Ecologies of creative diversity
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Huib Schippers
Download the complete article PDF
Huib Schippers' biography and other articles by this writer
I am not the greatest fan of the obligatory cultural tours that are increasingly anchored in the program of international conferences. In Vienna it would be to a Weinstube; in Durban a Zulu village; in Bergen perhaps a Viking museum. This time, in Hanoi, the choices include a local temple and a silk village. I have travelled in Asia extensively – enough to be wary of temples riddled with friendly locals continually offering their goods or services as guides at the expense of peaceful immersion in an ancient spiritual atmosphere (which may have been a bit of an ask in the first place, given the company of a busload of colleagues). I know the silk village tour will take me along cages with silk worms in various stages of growth feasting on mulberry leaves, followed by boiling cauldrons, dying casks and spinning wheels where the cocoons are processed into strong and beautiful thread to be turned into garments, little bags and cute toys which I am certain to encounter in the factory shop at the end of the tour. Many of us have cupboards filled with such mementos, or have imposed them on innocent acquaintances in whose garages they now reside. This time, I am quite determined to avoid such patterns in a country that seems to have so much more to offer.
During the morning coffee break, I turn to a group of three young staff from the conservatorium hosting the conference. During the presentations and discussions, they have been sitting almost motionless on chairs against the wall, strikingly quiet while their superiors were present. However, during short conversations between sessions, I delight in their insightful comments on specific presentations and the idiosyncrasies of various participants – including myself. Behind their demure manner hides a resolve to do things their way once their time comes. I sense the promise of a major generational shift from old-style communism to a new Vietnam which, as in many other places in the world, I believe is likely to be led by bright young women.
Back to the conference and the tour. I decide to ask whether it is possible to visit a place unlikely to attract any tourists, to get some impression of what this country means for its people rather than for its visitors. The young teachers are a little taken aback, but during lunch Hue asks whether I would be interested to visit a village some thirty kilometres from the capital, where she has been studying music with a seventy-year-old master musician of ca tru, an ancient genre of sung poetry. I confess I am more than a little interested; these are the opportunities I seek out while exploring the musics of the world. Sometimes they lead to nothing remarkable, but more often they delight, and challenge my preconceptions about practices of music from a global perspective, nurturing new insights and often inspiring new projects and collaborations.
A taxi is arranged, and while I watch my colleagues climbing into their buses we take off through the busy streets of central Hanoi, make our way through the suburbs and drive into the countryside. Rice paddies and vegetable gardens, dotted with characterless concrete buildings with corrugated iron roofs, line the road. Halfway, as Hue points out, there is the village famous for canine meat. That does not need much pointing: the road is lined with uncompromising ‘hot dog stands': hairless fried animals ranging in size from Pekinese to Great Danes grace a dozen simple wooden tables.
Arriving in the unassuming village (not the faintest threat of tourism here), we walk through a narrow alley, where a small gate gives access to a little compound harbouring a vegetable patch and a simple house with a front porch. Hue eloquently, and I at least reverently, greet our host. Being used to the etiquette surrounding visiting Indian gurus, I had asked Hue what I should bring. From a plastic bag, she produces the combination of ceremonial fruit and flowers offerings on our behalf, as well as more mundane soft drinks and processed cookies. They are accepted with grace, and we are invited in for tea. Inside, the house is dark. As my eyes adjust, I see a single room with a large Buddhist altar around the central wooden pillar, from which emanates an indeterminate number of beds for the master and her relatives, some of whom pass through unannounced during our visit, smiling.
SUCH SETTINGS HAVE ALL THE CHARACTERISTICS THAT MAKE ONE FEEL profoundly ill at ease. I am literally and metaphorically thousands of miles away from my comfort zone: I am used to being reasonably in control of matters, working in cultures where I know the music, the conventions, the people. I am clearly not in control here. I don't know the language, and have no clue of the decorum in this culture, of appropriate ways of dealing with elders, relatives or women in these settings. I did not even know ca tru existed until a few days before. It is hardly what the ethnomusicological fieldwork handbook ordered. Yet I feel surprisingly comfortable surrendering to this position of vulnerability.
I have been in a similar situation several times before, and rarely comfortable: nervously sipping tea with the Maharaja and Maharani of Jodhpur while researching the biography of a teacher who used to be employed as a court musician in their palace in the 1940s; travelling up the Gambia River by boat with a kora player recording songs on the heroic deeds of Mandinke kings as we passed places of historical significance; squashed in a Turkish stadium in Bodrum to hear saz virtuoso Arif Sağ play live for an all-Turkish audience; arriving in the remote Indigenous community of Borroloola, where my whiteness emphatically and understandably was not a guarantee that I would be embraced by the local Yanyuwa people; and, perhaps most strikingly, finding myself alone with two hundred urns containing ashes of the dead as the ‘live audience' at a Balinese gamelan performance during a ceremony for the deceased in a small village in the mountains near Singaraja.
These are situations where my academic status, my relative affluence, my five languages and my culture-specific social skills have no currency. It is not only humbling; it is also refreshing to be far removed from even the potential of pretence. It inspires alertness and receptiveness to engage with whatever occurs without bias.
A long introductory dialogue in Vietnamese between Hue and her teacher ensues; I switch off language recognition (nothing to latch on to for me there) and try to gauge vocal timbre, body language and facial expressions. These women seem to have negotiated a good relationship: the master revered as an embodiment of traditional knowledge, but the student far from completely subservient, and respected for her understanding of the world. After about ten minutes of animated conversation, some of which obviously refers to me, Hue starts drawing me into the conversation: ‘She says she is worried about the future of ca tru music. There used to be many musicians singing this style, now there are only a few old masters left. And the young people, they are not learning; this style is not taught at the Conservatorium. Only I am learning here.'
I AM VERY PASSIONATE ABOUT AND CONCERNED WITH global systems of music transmission, the lifeline of aural traditions. As the discussion develops, I ask whether I can get an idea of how ca tru is learned and taught. A lesson is arranged for Hue on the porch in front of the little house in soft sunlight, cocks crowing in the background; the video will be an ethnographer's dream. The process that unfolds answers my expectations of an aural tradition that has successfully been handed down for centuries: the master sings a line, the student copies, gradually refining the words, melody, rhythm, timing, timbre and intonation. Both are sipping tea as text, rhythm and ornamentation are leisurely discussed. Even so, contemporary learning aids have entered into the system of this aural tradition: Hue uses written text to remember the poetry, and her minidisk recorder is on the tea cosy, so she can continue absorbing the subtleties of the music by playing it back time and again while she is cleaning the house or taking care of her daughter, whom she has since started teaching as well.
The mood, pace and depth of this transmission process contrast with what I have seen in the teaching studios at the Hanoi Conservatorium in the days before. While Vietnam has a strong commitment to ‘preserving and developing' traditional music – particularly of the Viet majority as many of the fifty-three ethnic minorities are in acute danger of musical extinction) – it has transformed once vibrant living traditions into static repertoires: improvisation, fluid tempi and even instrument-specific tunings have largely been ironed out in institutional settings.
To me, this crude canonisation seems like a ‘slow puncture' approach to sustainability; while it is officially being supported, the music is robbed of some of its most attractive features, so it runs the risk of being met with apathy by the next generation. But then again, the barely hidden agenda of the director of the institute is more the ‘development' than the ‘preservation' of Viet music: rather than focusing on the subtleties of music for soloists or small ensembles, Professor Thanh dreams of large orchestras of traditional instruments, modelled on Chinese examples, and seems ready to sacrifice timbre, improvisation and distinctive tuning systems in the process. Meanwhile, some of the students who have graduated in traditional musics venture outside and work with surviving old masters to breathe life into the music they have learned through a fifteen-year association with the conservatorium, from selection at age eight until their final degree at twenty-three – the perfect length of time to master an oral tradition.