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VIETNAMESE_MUSIC
December 11, 2005
If you know nothing of
Vietnamese music, read If you know something
on. about it, proceed for
laughs only.
First, three key facts about
Viet Nam:
(1) The vietnamese spoken
language is "tonal", as many Or so I've been told.
asian languages are, but has A definitive count of
even more tones than the others. a language's tones
seems ellusive.
(2) The country Viet Nam has been
occupied/influenced by many other
countries. Before it was used as And further, there are
a chessboard by the US and "red" substantial
China it was a French colony. Vietnamese-American
communities, e.g.
(3) When we talk about vietnamese Westminster in Socal.
culture, we usually mean the A lot of the
dominant culture in the coastal music I hear comes
region, but there are also a from record labels
diverse range of "hill tribes" down there.
with odd musical characteristics
of their own. According to the
Lonely Planet guide to
Vietnam most music CDs
So, there are many different in Vietnam are imports
things you might mean when from Westminster.
talking about "vietnamese
music".
I think most of us regard the "hill tribes"
as off on their own, completely isolated, It would be
with no effect on the main culture: so very interesting
they're a separate subject. to be proven
wrong about
that, though.
That said, the way I think about
vietnamese music is to arrange it
on an axis of increasing western There's also a
influence: "traditional" to "pop". geographic axis: as
you go north there
is increasing
I like Vietnamese music chinese influence.
quite a bit. It's not
easy to say much about By fiat, I tend to
why a music appeals, ignore this: if it
but I strongly suspect sounds "chinese"
that in this case it it's chinese music,
has a lot to do with and outside the
the rich range of boundary of this
tonality: it's discussion.
difficult to sing a
boring melodic line in
Vietnamese, just
because of the nature
of the language.
I think you can see the influence
of the language on the design of the
traditional instruments -- many of
which are completly unique to my
knowledge.
For example:
There's a stringed instrument with a
tensioning string that goes from the
lower bridge to a piece held in the
mouth: you shape the tone of the
instrument by changing your mouth's This instrument is a
resonance (as with a mouth harp), and little like a violin
you can put a flutter on top of the but it's held
sound by changing the tension (as horizontally at around
with a wah-wah peddle). waist height, with
base against your
body, and neck pointed
away from you.
So the traditional music is
pretty interesting, but my ETHNICALLY_AUTHENTIC
interest isn't limited to that.
I find that I often like
the forms with strong
influences of Western Pop.
A lot of the female vocal
pieces bear a strong
resemblence to "torch
singing", showing a clear HETEROPHILLIA
influence of the French
colonial period.
But I've seen some live performances from the
younger generation of Vietnamese-Americans that
don't impress me.
My ideal is
It would be nice to to think someone like
that there's a Vietnamese Khan Ly, whose
rapper out there creating a career stretches
breakthrough in hip-hop and back to the
about to appear on the cover of vietnamese
Giant Robot any day now... but war era.
the guys I've seen in action
are just Backstreet wannabees. As it happens,
she was one of
And then there's Trish: a the first I
two-bit version of Britney heard, on a CD
(which makes her worth more from a label in
than the "original", but still Westminster.
not much).
It turned up used
at Amoeba, which
So as far as my own originally was
tastes go, perhaps the only place I
there's a balance point knew to find such
that I like on the things... these
tradition-modernity days I look for
axis? the small
Vietnamese record
stores that exist
hidden away in
odd neighborhoods.
These are more of them
down in the San Jose
area -- one of the few
things the South Bay
has over the North.
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