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| The Guqin in Vietnam | 古琴在越南 1 |
Vietnam, like Korea and Japan, has throughout history been heavily influenced by its neighbor, China.3 And as with those other two countries, there is evidence for the qin having been played at various times in Vietnam. However, the information available about this at present suggests that it had a very minor presence there.4
Reasons for this are given in what seem to be the most detailed articles in English on this subject, by Mitchell Clark. Most of the information here comes from those articles.5
The word for qin in Vietnamese is "cam" (I do not know how to reproduce the diacritical marks).6 In classical Chinese the character for "qin" almost invariably refers to what is today called the "old qin" However, in Vietnam both the word and the character may also refer to other string instruments.7 This complicates specific research on this topic.
Qin in Ensembles
The Tran dynasty (1225 - 1400) established a court orchestra along the lines of a Chinese court orchestra. This was continued during the Le (1428 - 1788) and Nguyen (1802 - 1945) dynasties. The surviving (or reconstructed) Vietnamese court orchestra is apparently patterned on the Ming dynasty court orchestra. The qin has been a part of this orchestra, though perhaps mostly for ritual or historical reasons (its association with Confucius). Even though multiple instruments may have been used, it played only a simple part and perhaps was not even audible. As in China, qin melodies apparently had no influence in the repertoire. I do not know of any studies of what influence, if any, the existence of this court ensemble might have had on local Vietnamese music.
During the Tran dynasty there was also a small ensemble consisting of a cam along with a tranh (the Vietnamese zheng), tyba (pipa), qi xian (that huyen: "7-strings"), song huyen (shuang xian: double string) and tieu loai (vertical flute). Clark sites Vietnamese scholar Tran Van Khe as having identified the cam as a qin and the "7-strings" as a local variant. However, neither of these identifications is certain, there seems to be no surviving music of this ensemble, and I have no information on what influence it might have had on the development of Vietnamese music in general.
Qin as a solo instrument
Clark could find record of only two qin players in Vietnamese history, both from the Tran dynasty. One, Tran Cu, taught qin to the son of the Tran emperor. He is said to have been a well-rounded gentleman, with some comment devoted to his custom of "cutting the ends of the strings before attaching them (to the instrument)". Nothing is said about the music he played or his playing style.
The other, Nguyen Si Co, is described as follows: "When playing, he first wandered back and forth among the strings, and then went into the piece. In general, (the listener) can grasp the image of the music in this way." Clark cites Nguyen T. Phong as interpreting this to mean that Nguyen followed the custom found in Vietnamese music of extemporizing within the mode of a melody before playing the actual composition. Again, there is apparently no further information with details of both these preludes and the melodies themselves.
Clark goes on to cite the titles of three melodies apparently played at one time in Hue:
Because the list includes one known melody, one only included in a list, and one not mentioned elsewhere, Clark speculates that perhaps this means these were titles of melodies actually played in Vietnam, rather than simply melody titles from lists.
Conclusion
Clark concludes with a chapter on why the qin never caught on in Japan, Korea or China. He says Vietnamese music certainly was known to take on foreign influence, pointing to the fact that they adapted the zheng (which also became popular and localized in both Japan and Korea.) However, qin melodies were very specific to the qin and so not easily adapted to other instruments. The sort of ornaments played on other instruments cannot be produced on the qin.
For a contemplative instrument the Japanese generally played the shakuhachi end blown flute. In Korea the komungo zither, plucked with a stick, seems to have taken on this function. Both of these instruments, though quiet, are considerably louder than the qin. In Vietnam no instrument seems to stand out as an instrument of contemplation, unless it was the dan bau monochord. Originally perhaps the quietest Vietnamese instrument, today it is always played with an electric pickup.
In Vietnam some of the aesthetic attitudes applied in China to the qin came to be applied to the more elegant forms of chamber music, such as the nhac tai tu (music of skilled amateurs), found in the south. That this influence came from the Chinese scholars' attitudes towards the qin and its music is underlined by the fact that a number of these melodies use qin melody titles.8
Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a
separate page)
1.
The Guqin in Vietnam, main references
Mitchell Clark,
A History of the Chinese Seven-string Zither in Vietnam
Mitchell Clark, Two Histories, The Qin in Korea and Vietnam
At present the only references to Vietnam on this site are with an image of a small screen purchased in Hanoi in the 1990s, and in the commentary to a qin melody that has a theme that perhaps suggests Vietnam, Yueshang Cao.
(Return)
3. At one time the languages of all three countries were written using Chinese characters. This was particularly difficult for Korean and Japanese. It apparently worked better with Vietnamese. Perhaps for this reason Vietnamesee, unlike Korean and Japanese, is often thought of as belonging to the same language family as Chinese. However, it is today generally accepted that, while Vietnamese has a large number of words that come from Chinese, it belongs to a different language family, Austro-Asiatic. Since the 16th century it has been written using Roman letters with extensive diacritical markings (not used here). (Return)
4. The situation is similar for Korea and to a lesser extent Japan. (Return)
6. The Vietnamese pronuncation for 琴 qin seems thus rather similar to the Cantonese pronunciation "kum" (rhymes with "come"). Southern dialects such as Cantonese have been shown to have pronunciation closer to ancient Chinese than does the standard dialect, Mandarin. (Return)
7. Clark does not discuss whether the qin was a motif in classical Vietnamese painting. It seems to have appeared with some regularity in both Japanese and Korean landscape painting. However, in those countries a local instrument such as the koto or komungo was sometimes substituted, not necessarily by intention.
It is also not clear how often the philosophical attitudes connected to the qin might have appeared in Vietnamese writing. Some of the stories and melody titles associated in China with the qin were in Vietnam applied to local instruments. Clark is presumably correct in concluding that the attitudes of Chinese literati towards the qin had little effect on the music in Vietnam.
Clark mentions the migration of a number of Chinese to Vietnam upon the collapse of the Ming dynasty. Personally I wonder whether one reason this apparently did not lead to any notable qin players in Vietnam is the heat and humidity there. In the following centuries increasing numbers of Chinese came, forming particularly large communities in the south. Although they were mostly merchants, evidence suggests that during the Qing dynasty in China merchants not infrequently had their children study the qin; they also formed local qin associations. Did this ever happen in Vietnam? (Return)
8. Perhaps another point to consider is the Daoist connection to the qin. In Japan, Korea and Vietnam, Confucianism was very influential in formulation of government policy. In China many qin melodies have Confucian themes. However, even more have Daoist themes. Daoist attitudes, when accepted in the other three countries, always seem to be combined with Buddhism, never strongly associated with the qin. (Return)
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