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.
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