Learning Chéo from a master

My teacher, Diêu, is a performer at the Chéo theatre. His way of teaching is very different from the way of the Academy. For instance he doesn’t use notation. He occasionally takes a quick look in my Chéo book, but he only seems to check the lyrics. Another difference is that he is very inconsistent in his playing. I always record the whole song when I learn a new piece, and then we move on to learning it phrase by phrase. The full version is always a little bit different to the phrase by phrase-version. For example how he use the ornaments, in the full version they are always more fluent and it is hard to discern what is really going on in the left hand. Some melodic movements are completely different and sometimes he performs, with such ease and subtlety, a rhythmic variation that has me completely bewildered as to where the beat is until he, with equal subtlety moves out of the variation. He can play an elaborate scale movement one time and the next time limit the phrase to a mere skeletal framework. Over time this gives me a fairly clear image of the framework, lòng bán, of each song that we play.

In the phrase by phrase-version he is more set in what he teaches me. He only changes a few of the phrases from time to time while most of them remain the same. In a teaching situation (or maybe this is a learning situation) it is very tricky to remember the whole melody because of this. I mainly use the lesson to practice different ways of performing each phrase but when it comes to putting the piece together, I prefer to do it by my self, at home. Listening to the full version over and over again. When I come back for another lesson, my newly acquired version is rapidly changed and improvised upon. In this way I, once again, am able to discern the important pitches in each phrase. Although it is time consuming and demands a whole lot of work from my part, I think it is a very good way of learning this kind of traditional Vietnamese music, Chèo.

What I try to remember is that every phrase both is and isn’t…

Notation... Make it better

The notation of the Vietnamese traditional music is often used as a framework, cái suòn [“the frame”], cái can [“the root”], or chân phuong [“standard”]. (Lòng bán is the name I have been taught to use when referring to the framework, so that's what I will do.) It can be described in a few different ways. The ones that I have come across so far are the western notation and the Chinese signs both in its original form or written in roman letters: ho, xu, xu, xang, xe, cong, phan/oan. (The two xu:s are actually meant to be two different ones, but I’m unable to add some of the intonation marks of the Vietnamese language in Word. This also affects some of the other Vietnamese words in this document. A Vietnamese reader may have difficulty understanding them, and for this I am sorry.) The framework, after being learnt, is processed by instrumentalists who, through improvisation, add their own style to the piece. This practise is referred to as biê´n hoá lòng bán [“variations on a basic framework”]. It is this kind of improvisation that I refer to later in this post.

Le Tuan Hung speaks of two different levels when elaborating the lòng bán. The first level adding pitches to the framework, the other decorating it with ornaments. I’m not exactly sure which of the following methods belong to which level but the adding of hoa lá cành [“flowers, leaves and branches”] and chê´ chu [“inventing pitches”], sound like they could belong in the second level while thêm chu [“adding pitches”] could belong to the first. That is my interpretation at the moment.

When I talked with one of our teachers in an interview about notation, she explained that the music books that you can buy from the music store in the National Academy of Music are only one persons’ opinion on the music, revealing only one variation for each instrument. All teachers don’t have to agree on that variation, but it is the variation chosen by the school to be printed. That doesn’t mean every teacher has to use that notation. They are free to use their own variation to give to their students. The fact that there are five different teachers for the Dan Nhi alone, suggests there could be many different variations of each song taught at the academy.

It’s also not very likely that the variation once printed is up to date. I happened to walk through the Dan Nhi-part of the school last week and stumbled upon a student practising. We started a conversation using poor English, worse Vietnamese and the universal language of Sign and it turned out I had been taught by his teacher last year. I also noticed that he had the same music book as me, so I asked him to play a tune that I knew since we obviously must have the same variation, sharing both book and teacher. Although I could recognise my old teachers’ sound in the students’ playing, many things were different in this “newer” variation. Maybe this doesn’t prove anything. Maybe I changed my way of playing the tune when I returned to Sweden. Maybe the student played his own variation inspired by our teacher. Maybe he didn’t mean to play the notation at all. But it’s highly probable that it is the source of the variation being taught i.e. the teacher that is changing his variation. Maybe there should be a different way of recording the main melody, without printing a detailed prescriptive notation that try to explain a melody that might be changing slightly each year.

One of our teachers has previously let on to us that students at the National Academy of Music don’t know how to improvise in Vietnamese traditional music anymore, something that could be a result of the use of notation and printed variations. If the students learn something very detailed to begin with it is harder for them to determine which is the framework and which is the improvisation. She also points out that it is harder to change an elaborate version into another version. She wants the students to be able to use the notation or the framework to correctly extract the music prescribed in it, but believes that the system for notation used today is inadequate. She definitely thinks that western notation can be used for Vietnamese music, but it has to adapt to the traditional music of Vietnam. Someone has to make it better…