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By Root 1635 0

A Dao, charmed the enemy with her songs of the verdant countryside and the way of life in the villages. Fascinated by her voice, the soldiers were encouraged to drink until they became incapacitated and could be pushed into the river and drowned. The lyrics of Ca Tru are often taken from famous poems and are traditionally sung by a woman. The singer also plays a bamboo percussion instrument, and is accompanied by a three-string lute (dan day) and drum. She has to master a whole range of singing styles, each differentiated by its particular rhythm, such as Hat noi (similar to speech) and Gui thu (a more formal style, akin to a written letter). This difficult genre has undergone something of a revival in Hanoi in recent years, while in Hué excerpts from the closely related Ca Hué song tradition are performed for tourists on sampans on the Perfume River (See "Around Hué").

The traditional music accompanying Cai Luong theatre originated in eighteenth-century Hué. Played as pure chamber music, without the voice, it is known as Nhac Tai Tu, or “skilled chamber music of amateurs”. This is one of the most delightful and tricksy of all Vietnamese genres. The players have a great degree of improvisational latitude over a fundamental melodic skeleton; they must think and respond quickly, as in a game, and the resulting independently funky rhythms can be wild. Although modern conservatory training fails to prepare students for this most satisfying of all styles, there is now a resurgence of interest among young players in learning the demands of Tai Tu.

It was also in Hué under the Nguyen emperors that the specialized body of royal music and dance reached its peak of sophistication. These solemn ceremonial dances again owed their origins to the Chinese courtly tradition and were categorized into a highly complex system according to the occasion on which they would be performed: ritual dances to be held in temples or pagodas, during feasts or at various civil and military functions, and dances to mark particular anniversaries were just some of the distinctions. As the Imperial court fell under European sway in the twentieth century, so the taste – and opportunity – for such music waned, until the late 1980s when it was revived by the provincial authorities with assistance from UNESCO. Hué’s former Royal Theatre has now been renovated and is the venue for occasional performances of courtly music and dance by students of Hué University of Fine Arts. In 2003 UNESCO recognized Nha Nhac (“refined music”) as a Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage.

Music and theatre | The traditional strand |

Traditional instruments

A visiting US general once stepped off a plane with the intention of smoothing relations by attempting a little Vietnamese. This being a tonal language, instead of “I am honoured to be here”, listeners heard “the sunburnt duck lies sleeping”. The voice and its inherent melodic information are behind all Vietnamese music, and most instruments are, to some extent, made to do what voices do: delicate pitch bends, ornaments and subtle slides. According to classical Confucian theory, instruments fall into eight categories of sound: silk, stone, skin, clay, metal, air, wood and bamboo. Although few people play by the rules these days, classical theory also relates five occasions when it is forbidden to perform: at sunset, during a storm, when the preparations have not been made seriously, with improper costumes and when the audience is not paying attention.

Traditional musicians playing at Cao Dai Cathedral

Many instruments whose strings are now made of steel, gut or nylon originally had silk strings; silk is now out of fashion, more for acoustic than ecological reasons. The most famous of these, and unique to Vietnam, is the monochord dan bau (or dan doc huyen), an ingenious invention perfectly suited to its job of mimicking vocal inflections. It is made from one string (originally silk obtained by yanking apart the live worm), stretched over a long amplified sounding box, fixed at one end. The other end is attached