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FEW GENERAL NOTES ON THE LANGUAGE AND MUSIC
Vietnamese
as spoken follows the cultural division of the country into
three parts, but it is everywhere an inflected language. It
has four, five, or six different tones depending on the speaker’s
dialect respectively The North, The Central, or The South.
Vietnamese
switched from the use of a form of Chinese characters to the
use of a Western-style alphabet over the last century with
diacritics indicating the tones:
Ma
- level ghost
Má - high rising mother
Mà - low falling but
Ma.- low constricted young plant of rice
Mã - dipping rising horse
Ma?-low dipping tomb
Even
more than Chinese, the Vietnamese language depends on tones
for understanding. Speaking Vietnamese with a poor accent
is preferable to speaking with a good accent but no tones,
a fact that has created problems for Westerners learning the
language.
The
strong tonality of the language has had a deep effect on Vietnamese
music. A word with a high rising tone cannot be sung with
a falling melody, and vice-versa. As a result, melodic forms
were developed that could accommodate improvised changes of
notes to fit the tones of the words used. In both Folk and
Classical music, words and melody have an especially close
and mutually interdependent relationship.
Now,
let us first examine the Entertainment Music, a type of music
popularly known as the “Nhac Tai Tu Nam Bo” which
means “Music of the amateurs”. This term applied
to a highly bourgeois evolved art form, a type of music that
has many facets whose beauty lays in an extremely subtle and
melodic style. Although comparable to Western Chamber music,
this type of music is of a strictly private nature to be heard
by a small audience and practiced by professional or semi-professional
people as hobby for their own enjoyment with a repertoire
which includes mainly songs accompanied by one, two or three
instruments. One can enjoy the beauty of the music and the
mastery of the performers. The value of the ensemble is not
in the instrumentation, but rather lies in its use.
