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!

Henri Oger - Mechanics and Crafts of the Annamites

Today I bought the recently published new edition of Henri Oger's book(s) with drawings and woodcuts from the early 20th century. I had seen the one of the extremely rare first edition in the collections of the British library and when I stumbled on this new edition in a bookshop next to the post office I just had to buy it! The first edition was only published in 60 copies. The second edition (2000 copies) includes translations from the original Nom and Han character into Vietnamese, French and English as well as a number of chapters about Oger and his works.. The pictures in the books shows a multitude of different crafts as well as gruesome torture scenes, musical instruments, people picking their teeth and loads of other strange, funny and interesting activities! I am very exited that I found it but I haven't got a clue how I will get it back to London, might have to send it separately. Any way if you see it, buy it!

Ca tru goes to university

Yesterday I was invited to a ceremony at the FPT University. I wasn't really sure what it was all about but Hue had mentioned to me that they had plans to start a ca tru drum course at the university, however, I had I assumed that this was a bit into the future. As It turned out this was the opening ceremony of the ca tru course. When I arrived (30 min late due to Hanoian traffic and wrong turns) Linh, Thuy and Ngoc from the Thang Long Ca tru club were performing. I was a bit surprised but delighted to see Nguyen Thi Chuc there as well. She also sang a piece on stage before the first group of drum students entered the stage. Together with the vice-rector of the university Dr. Nguyen Khac Thanh they hit three strokes on their drums to symbolise the start of the new course. I had the opportunity to have a chat with Dr. Thanh about the new course when all the students had left. He said that he had always been a bit of a folklore enthusiast and that he felt that in such a theoretical university as FPT (focusing mainly on finance and IT subjects) there was a need for a practical art subject. He thought that there were things, such as for example ethics, that was better taught with music. He and another member of the board, who both knew Hue since before, had suggested that the university should try to have a music course on the schedule. After talking to Hue the ca tru course was put into the range of courses that the students could choose from and they decided that they should start out with a maximum of 15 students. All the positions in the course were taken and these students will have a total of 12 lessons of one and a half hour each. The subject will both include practical drum beating and more theoretical issues such as ca tru history and music structure. The first lesson will start later this week and Hue will be the main teacher. This is not the first experiment the Hue and the Thang Long club have made with audience courses for ca tru, they have had regular free audience classes in the club before. Hopefully their experiences from teaching these classes will make the new university course an interesting and useful one for the students. As far as I am aware this is the first university course entirely devoted to ca tru and it will be very interesting to see how it turns out!

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

Plans for the summer and future

Spring term has finished but my planned article has not. I have had troubles deciding what I'm really writing about, a case of to much material and no real good ideas. But now I´m on track again thanks to a few articles on tradtion as well as a book on "how to write" (it turned out the thing is not just to think about writing your article but to actually do it). Unfortunately I have started my summer job, so the article will be a spare time project during the summer. In September I will move to London and start studying a master in ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths. Loads of thing happening....

Sweden

I´m back in Sweden.

Three weeks...

Three weeks left and it feels like we are going to leave tomorrow. The 25 of Mars we will ave a short concert at the Hanoi academy of music, we will play some tunes we've learnt during this trip and maybe one or two swedish tunes. There will be some cheo together, I will play a few of my tuong tunes and Pia will sing some ca tru together with our ca tru club friends. This sunday(15/3) the Swedish radioprogram Folke played some Vietnamese and interviewed me on the phone from Hanoi, it turned out ok you can hear it here. I'm getting more and more curious about tuong, part due to my very enthusiastic teacher and part, I guess, because it is so hard to get any meaningfull information on it. I've asked my friend Quang to follow me to my friday lesson next week and help me translate, it will be interesting to be able to communicate with Khanh without gestures and music. Before I leave I will try to get the nhac hieu recordings from the musicology department. It probably not a problem but they said that they would give me the recordings one month ag and nothing happened yet, one more phonecall can't hurt. My plans for an article with Hue are on their way. I've made three one hour interviews with her and written a very short overview on Ca tru and teaching in the past. Now I'm transcribing the interview and after that I will talk with her again to see if I have got her right. Hue will write a summary on ca tru and she should be able to explain the music better than me. We wont be finished before I leave but It should be done before the end of this term anyway.

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!