Plans for the summer and future

Spring term has finished but my planned article has not. I have had troubles deciding what I'm really writing about, a case of to much material and no real good ideas. But now I´m on track again thanks to a few articles on tradtion as well as a book on "how to write" (it turned out the thing is not just to think about writing your article but to actually do it). Unfortunately I have started my summer job, so the article will be a spare time project during the summer. In September I will move to London and start studying a master in ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths. Loads of thing happening....

Sweden

I´m back in Sweden.

Three weeks...

Three weeks left and it feels like we are going to leave tomorrow. The 25 of Mars we will ave a short concert at the Hanoi academy of music, we will play some tunes we've learnt during this trip and maybe one or two swedish tunes. There will be some cheo together, I will play a few of my tuong tunes and Pia will sing some ca tru together with our ca tru club friends. This sunday(15/3) the Swedish radioprogram Folke played some Vietnamese and interviewed me on the phone from Hanoi, it turned out ok you can hear it here. I'm getting more and more curious about tuong, part due to my very enthusiastic teacher and part, I guess, because it is so hard to get any meaningfull information on it. I've asked my friend Quang to follow me to my friday lesson next week and help me translate, it will be interesting to be able to communicate with Khanh without gestures and music. Before I leave I will try to get the nhac hieu recordings from the musicology department. It probably not a problem but they said that they would give me the recordings one month ag and nothing happened yet, one more phonecall can't hurt. My plans for an article with Hue are on their way. I've made three one hour interviews with her and written a very short overview on Ca tru and teaching in the past. Now I'm transcribing the interview and after that I will talk with her again to see if I have got her right. Hue will write a summary on ca tru and she should be able to explain the music better than me. We wont be finished before I leave but It should be done before the end of this term anyway.

Ca tru and teaching

As Pia wrote earlier we have decided to write an article together with Pham Thi Hue about her project to teach Ca tru. Unfortunaly Pia had a visit from Mr. Reality that told her that she doesn't have time to this, so I and Hue will do the article on our own.
Hue and I have had three meeting this far. We have discussed which parts of the project we should include and I have tried to understand what she is actually doing. It turned out that she has been very busy! The Club started in 2007 and already they have done a lot, among other things, they have reconstructed songs and dances. The newest project is to get a Bat am / Le nhac orchestra going and to learn more music from the Hat tho repertoire (Ca tru that is sung in the tempel). Hue's high set goal with her club is to re-establish a Giao Phuong (a oldtime ca tru teaching community centered around a dinh, a village tempel). This mean that the student should not only learn to play music ( at this stage she is focusing on Ca tru but in the future she hopes to include other traditional styles as well) but also a "good way of living" , to treat each other and their teachers with respect and other usefull skills for a traditional musician. Even if the ideas of the Giao Phuong is old she hopes to use the old ideas to build a Giao Phuong that fits into todays society. Hue has huge expactations and demands on her students, but they also expect that from her. Hue has a serious talk with her students before they start studying with her, she doesn't want to waste her time on students who don't practise and do their best. She teaches her students to become professional performers not amateurs. If somebody want to have lessons but is not interesting in devoting their life to music she teaches them to beat the drum (the drum in ca tru is played by a member of the audience) and to appreciate the music as an audience member or "expert listener". In the future her student will also be able to teach more and they will be able to handle both professional and amateur students. Hopefully most of the article will be ready for a conference in Australia where Hue will talk about teaching traditional music.

Videos

I´ve put up some of new videos on YouTube! It´s both from cheo and tuong plays and from my lessons with Khanh and Doanh. Most of the recordings are made with my ordinary camera so the sound and picture is not great, but hopefully one gets the feeling. More Video can be find on www.youtube.com/user/ojzaioj

A tuong performance.


Khanh playing four versions of my homework, a tuong tune


Doanh playing Dao Lieu, Cheo

More Ken

If you look at the Ken bau page of the Vietnamese Musicology Institutes homepage the picture shows a man playing a ken without a lip-plate and with the reed between his lips. The design is more like Khanhs instruments than other pictures of the ken bau I´ve seen. The text is about the Ken in general and not about any specific style of instruments. The homepage is quite poorly translated into English so this could be a reason for the mix up, or maybe you could use the name Ken bau for any Ken, even though I´ve never heard it used for anyother than the court music Ken.

Ken, ken, ken...

I have been thinking a lot about the instrument I’m playing. Early on I realized that the Vietnamese uses a lot of different names for it. I’ve mostly been calling it a Ken sona as that was the name Khanh used during our lessons the first trip. But before I met him I had bought an instrument in Hue called Ken bau. Khanh dissmised that instrument and said I should buy a Sona from him instead. Ken is the name used for all reed instruments in Vietnam.
My two instruments are quite similar; they have four parts: reed, reed stake, body and bell. The bore and holes of the "body" are virtually the same on my two instruments but the bell, the reedstake and the reed differs. Another kind of reed and stake could mean the use of a different playing technique. A small reed and a stake with a lip-plate imply a playing manner where the reed vibrates more or less freely in the mouth, my Ken bau has these features. A larger reed and no lip-plate imply a more oboeish way of playing with the reed between your lips, my Ken sona has these features.
Most of the pictures I seen with different kinds of Vietnamese Ken has a lip-plate and a small reed, so has most of the types I seen from the Middle East and China. The Cham minoritys Ken, Xaranai, don’t have a lip-plate and the pictures shows that the player has the reed between his lips. The same is true for the Indian Shehnai. I tried to discuss this with Khanh but as we don’t speak the same language we couldn’t go into details. He showed me some different kinds of Ken and reeds, pointed shook his head and wrote down names and origin. According to him the chinese models has a lip-plate and a smaller reed, he doesn’t like the lip-plate. When he plays on the Chinese sona he uses the same stake and reed as for his Vietnamese Ken.
From this “discussion” I also understood that the Ken I’m playing is a north ("bac-Ha noi") Vietnamese typ and that he also uses a southern model ("nam-Da nang, Hue"). The “nam” Ken is smaller (tuned in C instead of F) and has different fingerings and a different kind of reed (still held between the lips). He doesn’t play the nam tunes on his bac ken as it doesn’t allow the right ornaments. This might explain why he didn’t want to play Xang Xe (a nam tune) with ornaments on the bac Ken, he only played the framework melody. Khanh is also an instrument maker so I have ordered a southern style Ken from him as well. Hopefully I will be able to do some documentation of him building it. According to Khanh both the nam and the bac model is called Ken bop.
I’m not totally certain that you could hear what kind of instrument the musician is using only from a recording. But I get the impression that an instrument with a lip-plate where the reed is vibrating freely in the mouth-cavity gives a rougher sound than when the reed is controlled by the musicians lips. This is probably not always true but the videos I’ve seen and the pictures accompanying recordings I’ve heard suggest this.
Why do Khanh and a some other ken players I’ve seen in Hanoi play with the reed between their lips when most of the pictures and recordings of Vietnamese ken players shows the other way of playing? Khanh is a Tuong musician; can his way of playing be connected to the Tuong style? Tuong is some times called court theatre, but the ken used in other court music is played with a lip-plate. Stephen Addis (Music of the Cham Peoples, 1971), wrote a few lines about Cham influence on Vietnamese court music and says that one of the influences that still can be seen is the use of the Ken. But the Ken bau of court music has little resemblance of the Xaranai neither in playing manner or appearance. Of course this influence that Addis writes about was hundreds of years ago so a lot might have changed. Khanhs nam style Ken bop looks a bit like the Xaranai; both the reed and the general shape of the instrument. But I have not seen any really good pictures of a Xaranai reed so this resemblance might only be cosmetic. Tuong seems to have been most popular in central and southern Vietnam, the area where most of the Cham are living so it’s not impossible that there has been an influence from their instruments. Maybe this way of playing is a later influence maybe from the European oboe? Or it might just be convenience; when playing with the reed between your lips you have a better control of the sound and you can probably squeeze out more of the instrument by playing in that manner. I will try to bring one of my English speaking Vietnamese friends to Khanhs home to discuss a bit more about this.

Thang Long Ca Tru Club

Yesterday Hue, Esbjörn and I sat in my room, drinking tea and talking about music and musicians, about teaching traditional music and about the Thang Long Ca Tru Club. The more Esbjörn and I hear about the Club's work, the more fascinated and impressed we get. Yesterday we got to understand that Hue actually has a curriculum for the Club, even if it's not printed. The Club seems to work as a well organized school with explicit goals and plans for the students musical and technical progress that are methodically structured.
We think that this is something that more people should hear about. It could work as a great inspiration for traditional musicians and teachers all around the world to read about the Club and so we decided that the three of us should write an article about the Thang Long Ca Tru Club. This will also be very useful for Hue as she will participate in a conference in Australia in the end of April that will deal with the subject of teaching traditional music.

In the process of understanding how the Club works, Esbjörn and I will also learn to play some Ca tru. I will sing and Esbjörn will play Trong Chau. We started this morning. Hue and three of her students came over and I learnt the first two lines of Bac Phan and Esbjörn got to beat the drum.

Meeting with Dang Hoanh Loan

This thursday I had a meeting/lecture with mr. Dang Hoanh Loan. He told me about north Vietnamese funeral music and customs. He doesn´t speak any English so Hai Van was interpreting. When I was in Sweden I read an artile he had written about funeral music and that made me curious to learn more. His research had mainly been on the country side (Bac Ninh and Thai Binh) so it is possible that what he told me don´t apply for the musicians I some times see on the streets of Hanoi. One of the things that caught my attention in his article was that the ken player wasn´t allowed to practice the tunes, as hearing the music when there was no funeral was bad luck. Instead they had a do-re-mi system so that they could learn the tunes by singing. All the musicians in the band learned this sung melody but the stringplayers could also practice on their instruments. Of course they also have to play together sometimes, according to Loan there where two ways to do this without anybody hearing them, either the band went far out on the fields in the middle of the night, or they used a big jar where the ken player could stick down his head (and ken) while playing. According to Loan the last method looked very funny, (I can imagine). One interesting thing was that in this kind of music all the musicians follows the ken, as in Cheo everybody follows the singer. Loan spoke for almost two hours so I got loads of information that might be useful. Next week I´m going back to the musicology institute to see if i can listen to some more of this music and hopefully I can make some copies.

"do-re-mi"

The last week

The Tuong performance in Bac Ninh was very interesting. It was very long and we sat on a hard floor outside so when we came home we felt more dead than alive! But the performance was beautiful, face paint, flags, swords, strange shoes, everything you need for a good show! The day after Hai Van said that we could come to see a concert with a Japanese koto ensemble at the academy. It turned out to be twenty old japanese amateurs playing "piano-kotos" with pre-recorded backgrounds on floppy discs. We stayed for two tunes, after "do re mi" from the sound of music we decided that this was not the thing for us. On sunday I went to Bac Ninh to listen to Quan ho together with Hue and her friends, Pia stayed in Hanoi. It was a very long day, no vegetarian food, hard floors, beautiful singing and horrible camera men trying to get everything on tape and destroying for the audience and the singers. That's all for now!

First meeting with the teachers

Yesterdays visit at the Musicology department was a bit strange. Hai Van couldn't come so she sent mr Le Pho instead, Le Pho has many qualities but English is not one of them. Nobody seemed to know why we were there and when I tried to explain that I wanted to listen to funeral music and other styles of music that uses the Ken they took me to a computer and showed me their website. I've used it several times before so I was not really impressed, I got the feeling that they thought that we were total beginners on Vietnamese music and therefore would be happy just seeing the webpage. As far as I knew they should have been told what we wanted to do, but no. After several phonecalls to Hai Van and loads of misunderstandings I finaly managed to shedule a meeting with the author of an article about funeral music, mr. Dang Hoanh Loan. I hope that by talking to him, through Hai Van, I will be able to learn a bit more about the music he describes in his article.
This morning we went to the Nha Hat Cheo, the cheo theatre, to meet with our new teachers. As I suspected I was going to play with Nguyen Ngoc Khanh, he was my teacher during my first visit to Hanoi. It was very nice seeing him again and even though we don't speak the same language I hope it will work out. At first he said that it was better for me to play folksongs as I wouldn't be able to play Tuong with anybody in Sweden. When I explained that my interest was more from a researcher perspective than musician and that I also was interested in funeral music he looked very surprised. That a western could be interested in learning about funeral music made him very suprised but pleased as he himself played had played that music a lot. Khanh is apparently know by everybody as the best player of the Sona and he seems very aware of that. He made it clear (as far as i understood it) that he expected me to treat him as the best and that I must show respect for his old masters by bringing an offering to his house before we started with the lessons. It turned out that he had an altar for his four old tuong masters and that he should tell them that he had a new student so that they could help me to learn. Hai Van explained this to me. Khanh have had another western student on the Sona, he told me, an oboist in the new york philharmonic orchestra. It might have been a while ago as he had some troubles remembering her name but he hought it was Anna. We didn't play so much this first time but he changed the bell of my Sona so that it would intonate better. He explained a bit about vibrato and copied two tunes that I could start with. The tunes were both to be played when the king where walking about in a play. I also asked him to write down the names of the different parts of the instrument as this might be good to know. This afternoon we will go to Bac Ninh and watch a Tuong and a Cheo play. Hopefully this will give inspiration for next weeks lesson!

Cheo in short

Today we´re going to visit the musicology department, we´ll probably have to see the same phony performance of stone instruments and dan day-bass as the previous times. It´s a bit depressing but maybe this time they've realized that we are actually interested in Vietnamese music. The Cheo performance last friday was interesting, it was the same play as in september.The plot seemed to be: two brothers are tricked into opium and gambling, when their father finds out he dies, everybody is upset, the brothers and their "friend" (who tricked them) have to walk around on the streets being poor and hungry, their sister together with a relative(?) to their father goes into disguise and gets the brothers to repent, some papers that was stolen by the brothers and then taken from them are returned, everybody is happy. That's all for now.

Rytmik videos

Last semester I did a project where seven Swedes tried to understand Vietnamese music through rytmik. The project was part of my exam paper at Malmö Academy of Music. You can now watch the visual result on youtube.
Go to:
Bắc Phản
đường trường phải chiều
Or search for PiaPedagog on Youtube.com

The never-ending Têt

The last weeks have only been about Têt. We haven't done much musicwise. We've mostly been in our rooms studying for our pedagogics course. We have been on some Tët visits at our teachers and friends houses. We spent almost two days in the countryside at our friend Quang's family. They live a village called Don Giao in the Hai Duong province two hours from Hanoi. It was an interesting trip, we heard some funeral music and sung karaoke with his uncle. I hope that we will be able to start our real studies next week but acording to our friend My most people ar not keen on doing anything the first week after Têt. This evening we will attend a cheo performance and tomorrow we will follow Hue and her students to a festival somewhere ouside Hanoi.

Following Hue around - Saturday 17/1

8.00 in the morning we left our apartment to follow Hue, her students and the TV crew to Hue's old master, Nguyễn Thị Chúc's home outside Hanoi. The traffic was terrible so it took us about an hour or so to get the 15 km outside Hanoi. Chùc lived in a beautiful, but draughty, old house with a small yard and some outhouses. We have met Chúc once before in Hanoi, but it was nice to meet her in her home. We had tea and Chúc talked with Hue´s students about her life and Ca tru. After a while Hue got hold of a dan day and the music started. Hue and her student Thuy took turns at playing the dan day while Chùc, Hue and some of the students sang. Some neigboring children also turned up to listen. One of them, a young girl, had learned some Ca tru from Chúc and also joined in the singing. We had a very nice time listening and talking about music. It turned out that Hue had scheduled a meeting with Tran Van Khe in the afternoon so we went back to Hanoi, had lunch and went of to meet him at his hotel.
Mr. Khe was very enthusiastic to meet Hue's students. He told them about Ca tru performers he had met and was eager to know which tunes they knew. Hue arrived a bit later with the dan day. The students took turn singing and Tran Van Khe sang some childrens songs he had composed and recited a poem. After a while the students took out their other instruments and played some Nha nhac, a style that mr. Khe have spent a lot of time to save from extinction. When I and Pia left a few hours later the others ordered take away and continued to sing and talk.

Ca tru in the house of Nguyễn Thị Chúc


Tran Van Khe reciting a poem (Ngam Tho)

Following Hue around - Friday 16/1

I'm getting the feeling that we will hear an enormous amount of Ca tru during this trip! Last week Hue asked as if we wanted to follow her and her students to a village hall, Dinh, where they were going to perform Ca tru and Nha nhac. Vietnamese TV where making a documentary about her and the Ca tru clb Thang Long and I expect she thought that some Swedish students would add an exotic touch to the tv program, we followed of course. We left for the dinh, I think it was called Cong vi, 8.30 in the morning. It was a very nice place on a backstreet, surprisingly silent exept for the school children playing on the other side of a wall. We had got the impression that the club were going to perform for an audience but it turned put that the arrangemant was only for the Tv camera. It took a few hours of retakes and changing of positions to get all the picturesque details on film. After that the Tv crew wanted to interview us togther with Hue, this included a scene where Hue was supposed to teach us a "new" tune. In fact we had already played that tune for over year so it took a bit of acting to make it seem authentic...

What we thought was going to be a one hour performance took half the day. It was interesting though, the sun was shining and we had a nice lunch with Hue afterwards and talking about Vietnamese music.

Ca tru with Hue

This monday me and Pia moved to a apartment on Tran Hung Dao. It's more like an hotel really with a room each, shared kitchen and a woman doing the cleaning. The concert went very well and as soon as we possible we will put up some film on the blogg. The others left for malmö the same day, so now we are alone. The last thing wi did together before they left was visiting our first teacher Hue. She brought some of her students to her house and we had tea and listened to Ca tru and Ngam tho (like poetry reading to music). I filmed them when they Hue sang Bac phan, a tune we listened to in sweden when we where trying to get a grip of mode and metabole in Ca tru. Hue sings and plays the phac, her student Thuy plays the Dan day and Nhat plays the Trong chau.

Bac Phan


Barley Norton have written about mode and metabole in Bac phan, you can find more o that here.
This afternoon we are going to have a meeting with Hai van about what we are going to do during this months. This far all we have decided is that on friday and saturday we are going with Hue for some more Ca tru performances.

The big concert and more on YouTube

Today we had the last rehearsel for our concert this evening. As usual it was a bit chaotic but it will probably turn out ok in the end. We have put up some rehearsal videos on YouTube, enjoy!

Loi lo - from the Cheo theatre music


Three tunes from the Ca Hue / court music repertoire.

The beginning!

[Ojzaioj]: I (Esbjörn), Pia Sara, Helena and Hedda (our pre-Olof Dan Nhi player) are back in Hanoi for a performance. Olof couldn't come because of a CD release with his band Alla Fagra. We will play at a concert on the Opera house on Sunday (11/1). We had our first practice yesterday, it was ok. We will only play three tunes and only one by ourselves on two of the tunes ten other Vietnamese musicians will play with us. Unfortunaly we wasn't allowed to play the tunes we wanted as the programme was already printed and it said: Pham tuyet - Nguyen tieu - Ho quang, Loi lo and "Folksongs from the three parts of Vietnam". I think it will be alright, I don't expect us to be the front figures in the concert. We are more an exotic touch to the show, the strange Swedes who play Vietnamese music.

After the concert I and Pia will stay in Hanoi for three months. We have some different projects to do and we will write more about them here when we have finished the concert. One of our projects is trying to learn some Vietnamese. It will be interesting to se if our musicians ears can pick up the strange vietnamese pronunciations!

The end!

Today Olof handed our paper over to our instructor so now we're finaly finished! Eventually I think it will be possible to read it through the University of Lund's webpage, I will post the link when it is up. As a preview, here is the abstract:

Abstract
This paper is the result of several years of playing Vietnamese music. Its main part consists of two articles by Olof Göthlin and Esbjörn Wettermark. To make the articles more accessible for readers not accustomed to Vietnamese traditional music the paper begins with an overview on Vietnamese traditional music. It is based on the English language literature available. The literature is presented in the beginning of the paper. We describe some of the most common terms in Vietnamese music, like the concept of a framework melody and modality. The main part of the overview consists of short introductions to the genres, Dan ca, Ca tru, Ca Hue, Nhac Tai tu, court music, Tuong, Cheo, Cai luong, Hat chau van and neotraditional music.

Olof writes about the use of, and view on, notation among teachers at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. In the introduction and background chapters Olofs own experiences in learning Vietnamese music are presented along with information on Vietnamese music and western notation found in literature. For example issues on tonality, the elaboration of the framework “long ban” and the use of the pentatonic structure in Vietnamese music. The literature is also presented in the background chapter. The aim for this article is to explain the view on notation in Vietnam as many instructions in Olofs learning process has been contradictive to the notations he has been presented with. The research made consists of qualitative interviews with four teachers/performers active in the Hanoi area. The results show that there are similar views on notation among the four teachers/performers. In teaching and performance they all view the notation as a framework or a reminder of the main melody. The interviews cover different aspects of notation and the teachers’ views on music, students and learning are presented. In the discussion Olof argues that the history of learning Vietnamese music, the choice of western notation to describe it and teaching efforts made to convey the knowledge are all contributing reasons to the problems he has experienced. Apparently the voice and the text is important when learning the features of Vietnamese traditional music.

Esbjörn’s article is about repertoire at the Vietnam National Academy of Music, in the Malmö Academy of Music’s Vietnamese ensemble [Ojzaioj] and in traditional Vietnamese music outside the Academy-environment. His ambition is to show how the repertoire of [Ojzaioj] reflects the repertoire at the Academy in Hanoi and what this might tell us. The article starts with a presentation of the repertoire in traditional music outside the Academy-environment, at the Vietnam National Academy of Music and in the ensemble [Ojzaioj] at the Malmö Academy of Music. He bases the presentation on literature, a study program from the Vietnam National Academy of Music and interviews with the teachers who have trained the members of [Ojzaioj]. After comparing the repertoire he concludes that the way of looking at repertoire at the Academy in Hanoi differs from traditional music outside the Academy-environment. The focus is much broader in the Academy where students are expected to learn many different styles of traditional music as well as modern repertoire. At the Academy they also teach neotraditional music, a genre that is not played that much by non-Academy trained musicians. New-composed tunes and neotraditional music constitutes almost half of the study program at the Academy. [Ojzaioj] has not been taught any new-composed or neotraditional music during the years. In the interviews the teachers said that their ambition was that the members of [Ojzaioj] should learn the basics of Vietnamese music and the music they teach at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. Esbjörn says that the lack of the biggest part of the Academy curriculum in the repertoire of [Ojzaioj] probably is because the teachers do not consider that music traditional in the same way as the older styles. He argues that this is a political statement of a sort in the ongoing debate on traditional music in Vietnam.

Both articles have been possible thanks to the ongoing Sida (Swedish international development agency) project between the academies in Malmö and Hanoi.