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...