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AB - >For more than three thousand years, members of the more than twenty ethnic minority cultures of the Tây Nguyên region of Vietnam—the central highlands—have practiced gong music.1 Traditional gong musical performance is so intimately tied to the artistic, religious, and philosophical beliefs and is so closely linked to the affairs of life of these communities, one may say that the cultural identities of the various highland groups are bound up specifically with their individual gong cultures. Unfortunately, the gong music of the Vietnamese uplands has received scant attention from Western scholars, even among ethnomusicologists specializing in the traditional musical cultures of Southeast Asia.2 Vietnamese gong music has received no attention from aestheticians. In this paper, we hope to introduce Western readers to this ancient and rich musical tradition and to place that tradition in the context of specifically aesthetic reflection. We shall argue that while traditional Vietnamese gong music may at first seem remote or even inaccessible to the Western ear, it is a musical tradition that has much in common with Western musical practice. At the same time, gong music is a product of its Vietnamese roots and, we shall argue, it can only be fully understood in its Vietnamese cultural context. We shall argue, however, that the importance of placing gong music in its cultural context has a parallel significance for the philosophical understanding of Western musical practices. The aesthetics of traditional Vietnamese gong music thus has something important to say about both Vietnamese and Western musical aesthetics. A few prefatory points are in order. The terms ‘Vietnam’ and ‘Vietnamese’ are here being used as geographical, political designations and do not refer to Vietnamese ethnicity (Vit). When we refer to Vietnamese ethnic groups, we shall do so by naming the groups. There are fifty‐five ethnic groups in Vietnam. The largest by far is the Vit group at 85 percent of the population. This paper is concerned solely with the traditional gong music of the minority ethnic groups who live in the central highlands. We recognize that there are many diverse and distinct musical styles and traditions among the various ethnic peoples throughout Vietnam. By “the traditional gong music of the central highlands” we mean the music that is currently being played and that we take to be representative of the musical traditions of the groups in question. We understand that, like all musical traditions, gong music is a cultural practice with its own history and dynamics. What we see and hear today are the distillation and accretion of these thousands‐year‐old practices.3 i .  the aesthetics of gong music Gong music is common to many Southeast Asian and Pacific countries, including Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, the Philippines, and, of course, Indonesia, whose gamelan orchestras are probably most familiar to Western audiences. A defining characteristic of all these practices is the central role of gong playing, that is, the production of sounds on rimmed metal disks by hitting the gongs with implements such as mallets or sticks. Like the gong music of other Asian and Pacific countries, Vietnamese gongs are of many different sizes and are typically played in ensembles ranging from two to as many as twenty gongs (see Figure 1). Some gongs (Cng) are carried or worn. Others (Chiêng) are suspended from the ceiling or a stand. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Ba Na gong ensemble with different size gongs. The traditional gong music of the central highlands of Vietnam has its own characteristics. Vietnamese gong musical performances vary from village to village, but we may start by noting that traditional Vietnamese gong music is a hybrid practice involving one or more associated artistic forms and practices. Gong performers themselves frequently parade or dance while playing. Gong playing may also be accompanied by dancers who move in lines, performing centuries‐old hand gestures and steps (see Figure 2). Dancers may carry decorated woven shields and bamboo swords. In some cases, dancers and gong players engage in chanting and vocalizations. Gong performances may involve the sharing of food and drink, including the ceremonial sharing with gods and spirits of the dead. Gong performances may also involve parades or animal sacrifices. Understanding the cultural meaning of gong practice will necessarily involve reference to all these things. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Ba Na gong players and dancers in procession. However, the designation “gong” music clearly recognizes the centrality of gong playing itself as the nerve of the practice. The aesthetics of gong playing must begin with this. Gongs are percussion instruments: they produce their sounds by being percussed or hit. Vietnamese gong players hit their gongs with a variety of implements, including sticks from the cassava plant, bamboo poles, wooden mallets (which may or may not be covered with cloth, leather, or other padding), and the open or closed hand. Each of the hitting implements has its own characteristic sound. The choice of hitting implements varies from community to community. In some cultures, a bracelet is worn on the wrist of the hitting hand, and the bracelet hits the gong with the hand; the action produces a click at the onset of the ringing of the gong. Here it is important to bear in mind some basic observations about percussion instruments. Because some percussion instruments such as cymbals and snare drums do not produce sounds that are heard as tonal—that is, as occupying positions in a culturally defined system of definite pitches—it is common to think of percussion instruments as solely rhythmic and nontonal. That is a misconception. Some percussion instruments are tonal: the piano, the xylophone, the vibraphone, the glockenspiel, and the kettledrum being notable examples. It is more accurate to say that gongs are percussive instruments and that all gongs produce sounds but some gongs are nontonal while others are tonal. The musical effects of tonal and nontonal gongs are not the same and their differences are aesthetically significant. In addition, gongs may be flat or they may be “bossed,” that is, they may have a raised hub in the center of the disk. Hitting a bossed gong directly on the raised hub produces a more bell‐like sound; hitting it closer to the perimeter produces more of a crash resonance. The sound is also affected by whether the gong is hit on the outside or the inside of the gong. The instrumentation of traditional Vietnamese gong ensembles may include tonal and nontonal gongs, bossed and flat gongs, drums, cymbals, and bamboo panpipes. Another aesthetically relevant feature of gongs is that gongs typically produce not just sounds but also “soundings,” that is, sounds that have more or less extended durations that decay naturally over time. A gong continues to reverberate after it is hit and gradually softens away into silence. The termination of a gong sound may, however, be imposed on the gong before the natural period of decay. That is, a gong may be stopped or “damped” by the gong player, typically by placing a hand or a mallet on the gong to stop it from ringing. This is an important point to keep in mind. The stopping of musical sounds is one of the most important, if frequently neglected, aspects of musical performance in the West. Western musical notation can specify the duration of sounds with great precision, but performers do not always pay careful attention to this aspect of musical performance; nor are listeners generally consciously aware of the phenomenon. Still, control over the cessation of sounds can affect the presentation of music in dramatic ways. The style of Glenn Gould, for example, is instantly recognizable even to the relatively untrained ear, especially for the clarity of Gould's presentation of musical lines, both melodically and contrapuntally. This is due in no small measure to Gould's uncanny control over both the onset and the termination of individual tones by means of his keyboard technique and his characteristic use of the foot pedals. Similarly, Vietnamese gong players pay special attention to the damping of gongs, and this range of discrimination is not something to which most Westerners would attend. For the Vietnamese, however, one means of identifying the characteristic styles of gong playing from different ethnic groups is by means of their respective damping techniques and styles. Differently damped gongs have their own aesthetic qualities. Gongs left to ring interact with other gong sounds. The Chu Ru and Ba Na peoples damp the gongs with the sticks they use to hit the gong. M, Mnông, Kp, and Co Ho villagers damp the gongs with the palm of the hand. The Gia Rai damp the gong with various combinations of fingers. Gongs may also be damped by elbows or thighs. Gongs may be damped at the center, toward the perimeter, on the rim, and from the front or the back, each technique resulting in a different effect. Gong sounds may be damped completely, bringing them to a halt, or they may be softly damped, allowing an attenuated sound to continue. A second hit on the same gong also has a damping effect on the first sounding (see Figure 3). 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Members of the M group damping gongs with the left hand. As a percussive music, Vietnamese gong playing places a high premium on its rhythmic element. One especially interesting feature of Vietnamese gong playing is the high degree to which individual musical elements within musical phrases are assigned to different members of a gong ensemble. We can understand this feature of Vietnamese gong music by contrasting it with the case of a Western jazz drummer playing a rhythmically demanding piece. The drummer has an array of sounding possibilities at his or her disposal: the snare drum, the tom drum, the bass drum, the high hat cymbal, the ride cymbal, the crash cymbal, and other percussion instruments such as shakers, chimes, and bells. The drummer might produce a steady underlying beat, say, with the bass drum or the high hat, while simultaneously producing accents, colorations, and polyrhythms with other parts of the drum kit. Often, one can see the complexity of the rhythm, literally, by watching the drummer's hands and feet ablaze in constant, sometimes furious, motion. (Buddy Rich was famous for such displays.) Vietnamese gong music may also present differing rhythms, accents, and colorations, but, even in the case of rhythmically sophisticated and complex performances, as for example the fast tempo music played by the women of the Bih ethnic group, one is struck by the relative calm of the gong players' hands, as compared with the hands and feet of the jazz drummer. This is so because individual gong players are assigned particular motifs that, taken together, produce the rhythmic interest. The motifs played by individual gong players are not particularly complicated in the sense of consisting of extended rhythmic lines. What matters is rather the placement of the rhythmic accents as the beat is subdivided metrically as well as the precise placement of the individual elements in the rhythmic array of the ensemble. This sort of playing requires a highly developed rhythmic sense. Ensemble rhythmic playing with elements assigned to different players does occur in Western music. Western listeners who would like to get a sense of the particular musical effect of the very highly specialized assignment of rhythmic elements in Vietnamese gong music might think of the rhythms of salsa music. One of the great delights of salsa music is the overlay of precise syncopated rhythmic accents on a pulse sometimes stated, sometime implied, always present in the music. As in Vietnamese gong music, the musical effect in salsa is the result of a rhythmic ensemble whose members are assigned relatively simple but precisely placed complementary rhythmic parts. In salsa music, the parts are assigned to the characteristic rhythmic instruments of the Latin ensemble: the cymbal, the cow bell, the conga, the clave, the maracas, the guiro, the cabasa, and the bass. In an eight‐beat phrase, for example, the clave might be hit on the downbeat of 1, the upbeat of 3, and the downbeat of 4, 6, and 7. The conga might be hit on the downbeat of 2 and 4, the upbeat of 5, the downbeat of 6 and 8, and the upbeat of 1. The cowbell might be hit on 1, 2, upbeat of 3, 4, upbeat of 5, and the downbeats of 5, 6, 7, and 8. These patterns are repeated continuously. The challenge for each individual playing this music is in the placement of the musical hits, maintaining not only the precision but the overall rhythmic feel of the music. The combination of these parts gives the rhythmic section its cohesion and salsa its characteristic musical sound and vitality. And so it is with Vietnamese gong playing. In the tradition of the Brâu people, two players sit facing two gongs hanging between the players. One player beats relatively even eighth notes to establish the meter; the other player punctuates the rhythm by subdividing the beat and hitting accents. Together they produce the complicated and lively rhythm. In other communities, such as the M, Mnông, and Co Ho communities, the gong ensemble may range from six to as many as forty players, where the individual parts are “doubled” (that is, the part is played by more than one player) with as many as five or six players on a part. Players on the same part must sound as a single voice. Since the hits occur at very precise and small metric subdivisions of the beat, the meticulous musical demands of this sort of playing are obvious (see Figure 4).4 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Bih gong players doubling parts in three groups of two. Gongs must be regulated, which is to say that each gong must be adjusted to produce sounds whose timbral or tonal properties are complementary to the sonorous properties of the other gongs in an ensemble. Typically, each village has a gong regulator who is a master practitioner highly skilled in such matters. One interesting feature of Vietnamese gong music is that while the gongs, which are forged from metal alloys, were previously produced in certain of the highland villages themselves, in recent years, as result of the dislocations and hardships of the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the “American War”), they have been manufactured elsewhere by ethnic Vit instrument makers who have a general sense of the individual ethnic musical styles and who sell the gongs to the villages. The gongs must then be finely adjusted and, in the case of tonal gongs, tuned in accordance with the tonal array of the rest of the ensemble. It falls to the gong regulator to make these fine adjustments. Gong regulation requires another set of musical skills. Regulating the gong is a matter of hammering the gong in spiral or circular patterns on the central disk or along its rimmed edges. The regulator must be sensitive to musical features such as the volume, the timbre, the tone, the overtones (the multiples of fundamental frequencies that give sounding tones their unique colors), and the rate and nature of the onset and durational qualities of the sound of the gong. He (for the regulator is typically a male) must know exactly where and how to hammer the gong to effect the subtle changes that bring the musical sounds of the gong into adjustment with the ensemble. The existence of gong regulation skills alongside the skills of gong playing brings to mind R. G. Collingwood's observation that, in the case of highly skilled activities, there may be a hierarchical, reciprocating relation between various crafts wherein one craft supplies what another needs.5 In the case of gong ensembles in which tonal gongs are used, the gong regulator is responsible for bringing each gong into conformity with the tonal array. The tonal system of traditional Vietnamese gong music is in some ways similar to standard Western tonality. The gongs produce tones or pitches arrayed on a scalar system in which steps can be heard as existing in a system of tones heard as higher and lower in relation to one another. Like Western musical scales, the steps of the scale are heard as fundamentally related to one pitch that is heard as the center of the tonal system. Tonal patterns differ from community to community but, generally speaking, the musical intervals employed are many of the same intervals as we would find in the Western diatonic scalar system (half tones, whole tones, thirds, fourths, fifths, octaves, and so on), with the important exception that in some Vietnamese traditions quarter‐tones are employed. Westerners may at first hear the quarter‐tones as simply being out of tune. But, as in the case of other micro‐tonal musics such as Indian music, these intervals can, with training, be heard by the Western ear as appropriate and functioning within the scalar system. Quarter‐tones may also have a subtle trance‐inducing effect.6 Each tonal gong produces a single pitched sound and each player plays only one gong. So, analogous to the case of the rhythmic patternings discussed above, the melodies (which are typically no longer than four measures long) and the harmonies of traditional Vietnamese music are the product of the assignments of particular pitched tones placed in time so as to produce integrated melodies and harmonies by the ensemble. The same musical demands and musical delights ensue from listening to the melodies and harmonies in rhythmic gestalts emerging from the individualized soundings taken together as a whole. Traditional Vietnamese gong music has expressive and representational dimensions whose meanings are derived from a combination of purely musical and contextual factors.7 The relatively slow, uncluttered music played in the context of a funeral is heard as expressive of melancholy.8 The syncopated music played at the harvest celebration is heard as merry.9 An Ê?ê piece known as “Ice Rain” represents a hailstorm: a series of hits on a variety of small gongs starts slowly, followed by an increasingly animated and turbulent pattern of sounds involving the full range of gong and drum sounds, much in the way that a hailstorm might begin and develop. In this case the patterning of gong sounds mimics the overall pattern of the growth and development of a hailstorm in general as well as the specific sounds and patterns of sounds that hailstones make as differently sized hailstones hit different surfaces during a storm.10 In another piece, “Scarecrow,” the gongs imitate the rattling made by bamboo scarecrows Ê?ê highlanders use to keep birds away from the fields.11 Finally, players may improvise on the fundamental patterns after the patterns have been firmly established in performance. Virtuosity is a prized value. Among the Ê?ê, for example, there are contests in which gong players play variations on fast rhythmic patterns, attempting to throw others in the ensemble off balance, not unlike the “cutting sessions” occasionally had among some jazz musicians in the West. These observations combine to give us a sense of what we might call the basic aesthetic elements of traditional Vietnamese gong music. They also establish the characteristic features that help us to individuate the styles and artistic creativity of one ethnic group from another and to mark stylistic differences and nuances within the music of particular ethnic cultures. The Ba Na group, for example, typically employs a thirteen‐gong ensemble with a nine‐step scale, in a homophonic way (that is, having a single melodic line with accompaniment). The Ê?ê group employs an array of six to nine gongs, producing polyphonic music of complex rhythms and fast tempi, with some improvisation.12 The Mnông use brass gongs in worship ceremonies but bamboo gongs in the funeral ceremony; their music often resembles the dialogue of ordinary speech. Brâu music has a driving feel. Chu Ru is more lilting. The Xo ?ang music is powerful and stately. Vietnamese gong players and listeners in the community pay great attention to these temporal, spatial, rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, textural, formal, expressive, representational, improvisatory, and virtuosic musical dimensions. They do so in a way that Western listeners would recognize as having resonance with a common understanding of the aesthetic appreciation of music: they are familiar with the repertoire of the musical culture and they attend to what Western theorists would call purely musical features. Entire villages take enormous pride in the musicianship of the gong players and in the sensibility of the members of the community who attend to this finely nuanced music—we might say—for its own sake. And with good reason: the aesthetic power of this music, its drive, its energy, its sometimes hypnotic force, its expressiveness and rhythmic sophistication, are all there to be heard by Vietnamese and Westerners alike. ii. gong music and ethnic traditions It would be a mistake, however, to think that the aesthetic qualities and the musical sensibilities and experiences we have so far considered exhaust the meaning of traditional Vietnamese gong music. Nor would this analysis help us to understand the depth of meaning of what is often said of the Tây Nguyên region—that if one visits the region and does not listen to the gong music, one has not been there. Gong music is very much a part of the traditional cultures of the Tây Nguyên communities, central to the concerns of life. It is not a quotidian music found in everyday activities, in the way that lullabies are. Gong performances are reserved for occasions that mark special meaning in the course of human affairs. In this way, gong music reflects the animistic, agrarian, and ancestral aspects of traditional ethnic life and, as such, has connections with ritual and the sacred, as well as with the mundane. Gong performances signify special points in the cycle of life from birth to the grave, celebrating pregnancy, welcoming newborns into the world, accompanying marriage ceremonies, reminding newlyweds to practice cultural traditions, celebrating the building of a new house, mourning the dead at funerals, and announcing the departure of a dead person's soul for the land of the dead. Performances signal key moments in the planting cycles, with land ceremonies, sowing ceremonies, watering ceremonies, rain ceremonies, and harvest ceremonies.13 Gong performances provide the opportunity for socialization around a shared set of values. In some cases, the performances are “performative” in the technical sense of signifying a particular kind of action, such as welcoming a visitor to the village.14 Gong performances also reflect and instantiate social relationships. Some gong ensembles are entirely male, some female; in others, gender roles are mixed together. The performances speak to ancestors and deities who influence human activities and natural events. In some groups it is thought that gods reside in the gongs. The gongs themselves may also have a general representative meaning: in some cultures they represent the power and the prestige of the owners. A measure of the importance and power of gongs is that gong sets are considered extremely valuable treasures. A set of gongs among the Gia Rai group may be worth the exchange equivalent of thirty buffaloes. Gong performers typically wear handsome and ornate costumes made specially and worn only for gong performances. Performers frequently wear special facial and bodily decorations. Clearly, we can begin to grasp the deep cultural meanings and significance of gong performance only when we understand it in the context of the honored place that gong playing holds and the important cultural functions that it serves for the peoples of the Tây Nguyên region. In this light, traditional Vietnamese gong playing can be seen to have affinities with the form of human behavior Ellen Dissanayake calls “making special.”15 iii. art, craft, and culture We can take several lessons from these reflections about Vietnamese gong music that shed light on the musical practices of the Western musical world. We earlier spoke about Collingwood's observation that one of the characteristics of craft is that a craft may rely on other crafts for what it needs. A craft therefore takes its place in a nested series of interlocking activities. Certainly, when we think of the production and regulation of gongs, of the costumes, decorations, and dances that accompany gong performances, we can see that something of the sort is true of traditional Vietnamese gong practice. These activities involve what the ancient Greeks recognized as the power to produce a preconceived result by means of consciously controlled and directed action.16 These techniques are certainly taught and passed on from generation to generation by way of example and oral instruction. But Collingwood deployed his analysis of craft as a way of distinguishing craft from art, properly so‐called, which, on his view, consists in a certain mode of expressing the emotion of an individual artist. This is a position that would be totally foreign to the ways of thinking of the ethnic groups of the central highlands we have been examining. Certainly, the subsumption of gong playing under the general rubric of personal emotional expression would strike these Vietnamese as peculiarly narrow. Nor is it clear that these Vietnamese would even recognize the distinction between craft in the Greek sense and art in the sense of activities designed solely or even primarily for the provision of aesthetic enjoyment, much less in Collingwood's sense. As we have seen, the gong players and the members of these societies have a sophisticated aesthetic sense, but gong playing is seen as so closely integrated into the daily lives of people in these societies, that Western categories of art and craft that figure in Western aesthetic discussion would surely strike these Vietnamese as somewhat artificial and narrow. Gong playing is too deeply imbricated in the daily and supernatural meaning of life for these categories to take us very far. On the other hand, one wonders about the extent to which the same kind of analysis might be given to Western musical practice. Consider the case of one of the great masterworks of Western musical culture, Handel's oratorio, The Messiah. The Messiah is, of course, a justifiably admired musical achievement of choral composition, notable for its musical eloquence, its harmonic intensity, and monophonic, polyphonic, and homophonic textures. But it also has deep religious significance, celebrating the story of Christ the Redeemer and Savior of the world. It has occasioned philosophical reflections on Hannah Arendt's conceptions of human natality and human possibility.17 At the same time, The Messiah draws on traditional folk music, in particular, themes of the pifferari, the wandering musical shepherds of the Abruzzi who went to Rome during the Christmas season to play. It has also become something of an industry. The Messiah was already an Easter‐time phenomenon in Handel's day. Today, there is hardly a metropolitan area in Europe or North America that cannot boast a tradition of performing the work at Christmas, with hundreds of Messiah groups, societies, and festivals proclaiming their performance as a beloved tradition involving hundreds of voices. Performance of The Messiah is an important factor in the economic success of countless concert halls, orchestras, and community choral groups. (In some locales tickets are available through Ticketmaster.) Choir members, including both amateurs and professionals, rehearse for months in preparation for eagerly awaited performances. Participation in these groups evokes a mixture of responses and motivations, from glory in the music itself, to piety, camaraderie, and the self‐affirmation and comfort that comes of knowing that one belongs to a particular religious community. The Messiah is each of these things and all of these things. The larger question that our reflections on Vietnamese gong music brings to mind, then, is the extent to which the philosophical understanding of Western music requires an analogously situated inquiry into its human significance. If we were to insist on pushing the Collingwoodian insight about the network of interlocking and reciprocal activities he identified as activities of craft, what we would want to say is that both Vietnamese and Western music must be understood in the context of the larger forms of life that are both presupposed by and that go beyond the musical practices themselves, a suggestion that calls to mind not so much the philosophical views of Collingwood as much as those of John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Bruno Latour. Indeed, understanding musical performance practices in the context of the cultural forms of life out of which they arise may give us some insight into the question of what differentiates the musics of the world as well as what they have in common.18 iv. postscript The gong culture of the Vietnamese central highlands is in danger of dying out. As ethnic communities are increasingly exposed to Western and other outside influences, village youth are becoming less interested in their ancestral music. The responsibility for preserving the traditional patterns, tunes, skills, and lore rests on an older generation. Under the pressure of globalization, traditional rice cultivation is being replaced by other crops such as coffee, black pepper, and cashews, and many of the gong ceremonies based on rice farming seem less vitally connected with the concerns of everyday life. The supply of musical instruments is also dwindling under the influence of globalization and the ravages of war. Ancestral gongs are being by sold to outsiders by villagers who must cope with the rigors of subsistence farming and the costs of purchasing the necessities of modern life. The gongs are sold by weight. A gong set that had been worth thirty buffaloes to the Gia Rai is now going for eighty‐five cents U.S. per pound. In Gia Rai province alone, the number of gong sets has dropped from the tens of thousands in 1980 to about three thousand in 2003. In some villages musicians play damaged gongs because they cannot afford to replace them. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has recognized gong music as a world heritage music. The Ministry of Culture and Information and the government of Vietnam are taking steps to preserve gong culture through programs of research, conferences, festivals, television broadcasts, and education. Whether traditional Vietnamese gong cultures can survive as a living tradition in the communities of their origin is an open question. 19 Footnotes 1 Tây Nguyên is a 26,850‐square‐mile region of mountains and high plateaus, 90 miles wide east to west, and 280 miles long from north to south, bordering Laos and Cambodia to the west. The Tây Nguyên region comprises the provinces of Lâm Dng, Gia Lai, Kon Tum, ?c Lc, and ?c Nông. 2 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians has only a few sentences on the subject of Vietnamese gong music. There are recordings of other varieties of traditional Vietnamese music available on CDs in the West where one can hear examples of music featuring the ?àn tranh (the sixteen‐string zither), the ?àn t'rung (the bamboo xylophone), the tam thp lc (the thirty‐six‐string hammered zither), the ?àn bu (the Vietnamese monochord), the nguyt cm (the moon‐shaped lute), and the sáo (the bamboo flute), as well as other less familiar musical instruments such as the pang gu lug u Hmông (a slide whistle), and the leaf of the blông tree, but few of these recordings include gong music. Exceptions are the CD compilations Gongs Vietnam—Laos (Playasound), Vietnamese Folkmusic 1 (Vietnam Musicology Institute), Stilling Time: Traditional Musics of Vietnam (Innova, also available as a download from http://www.innova.mu), Music from Vietnam 3: Ethnic Minorities (Caprice Records), and Vietnam: Musiques des montagnards (CNR). The Ministry of Culture and Information of Vietnam has produced a DVD, The Space of Gong Culture in the Central Highland of Vietnam, with an accompanying essay, “Cultural Space of Tây Nguyên Gong” (Vietnam Institute of Culture and Information Studies, Hanoi: The Gioi Publishing House, 2006), written by Nguyn Chí Bn. A portion of the essay appears in To Ngoc Thanh and Nguyn Chí Bn, “The Space of Gong Culture in the Central Highland of Vietnam,”Vietnam Social Sciences 112 (2006): 113–126. The current paper is indebted to these materials. 3 For an introduction to the culture of Vietnam as a whole, see Mark W. McLeod and Nguyen Thi Dieu, Culture and Customs of Vietnam (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001); Neil L. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (University of California Press, 1993); Pierre Huard and Maurice Durand, Vietnam, Civilization and Culture, Vū Thiên Kim, trans. (Paris/Hanoi: Ecole Francaise d'Extrême‐Orient, 1998). For background information on the central highlands, see Gerald Hickey, Kingdom in the Morning Mist: Mayréna in the Highlands of Vietnam (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Georges Condominas, We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in Central Highlands of Vietnam, Adrienne Foulke, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977). 4 Listen, for example, to the Jörai Hrap pieces, Gongs Vietnam—Laos, tracks 10 and 20, and the Ê  ?ê music, track 11. 5 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 16–17. 6 For good examples of quarter‐tone gong music, listen to the Thái music, track 7 on Gongs Vietnam—Laos, the Ba Na pieces (especially tracks 18, 22, and 25), and the Mnong Rlâm music (track 23). 7 The expressive and representational qualities of Western music have received considerable attention in contemporary Western philosophical aesthetics. For recent overviews, see Philip Alperson, “The Philosophy of Music: Formalism and Beyond,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Peter Kivy, ed. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 254–275; Stephen Davies, “Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Jerrold Levinson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 489–515; Mark DiBellis, “Music,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 531–544. 8 For examples, listen to Gongs Vietnam—Laos, tracks 14 and 21 (Thái), 15 (Jörai Hrap), 22 and 25 (Ba Na), and 23 (Mnong Rlâm). 9 Listen to the Gié‐Triêng harvest music, Gongs Vietnam—Laos, track 3. 10 Listen to track 29: “Pliér,” on Music from Vietnam 3. 11 Listen to track 24: “Kong taár” (“Scarecrow”) on Music from Vietnam 3. Track 20 is a performance of the same piece on bamboo rods. Comparing these two performances is an excellent way to get a sense of the distinctive characters of gong and bamboo music. 12 For examples of Ê ?ê gong music in addition to the performances mentioned in notes 5 and 6 above, listen to track 2: “Dinh tktàr,” track 7: “Ciriria,” and track 14: “Nio vit h'gum,” on Music from Vietnam 3. A gong ensemble accompanying a singer from the Muòng group can be heard on track 18: “Loóng ba,” on Music from Vietnam 3. 13 The Gongs Vietnam—Laos CD has recordings of performance styles from different ethnic communities for similar ritual ceremonies. The disk has music to celebrate the inauguration of a new house from the Mnong Rlâm, Ê ?ê, and Ba Na groups, for example, buffalo sacrifice music from the Ba Na and Jörai Hrap, and funeral music from Jörai Hrap, Thái, Ba Na, and Mnong Rlâm villages. In addition, the CD has four separate recordings of performances addressed to the spirit of the communal house by Ba Na players. One can also hear music to summon spirits and to mark the departure of the deceased soul from the grave for the spirit world from the Jörai Hrap, and Gié‐Triêng music to celebrate the new year and the end of the harvest. 14 For a discussion of performative utterances, see J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). For an example of performative gong music, listen to the Ê ?ê“Welcome Music” on Stilling Time, track 1; six male gong players and a drummer play energetic rhythmic patterns with improvisations while the head woman of the village shares a ceremonial cup of wine with the visitors. Listen also to the Ê ?ê welcome music on track 11 of Gongs Vietnam—Laos. 15 See Ellen Dissanayake, What is Art For? (University of Washington Press, 1988), especially ch. 4. We make this reference without endorsing the specifically sociobiological tenets of Dissanayake's work. 16 Collingwood, The Principles of Art, p. 15. 17 Frederick M. Dolan, “An Ambiguous Citation in Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition,”The Journal of Politics 66 (2004): 606–610. 18 These themes are developed in Philip Alperson, The Philosophy of Music (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, forthcoming). 19 The authors thank Noël Carroll, Nguyen Thi Dieu, Susan Feagin, Casey Haskins, Mary Hawkesworth, Ngô Thanh Nhàn, and Sophie Quinn‐Judge for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. They also thank BiHoài Son for his valuable assistance with translation. © The American Society for Aesthetics This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The American Society for Aesthetics
TI - The Sounding of the World: Aesthetic Reflections on Traditional Gong Music of Vietnam
JO - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
DO - 10.1111/j.1540-594x.2007.00233.x
DA - 2007-09-22
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-sounding-of-the-world-aesthetic-reflections-on-traditional-gong-0RCds00gmy
SP - 11
EP - 20
VL - 65
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -