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An American Looks At Phạm Duy

Many people have written at length about the music of Phạm Duy, and I hope, in time, to add my own (English language) contribution to such studies. Here I wish merely to set down some brief reflections that occurred to me after attending the recent October 30th musical celebration of the composer’s 84th birthday in the offices of Người Việt. This program, it goes without saying, was of the highest possible musical quality, with a fine and varied group of singers, and excellent, fastidious scoring and instrumental work throughout; and the second half of the program, devoted to pieces completed during the past year, was an astonishing demonstration of the composer’s undiminished creative vitality as he enters his mid-eighties.


Of course one cannot begin to do justice to Phạm Duy’s creative output in the course of a single evening—what is needed is a Phạm Duy festival extending over many weeks, or throughout a summer season. Only in such a setting could one have an opportunity to acquaint oneself with the composer’s dozens of song cycles on an endless variety of themes—the “Refugee” cycle (Tỵ Nạn Ca) alone, for example, has enough material in it for several concerts.

It seems to me that a composer cannot be significant—significant in a given cultural setting or historical era—without, to begin with, having an audience; that is a body of listeners who turn to his music for entertainment, solace, reflection, self-cultivation, or all of the above, and who then discuss their listening experiences with each other. Phạm Duy has assured himself of an audience throughout his musical career through his study and emulation of styles of music indigenous to Vietnam and by working in a form accessible to large groups of his countrymen: the semi-westernized popular song style known as tân nhạc.

But aside from satisfying this basic requirement of accessibility, Phạm Duy has also been at pains to endow his output with a depth and structure not necessarily inherent in the tân nhạc style, both by inventing many devices to link single songs and groups of songs to other songs, and by using his music as a means of exploring historical, cultural, and moral issues of general concern to his audiences. His music, taken as a whole, is both internally and externally referential. He is a songwriter who uses his art to comment upon, and ultimately to influence, history and culture. These factors, his accessibility, his depth, the wide public attention given to his music, and also his restless artistic quest for new forms in which to cast his thoughts, make him, in my opinion, a greatly significant Vietnamese composer, a major arbiter of Vietnamese culture in the twentieth century.

The first half of the birthday celebration on the 30th of October just past was devoted to familiar pre-1975 favorites of the composer, including several songs—“Highland Fields at Dusk (Nương Chiều), “My Poor Country Home” (Quê Nghèo) “A Countryside Mother” (Bà Mẹ Quê), and “Remembering the One Gone Forth” (Nhớ Người Ra Đi) written almost sixty years ago, during the War of Resistance against France. “A Countryside Mother” was sung in a charming, partly choral, arrangement with added antiphonal voices, with no loss of the song’s inherent sunny simplicity.

Also included in the first half of the program were songs from the 1950s—“My Homeland” (Quê Hương Tôi), “Hò Calls of the South” (Tiếng Hò Miền Nam), “The One Who Returns (Người Về), “Wild Rose Buds” (Nụ Tầm Xuân), “Far Journey” (Viễn Du) and the 1960s: “Where Will I Send My Thoughts” (Tâm Sự Gửi Về Đâu) and “Joining Flowery Hands” (Chắp Tay Hoa). All these songs were performed with every possible degree of expressiveness, with performances by Bích Huyền and Tuấn Ngọc making a particularly deep impression on this listener.

The second half of the program was devoted to 1) the first seven (of a projected ten) songs in a new cycle called Homeland Fragrance Songs (Hương Ca) and 2) the first five episodes in the composer’s Illustrations of Kiều (Minh Hoạ Kiều) Part III. In this half of the program the composer took to the stage and introduced each piece with a gusto and humor unique to himself. Watching Phạm Duy onstage, I recalled that he got his professional start as a between-scenes entertainer in a cải lương opera troupe. It seemed to me that I was looking at a man whose second home—if not his first home—was the stage. On this occasion also, as in his appearances on “Paris By Night” and other music videos, he showed himself a master of elocution—the art of speaking in such a way that the melody and timing of each sentence comes out perfectly, and creates maximum effect.

The Homeland Fragrance Songs have as their theme the thoughts and feelings of the composer during a recent series of visits back to Vietnam after an absence of more than twenty-five years. The music is finely lyrical and unpredictable as ever, and written in an easy-to-understand idiom. Particularly memorable to me were the opening piece “A Hundred Years By the Old Boatlanding” (Trăm Năm Bến Cũ), on the evanescence of life and memory, “Bathing in the Moonlit River” (Tắm Sông Trăng), an upbeat song about a skinny-dipping excursion, and “A Sad Love Story of Days Gone By” (Ngày Xưa Một Chuyện Tình Buồn), a buoyant piece with elegantly uneven phrasing, as charming and youthful sounding as “Bearing Back the Harvest” (Gánh Lúa) or “A Countryside Mother,” (Bà Mẹ Quê), but which unexpectedly and dramatically ends on a note of high tragedy.

Illustrations of Kiều Part III, like its predecessors, Part I and Part II, has the character of a dramatic oratorio. It is of composite texture, including intoned poetry, melodic narration, part-writing, and orchestral color, as well as straight-forward lyricism. Even more than in such recent cycles as the Hàn Mặc Tử Song Cycle and Ten Zen Meditation Songs (Mười Bài Thiền Ca), this music shows the composer’s determination to set himself new challenges and expose his listeners to new experiences. Here we have traveled far from the usual dance hall or cabaret stage venue of tân nhạc. The musical episodes making up this work have little repetition and have many “undetachable” passages—stretches of music too entangled in what precedes and what follows (or in what is happening simultaneously) to be taken away and sung as independent melodies. But whatever initial difficulties audiences may have with this work, I believe that Phạm Duy has assured its ultimate accessibility by choosing as his text a poem familiar to all Vietnamese. The listeners may be puzzled by the music, but they will not be puzzled by the text, and the text will ultimately help them accept the music.

As for me, I am a person who spent his childhood immersed in western classical music—multi-textured music full of undetachable musical sequences—so I had no difficulty whatsoever understanding the musical language of the Illustrations. I have also on two occasions taught courses on Kiều (in Vietnamese) and may teach more such courses in the future, so I am delighted to have Phạm Duy’s Illustrations available for use in such classes. Nothing could more effectively make clear to students the emotional significance of key passages in the text than these musical settings.

The episodes played on the night of the 30th were particularly stormy and dramatic, due to the nature of the events portrayed in them. They were, in order: 1) “A Domestic Calamity” (Cơn Gia Biến); 2) “The Feelings Of Kiều” (Tấm Lòng Kiều); 3) “Falling Into Common Hands” (Đã Bén Tay Phàm) 4) “Tú Bà” and 5) “In Front of Ngưng Bích Pavilion” (Trước Lầu Ngưng Bích).

Listening to these episodes, I felt that the music was often most effective at precisely the points where Nguyễn Du’s poetry is most moving, as in Episode Two, when Kiều sings “Sometime, if ever you will tune this lute, or light that incense vessel, look outdoors; Among the grass and leaves you’ll see a breeze Waft back and forth—you’ll know that I’ve come home.” (Mai sau dầu có bao giờ, Đốt lò hương ấy, so tơ phim này, Trông ra ngọn cỏ lá cây, Thấy hiu hiu gió thì hay chị về.), and then, shortly afterward, “Oh Kim, Oh hear me Kim! This is the end! As of today I have betrayed your trust.” (Ôi Kim lang, Hỡi Kim lang, Thôi thôi, thiếp đã phụ chàng từ đây!). Some phrases in this last couplet are repeated to excellent musical and dramatic effect in Phạm Duy’s score.

Episode Three, in which Kiều loses her virginity to Mã Giám Sinh, has many changes of pace and builds to a terrific climax, the power of which was acknowledged by the audience in their thunderous applause during its last measures. Episode Five, devoted to Kiều’s lonely musings as she gazes out to sea in front of Ngưng Bích tower manages to be thoroughly eerie and thoroughly lyrical at the same time, and made a deep impression on me, though I was by then quite tired from more than two hours of intense listening.

In conclusion, I can only congratulate the composer on his inexhaustible powers of eloquence and invention, and wish him every propitious circumstance in completing a work that I am sure will come to be regarded as one of the artistic wonders of the present era. This will be a work, as well, that will show how the past achievements of tân nhạc may be built upon to create a still more serious and versatile musical culture that belongs to, and expresses the sensibility of, the people of Vietnam.

 

Eric Henry


The author, Eric Henry, is an American Vietnam war veteran and former freelance keyboard musician. He now teaches Chinese and Vietnamese language and literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is currently engaged in research on the history of Vietnamese popular music.