The repertoire part - general thoughts

On my Ipod I got forty albums with various kinds of Vietnamese music. Fifteen of them contain “traditional music” of no specific style, the rest are theme albums with Ca hue, Ca tru, Xam and so on. In those fifteen albums there are eight recordings of the tune Luu Thuy, mostly together with the tune Kim Tien. If I would add some of the albums with music from Hue and Southern Vietnam, the number of Luu Thuy renditions will be twelve. The percentage would probably be the same. My first thought when I realized this was: don’t they have any other tunes? In Swedish traditional music you might hear the same tune performed by many different groups live, but on an album most try to be a bit more original. The same doesn’t seem to be true for Vietnamese folk music groups, at least not judging from my Ipod. When you look at the other tunes on the albums you realize that even though Luu Thuy sticks out of the crowd, the crowd is quite small. The same tunes keeps reappearing on the screen! I guess that this could be seen as an indication that the Vietnamese Folk music canon is not very extensive. Of course one could have objections on this unscientific way of looking at repertoire, I mean I have not listened to all the albums produced with Vietnamese traditional music! To be honest I have even avoided buying some albums that looked to “touristy” or “pop-musicy”. But the albums on my Ipod still gave me the idea to have a look at the repertoire and folk canon that seems to be very strong both in the Academy of music in Hanoi and among recording artists in Vietnam. When I write about repertoire in our essay I will focus on the repertoire of our Vietnamese ensemble in Malmö and compare our repertoire with what I can find on the repertoire in the Academy of Hanoi. I’ve done interviews with our main teachers and have also read what I have found about the subject. One of our teachers was kind enough to give me copies of a list with tunes that he expects his students to know. As this is a quite small essay and as I’m no expert on Vietnamese music or the Academy system and the cultural politics of Vietnam, I will only try to get an overview on the subject.