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…