More cheo

Earlier this week I was invited by my former flute teacher, Pham Van Doanh, to see a cheo play at the Kim Ma theatre. The play was called "Nghề nuôi Vẹt", which I think should be translated as "teaching the parrots" or maybe "nourishing parrots". It is a modern play that includes more talking than many of the older cheo plays. Most of the music used for the arias was traditional but the orchestra also played a lot of more western style background music during the performance. I am always impressed by the quality of the performers of the Nha Hat Cheo Viet nam (not to be mixed with Nha Hat Cheo Ha Noi), the singers as well as the musicians are really good! I am well aware that some traditional musicians in Viet Nam regard these modern cheo plays as being non authentic and boring, but even though I do really enjoy listening to more down scaled and "authentic" cheo, the parrot play was pure entertainment! It was probably the most queer thing I have experienced in Vietnam this far. If I understood the plot correctly with my limited knowledge of Vietnamese, it was about a family that owned 4 parrots, Illustrated beautifully by two men and 2 women all dressed in white tights, mini skirts, colourful feathers around ankles and wrists, sparkly silver belts and shiny makeup, all topped off with feather hats. The husband in the family wanted to train them to speak different languages and sing songs. After they have been offered a lot of money for the birds from a rather silly man with a bald cap (who also danced and made out with himself at the same time at one point) the wife joins in and everything turns rather crazy. They get more offers on the parrots and eventually they are offered a billion VND for the birds. At the same time the parrot are not at all keen on being sold as they want to stay with the daughter of the family and they refuse to sing. In the end the husband realises that if he threatens to hit the girl the parrots will do as he says. Of course it all ends well and the play ends with a moral twist were the parents don't get any money, the birds escape and the daughter twirls around on the stage in a shower of bubbles and parrots. A very entertaining evening!

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!

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.

Theatre

The tricky part (and interesting too) in writing about the theatre forms of Vietnam is that the different sources give different accounts on for example the order of performance. They also use different names for instruments and different meaning to some of the names.

For example, in the description of Tuong, Miller instead of using the word dan (instrument) as a prefix of the instruments use the word don. The lower two string fiddle (dan ho as I understand it) is referred to as co or don co by both Miller and Nguyen, Six essays on Vietnamese Music. However a google search for the word don doan (one of the lutes used in Tuong) renders no matches related to music, You may instead watch a video of a child learning to say I love you as the top hit. A search for dan doan however gives you a music related results (as the fifth hit: Dan doan, Dan Nguyet Family, Traditional Vietnamese String Instruments. Provided by the webpage www.saigonstrings.com). there is also a couple of variations on the ken (sona, ken bao, ken bap, ken thau) in the books mentioned above and below.

Another thing is the performance order of Chèo, which according to the book Theater of Vietnam starts with thi nhip (explained as the start of Chèo). Nguyen explaines thi nhip as a "rhythmic competition song" and states that Chèo starts with the he moi where two of the he (clowns) enter the stage waving torches (moi = torch) to clear the performance area.

Something that I have trouble understanding is the dieu or lan dieu. I don't have a good translation for it yet. It seems to mean a lot of things at the same time. Nguyen uses it as "modes" or "song styles". Garland encyclopedia of world music (south east asia) explained it a little bit more.

Diêu (diêu thuc or thuc diêu) is used in art and literature. Diêu admits to variant meanings: fashion, way, manner, melody, song, piece and rhythm. It would not be wrong to say there are 46 diêu in Ca tru, 20 in Ca hue and 80 in Nhac tai tu (chamber musics of north central and south).Each diêu has distinctive modal expression, understood as a mode or a type of song with endless variations. 

Lan diêu, refers to aria, type of melody or style of song and contain most features of a mode. (used in Chèo and hat quan ho, northern Vietnam)

Diêu is somewhat equivalent to mode in the central and south, but it has generalized meaning. Hoi meaning breath, air or nuance is more specific and preferred to be used according to Garland encyclopedia. It describes either the meaning of a mode or a specific nuance distinguishing one mode from another (by specific ornamentation) If you play the wrong ornament you destroy the mode.

The combined hoi-diêu is used for clarity.

I am still not entirely sure I understand it though.

As a final note I have to mention the famous chinese soldier, Ly Nguyen Cat, who was supposed to have taught Tuong theatre to the children of aristocratic familys under the Ly-Tran dynasties. This statement of course is impossible to verify. I will probably keep it in the paper though, becuase he is always mentioned in the different texts on theatre that I have come across.