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.

Following Hue around - Friday 16/1

I'm getting the feeling that we will hear an enormous amount of Ca tru during this trip! Last week Hue asked as if we wanted to follow her and her students to a village hall, Dinh, where they were going to perform Ca tru and Nha nhac. Vietnamese TV where making a documentary about her and the Ca tru clb Thang Long and I expect she thought that some Swedish students would add an exotic touch to the tv program, we followed of course. We left for the dinh, I think it was called Cong vi, 8.30 in the morning. It was a very nice place on a backstreet, surprisingly silent exept for the school children playing on the other side of a wall. We had got the impression that the club were going to perform for an audience but it turned put that the arrangemant was only for the Tv camera. It took a few hours of retakes and changing of positions to get all the picturesque details on film. After that the Tv crew wanted to interview us togther with Hue, this included a scene where Hue was supposed to teach us a "new" tune. In fact we had already played that tune for over year so it took a bit of acting to make it seem authentic...

What we thought was going to be a one hour performance took half the day. It was interesting though, the sun was shining and we had a nice lunch with Hue afterwards and talking about Vietnamese music.