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.