the books later on, maybe after our trip to Hanoi depending on whats on the schedule when we get there.