Monday, June 28, 2010

UNESCO Ca tru club



Yesterday morning I went to a performance with one of the newer Ca tru clubs in Hanoi, the UNESCO Ca tru club. As the name implies this group started as a part of the process of getting UNESCO to put Ca tru on its urgent safeguarding list of World Intangible cultural heritage. The performance took place in one of the old Viet houses on the grounds of the Hanoi Museum of Ethnology. The crowd was very small (2-15 people) at times the only audience consisted of myself and one elderly man. I have not met anyone in this group before, but knew that the day player Tùng was a student of Van Khue in the Thai ha ca tru club. Judging from the singing of the two woman singers in the performance I would guess that they also learned from Thai ha, but I will have to look in to that a bit more. When I arrived I was immediately approached by a jolly elderly man called Phạm Lãm. He spoke a bit of English and played the drum in the club. When the performance started it also turned out that he also was a rather skilled dan bau player. The first half of the performance was not Ca tru but Ngam tho, sung poetry accompanied by mr. Lam on dan bau. The woman who sang most of the poems, Madame Nguyen Tuong Lan, turned out to be the daughter of Quach Thi Ho. QTH was one of the most famous ca tru artists of the 20th century. After the poetry singing the ca tu group entered the stage. Together with Tùng there were two singers, Vương Tú Ngọc and Đô Phương Thao. It was apparent that Ngoc had studied longer than Thao but it was nice too see two young singers perform. Everyone on stage seemed heavily affected by the heat and I got the feeling that this might not have been their best performance. This was the first time I heard the UNESCO club and one of the few times I have heard a live performance by any other group than the Thang long ca tru club.The UNESCO club perform the last Sunday of every month at 9 am and If I have the opportunity I will listen to their next performance as well.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

Midsummer's day


Yesterday I did my first interview using an interpreter. Cuong Khuong helped me to interview the Vietnamese music researcher Bui Trong Hien. I was a bit worried at first but it worked very well! Khuong is my age and have studied musicology in Hanoi and Saigon (if I am not mistaken). He is also a performer and specialises in Hat Xam. Even though he recently mostly have been singing popular music in Saigon to pay the bills, while studying Tai tu. We talked to Hien about the growing interest for ca tru and his involvement in the application process for the UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. It feels good to be on the way with the interviews and I hope this will trigger my writing process as not much has happened there for a while. In the evening Khuong invited me to go and see the national cheo theatre perform at the Kim Ma theatre. It was really nice to see my flute teacher Doanh again and Thanh Ngoan, Pia's teacher, who organised the performance. The performance was a nice mixture of scenes from famous plays, solo arias and instrumentals, a reconstructed ca tru influenced hat cua dinh performance, and everything was topped off with a stage version of chau van. The spirits (hahaha) were high through out the performance with the audience, as well as the musicians, yelling and laughing. During the chau van performance a lot of kids run up to the stage with small bills for which they got a cookie in return. This soon escalated as more and more kids saw this as an excellent opportunity to get sweets and one of the performers almost had to spend more time handing out sweets than taking care of the "medium". In the finishing stage of the performance, when the actor was being "obsessed" by one of the minority spirits and run around throwing sweets at the audience, the kis went crazy and even managed to trip the actor so she fell over. This was immediately illustrated by a cymbal strike by the drummer. The actor managed to get up, the kid she tripped on run of to his mum, and everything ended happily. Definitely an entertaining performance!

Monday, June 21, 2010

Examinations


Yesterday I was invited by Pham Thi Hue to see her pi ba and dan day student Nguyen Thu Thuy's exam performance. It was an interesting performance. I saw four last year students perform all girls. However, the exams had been going on all week so most of the teachers looked rather tired. With the exception of Thuy the girls did more or less exclusively play "neotraditional music" (see earlier post). Every student has to play one Cheo, one Hue, and one Cai luong tune as well but it was quiet obvious that most did not spend that much time on learning these rather difficult styles. Instead they seemed to have focused on the fanzy, cuba-russian-chinese-ompaa-ompaa tunes that the academy is famous for. I feel strangely ambiguous towards this music. A part of me want to join some of my Vietnamese musician friends and just hate it, and another part thinks, "Hey, this is rather fun!". I was rather relived that a three-year old boy got up from his chair during one of the most crazy ompaa-ompaa pieces and just went for it! He danced his heart out in the aisle between the chairs stuffed with bored students, half a sleep teachers and serious looking examiners! That's the way to do it! But back to Thuy's performance. I was really impressed by her pi ba playing and it was obvious that she had spent considerable time practising Cheo, Hue and Cai luong. Especially the Hue, and the Cai luong tune (I think it was Vong Co she played) was beautiful! Knowing Hue's bias for Tai tu/Cai luong music, maybe her student's skill in that genre should not come as a surprise! On these three traditional tunes she used an older style pi ba; more drawn-out and with fewer frets than the Chinese inspired model more commonly used at the Academy. I also got the feeling that it had a lower tuning than the modern one. Anyway, after the three obligatory pieces she continued to play a piece of neotraditional music using the bigger "academy model" pi ba. This was still good even though as I implied earlier I would have preferred it if I was three years old (or drunk) and wanted to do a bit of crazy dancing. This was followed by a rather "contemporary" sounding piece together with a string quartet. I can't claim that it was the most inspiring piece I have heard, but still a nice break from out-of-tune bamboo flutes, electric bass and drum kit. The last piece was very interesting. As far as I could understand it was a rather organised improvisation, performed together with other members of the Thang long ca tru club, using sounds and licks from ca tru and other Vietnamese music but without conforming to that at all. If it reminded me of something it would be my some of my "free" improvisation classes when I studied at the academy of music in Malmö. In all it was a good 4 hours spent and it was interesting to get another glimpse of the Hanoi Academy's priorities for their last year students as well as hearing Thuy’s beautiful playing!

Monday, June 14, 2010

The sustainable futures project, January trip


On my last trip to Hanoi, ten days around the (western) new year 2009-2010, I did interviews for the Sustainable futures project that i mentioned in the previous post. It was a rather improvised trip where I did some interviews with teachers at the national Academy of Music and people at the Thang Long Ca tru club. Together with Pham Thi Hue I also went to Ninh Binh, a provins a few hours south east of Hanoi, and interviewed Xam singer Ha Thi Cau. Xam is a kind of singing accompanied by the dan nhi, or dan bau, and percussion, it was in the past played by groups of beggars in the Hanoi area. Cau is probably the most famous Xam singer still alive in Vietnam. Having listened a lot to the CD the Vien Am Nhac has produced with her singing and playing I was very keen on meeting her. She is in her 80s but she claimed that she was unsure of exactly how old she was when we talked to her. She lives with her daughter ad son-in-law and she was rather tired when we met her. Hue did the interviewed and translated occasionally my additional questions. Her daughter was very concerned that we should feel welcome and made us dinner, unfortunately I was not feeling great so she seemed a bit worried that I mostly ate peanuts and rice (as did Cau, combined with rice wine). After dinner Cau agreed on playing a tune for us. She used her husbands (dead since many years) old dan nhi and spent a lot of time trying to get the sound right before she started. We recorded Thap an, a tune I know she has recorded before, It sounded good even though her voice was tired. When a tractor on the street started to make too much noise she stopped and put the nhi away. By the she had been singing thap an for 7 minutes and was a bit tired. When we was going to leave and get back to Hanoi, Cau's daughter brought us a live hen as a gift. We managed to get the hen back to Hanoi wrapped in a plastic bag and when I left for Sweden it was running around in front of Hue's house as her dad didn't want it and her daughter didn't want Hue to kill it and cook it.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

New start

Since my last post I have almost finished my Ma in Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths in London. Right now I am doing fieldwork in Hanoi for my Ma dissertation while also working a bit with a new research project. The project is called "Sustainable futures for music cultures – towards an ecology of musical diversity" (read more here: http://musecology.griffith.edu.au/), I normally call it the SUFUT project. For my Ma I am writing about how issues of revival, heritage and tradition is implemented in the work of the Thang Long ca tru club. Hopefully I will have time to write some more here about my projects.