1. Welcome Music (Ê Ðê tribe).

            Although village life was effectively decimated in the Central Highlands, thousands of dislocated inhabitants are now trying to re-establish their former communities.  For the Ê Ðê people, a matriarchal culture, this includes digging up their sets of tuned bronze gongs, buried and hidden before the war, and hanging them in their wooden long-houses where they can be played for ceremonies.  Visitors are welcomed to the household by an assembly of male gong players gathered on the long wooden bench that runs down the inside wall of each house, playing a kaleidoscope of shifting rhythmic patterns. As the music rings, the head woman of the house downs a cup of rice wine then offers it to visitors, always beginning with the women. Most wealthier families have a set of gongs; their degree of wealth is proportional to the length of the bench and number of gongs.

            The gong ensembles of houses in this area consist of six small flat gongs (sometimes hanging, sometimes held), a large hand-held bossed gong played with a cloth-covered beater, a large hanging bossed gong (with a raised bump in the middle), a large hanging flat gong, and one large bass drum covered with water buffalo hide. The beginnings and endings of the music are signaled by cues from the drum while the bossed gongs keeps the steady pulse throughout. Of the six players beating the suspended gongs, two are expert leaders — they establish interlocking patterns which are picked up by the players on either side of them, before departing on more freely improvised rhythmic excursions.

            The languages of hill tribes in Vietnam fall into three families, each of which are represented in this recording: Malayo-Polynesian, spoken by the Ê Ðê; Sino-Tibetan, spoken by the H'Mông; and Austro-Asian, spoken by the Tøy. The tribal languages are declining in use because of the dominant Vietnamese culture's intention to acculturate the more than fifty-five minorities.

2.  Little Song of River Lam, Longing for the Past, Song of the Magpie.

            The Skilled Chamber Music genre of Vietnamese traditional music (Nhạc Tài Tứ) is the most highly improvisatory instrumental music in Vietnam. It is commonly heard accompanying Renovated Theater (Cải Lu’o’ng), in which actors sing their lines, adapting the play's particular lyrics to a standard repertory of instrumental pieces belonging to eight musical modes that reflect certain emotions or moods.

            Chamber pieces in this style include a short, unmeasured, improvised introduction (rao) followed by the rhythmical melody and regularly spaced meeting points where all the players must join together on the same note. Between these fixed points they are free to improvise within the mode and its associated decorative figures. Due to the tremendous room for improvisation players are valued for their skill at independent invention, often including wild rhythmic syncopation and pitch sliding, while still being able to keep their place in the rhythmic cycle and melodic skeleton.

3. Hà Lều (Nùng Tribe)

            Along the ruggedly mountainous northern border with China many different ethnic tribes live in co-existence, interrupted only by sporadic incursions and massacres by the Chinese.Tày, Nùng, Yao, Sánh Chị, H’Mông
and people of other tribes may be seen throughout the region in their distinct costumes planting rice in the rocky terrain or coaxing their horses and carts to market. To pass the time when things get slow, the Nùng have developed a dialogue game (sli) as a form of public entertainment. One or two couples sing and engage in coy flirting back and forth all afternoon while a crowd gathers to admire the double entendres and potential for embarrassment.

            Hà Lều is one of a repertory of five two-voiced melodies to which new lyrics are improvised on the spot. Since the new texts are sung simultaneously there is a gap between verses while the singers whisper to each other, conferring to decide the next lyric.  Skilled singers are quicker at inventing new words and more devastating when their wits are sharpened. Here a female couple sings for their own amusement along the road; at other times they may sit on a porch with a couple of men, an opium gleam in their eye, and lull the time away.

            Let the river carry me along and may I have reached the age of marriage by the time I arrive.  My beloved is like a rose, but I don't know if he has any thorns to prick me.

May our love be as unattainable and pure as a reflection in the water.

4. Hà Lều (Nùng). 

            Traditional culture is now the focus of Vietnamese government programs to "promote preservation" and "develop inheritance." Often the music is fundamentally altered when it is co-opted for the advancement of socialist ideals, but here these seven year old girls have learned Hà Lều in the traditional way: from their parents who teach them standard phrases before learning to invent new texts.  The new generation however is being encouraged to develop a more conscious stage presentation; by using facial expression and elegant hand gestures these girls interpret the meaning of the lyrics (here the natural beauty of the region) for the Vietnamese audience, as well as by a macaronic alternation of Vietnamese and Nùng languages.

5. Hêu Phưm (Nùng). 

            These sixteen year olds, in two couples, sing another melody of the sli genre (see Tracks 3 and 4). The men and women here use a different tonal area for their verses and have regular solo passages. When singing back and forth the couple that is not singing must listen carefully and come up with a quick response; whispering can be heard as they confer.

6. Elope in Spring (based on the music of H’Mông people).

            These musicians, a family of seven brothers which plays under the name Phù Đổng, have been performing together for fourteen years. They have become well known for their blend of traditional tribal musics and new compositions, a style of folk revival or renovated tradition known as Nhạc dân tộc cải biên.  With its format of musical arrangement derived from the teachings of the conservatory system of eastern Europe, the forms of these pieces are simple: Introduction, Theme, Development (with a little cadenza on the featured instrument), Restatement, Coda. Stage presentation (designed for TV screens and hotel lobbies) can be showy with elaborate "native" costumes and exaggerated body movements while the re-orchestrations and harmonizations elaborate the original tune as a vehicle for virtuoso display.

            In their compositions Phù Đổng manages to maintain a feeling for the origins of their works, here a H’Mông folk tune. This is played on a bamboo reed pipe, an instrument like a flute with a free bamboo reed in the mouthpiece which gives a characteristic buzz. The use of circular breathing, in which the player inhales through the nose while expelling air from his mouth, makes the tone of the instrument and the technique of the player all the more remarkable. The group takes its name from a Vietnamese legendary character, a weakling mute baby who grew to hulking proportions on hearing that his country was being invaded by the Chinese, and promptly sent them packing.

7. Spring Love Song (H’Mông tribe).

            The term H’Mông has come in recent years to represent several distinct yet related tribes to be found in areas across Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and North East Thailand. From the "same" tribe as in Track 6, only 1,000 kilometers to the north, comes a spring folk song with a similar  character of modal intervals, sung here by a rice farmer.

8. Offering Incense (Mediums' Trance Singing).

            At the Jade Bowl Temple in Huế, named after the azure-colored pool set in a hill overlooking the Perfume River, Chầu Văn or trance singing is traditionally performed on the 10th day of the 3rd month and the 15th day of the 7th month of the Lunar calendar. Goddess worship predates the arrival of Buddhism in Vietnam although the known goddesses of the Chầu Văn tradition pertain to much later times. Statues of a pantheon of goddesses are placed in Mother Houses found at Buddhist temple complexes and village shrines. Through the performance of hypnotically rhythmic music (the performers may be one or many, male or female) a medium enters a trance state and is possessed by a chosen deity. Because of the anti-religious stance of the Vietnamese government until 1986, the style was practiced in secret and also was adapted for inclusion in state-sponsored Hát Chèo theater presentations and is currently being revived by older practitioners in its original religious setting. Chầu Văn is also being openly revived because the growing economy has created a class of nouveau riche who would like the goddesses to intercede and protect their businesses.

            Many of the textual references here are obscure to the younger generation of Vietnamese because of the Huế regional dialect, the antiquated nature of the Chinese-influenced lyrics, and the fact that the vowels of the sacred names have been altered to preserve their magical quality (it would be an affront to pronounce the name of a goddess too precisely). The jumbled poetic form suggests this poem is from the 16th century, before poems became regularized as 7, 7, 6, 8 syllable lines with perfect rhymes; and the singer adds transitional vocalizations and word repetitions as she gets carried away.