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Vietnamese Music
Traditional Vietnamese music is highly diverse and syncretist, combining native and foreign influences. Throughout the country's history the largest influence on traditional music was from the music of China, but later on there was a smaller influence from the music of Champa, which the Vietnamese court found intriguing. Some claim that classical Vietnamese music more closely resembles that of Mongolia and Japan.
At the Research Institute in Saigon I accepted an offer to play the pile of rocks lying in the corner, a 6,000 year old stone xylophone (the Dan Da). This is the world's second oldest instrument (the oldest is an identical pile now in Paris) and sounds just as it sounded long ago (D-F-G-A-C-D), six ringing tones perfectly tuned in pure pentatonic ratios. Directing the heavy wooden mallets to the shiny playing areas I tried to honor the many generations of ancestors, although I couldn't help wondering about the diplomatic consequences if I broke one of the stones.
During an interview on Voice of Vietnam Radio I was prepared to give in-depth reactions to my experiences of Vietnamese music. The interviewer however chose a different tack and introduced me as an unmarried, 31-year-old composer with a doctorate, and handed me a dilapidated guitar with which to sing one of my songs to all the girls in the national listening audience. "Forgive me, but I am not the marrying or the songwriting kind of guy and I don't know how to play the guitar (even when it has all its strings)." An unfortunate slip of my Vietnamese tones then caused me to confuse Radio Voice of Vietnam with Pissing Voice of Vietnam. After hearing tapes of my experimental music there were no further questions.
One method of bridging the conceptual gulf, repeated with success, was for me to sing Appalachian ballads. On counting the tones and reaching five, proof would be apparent that we are all one people, our blood equally red and our music basically pentatonic. The myth of music as a universal language can occasionally be a useful platitude.
Folk song is especially powerful as a symbol of the Vietnamese identity. It was an ultimate gesture of reconciliation; several players of the traditional one-stringed instrument asked me to provide American folksongs for them to learn, so that in future when more Americans return, we will feel at home. Don't be surprised if you hear strains of "We Shall Overcome," "Hills of Galilee," or "Black is the Color" on your next trip to Vietnam.
The laid-back musicologists of the Saigon Research Institute, among them Lu Nhat Vu and The Bao, were mostly composers from the North before 1975 who were brought down to become researchers. The parallel office in Hanoi felt much more imposing. There, in a drafty former pagoda, was a plain wooden chair, an empty table, a bare light bulb, and a display of Bakelite electrical contraptions. The 4,000 recordings of traditional music kept there, their rusty dandruff particles floating off with each playing, have been uncatalogued and on forbidden access for the last few decades. Now recognized as a national treasure because of all the lost traditions that are documented, they are being studied on condition that no copies be made; the fears are a) that someone might make a lot of money out of publishing them abroad and b) their technical quality is embarrassing when compared to modern compact discs. The institute's solution is to begin making new field recordings of what's left (which of course keeps all those lost traditions lost...).
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