Dear all,
Last week I attended a kind of Vietnamese possesion ceremony in Bac
Ninh. The ritual music attracted me a lot. It was really "something" to
observe middle man interacting with spirits in "chau van"music.
I love to share my knowing of "chau van singing" to you.
The Vietnamese are very religious but not fanatical. Compared to other
categories, cult music was not widely developed. The most significant
cult song type is Chau van singing. This is a kind of incantation music
(although it was classified as ritual music), but its purpose was to
hypnotize the person who was estranged from the spirits through musical
airs, rythms and lyrics.
Chau Van combines trance singing and dancing, a religious form of art
used for extolling the merits of beneficent deities or deified national
heroes. Its music and poetry are mingled with a variety of rhythms,
pauses, tempos, stresses and pitches.
It is in essence a cantillation where the tunes and rhythm depend on
the contents of the sung text and may be linked together into a suite,
used in relation to a mythical happening, with hints at some features
of modern life.
The art of Hat Chau Van originated in the Red River delta and dates
back to the 16th century, spreading later to the whole of the country.
During its development course, Hat Chau Van has taken in the essential
beauty of folk songs from regions in the north, the centre and the
south. In North and Central Vietnam it was called "hat chau van",
whereas in the South it was also called "roi bong".
Chau Van in North Vietnam
In the North, a ceremony always began with a mass to invite deities to
come. The master of the ceremony (cung van) read a petition and said
some incantations to the underworld. After the invitation to the
spirits, the person, frequently a woman, who was going to be become the
speaker for the spirits sat on a mat in front of the altar. When the
spirit had not yet seized the person, the cung van and the orchestra
played together to encourage the spirit to distrain the person.
The lyrics in Chau Van were strongly emphasized.
The cung v--n not only had a good voice and knew how to play musical
instruments, but he also knew how to give compliments at the right time
and in the proper situation.
Finally the distrained person let the cung v--n know by a certain
gesture that she had already been seized. When a distrained person was
seized, a fairylike life began: a life full of flowers and butterflies
like those of te spirits. However, sometimes when te spirits were in a
sad mood, the songs and melodies also changed to fit the situation.
Chầu Van in Central Vietnam
One significant aspect of Hat Chau Van in Central Vietnam is that
people serve as distrained persons en masse, sometimes five persons
participated in the same ceremony.
Every year, a festival of distrained people was organized in the Hon
Chen Palace near Hue This palace is located on the bank of the H----ng
River, and because of the outsize
number of participants, they had to celebrate the ceremony on their
boats. The river was crowded with thousands of boats, thousands of
people dressed in colorful clothes, dancing to the offering music in an
atmosphere full of incense and scent of offering fruits and flowers.
Chau Van adopted even the tunes of the Music of the Court Banquet.
Chau Van in Central Vietnam is generally more prosperous than Chau Van
in the North. The melodies lie in many different pentatonics, the rythm
is far more complicated than that of the North.
Hát Chầu V--n in South Vietnam
Hát Chầu V--n, also called Hát Bóng, in the South follows the same
pattern of Hát Chầu V--n in the North and Center. Some of the tunes are
influenced by the classical music of the South.
Two kinds of Hát Chầu V--n: Hát thờ and Hát Lên Ðồng
Hát thờ (worship singing) is the chanting accompanying an act of
worship. Hát thờ is slow, grave, and dignified. Variations in the music
are few and contain little contrasting pitch and stress.
Hát Lên Ðồng is the cantillation accompanying psychic dancing claiming
to respond to occult powers and expressing the will and orders of some
super-natural being. It may contain many variations depending on the
number of verses sung, often coming to a climax or slowing down to the
tempo of a meditation.
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Musical accompaniment in Hát Chầu V--n
The instrumental music accompanying hat van plays a very important
role, either in emphasizing important passages or creating contrasting
effects, in any event enriching the content of the chant.
The main instrument used in hat van performance is the dan nguyet or
moon-shaped lute, accompanied by the striking of the phách (a piece of
wood or bamboo) marking the rhythm, xeng (clappers), trong chau (drum)
and chieng (gong). The 16-stringed zither (dan tranh) and flute (sao)
are also used in the recitation of certain poetry and sometimes the
eight-sound band (dan bat am) is also used in certain ceremonies.
Hát Chầu V--n has acquired over centuries both learned and folksy
characteristics and has proven to be a strong attraction to
musicologists at home and abroad.
Thank you for reading it.
