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Singing as Social Life: Three Perspectives on Kwv Txhiaj from Vietnam
Abstract
Despite the recent influx of predominantly foreign-produced recordings of Hmong popular music, the vocal art form of kwv txhiaj still plays an important role in the daily lives of many Vietnamese-Hmong people. While previous studies of Vietnamese-Hmong music have tended to focus solely on the musical sounds, this article attempts to illustrate how kwv txhiaj is made meaningful in live performance by contextualizing the musical examples with ethnographic data. Using Timothy Rice's Time, Place, and Metaphor model (2003) as a theoretical basis, three contrasting case studies of singers and their songs are examined: an elderly woman sings a song she learned at the time of her marriage at the age of nine, a younger woman sings while planting rice in her fields, and another sings about the importance of education at the local government cultural center. Based on fifteen months of fieldwork in northern Vietnam, this study examines a representative sample of performances from the Sa Pa district of Lào Cai province in an attempt to uncover what makes kwv txhiaj a vital aspect of Vietnamese-Hmong culture.
Keywords: Vietnam, music, kwv txhiaj, subject-centered ethnography
Introduction
Kwv txhiaj is a traditional ballad style that is sung by Hmong people throughout the world. In Vietnam, this vocal art form is so prevalent that the term nkauj (song or singer) is often used interchangeably with kwv txhiaj in the vernacular. Studies on Vietnamese-Hmong kwv txhiaj have tended to focus on the collection of song lyrics and the categorization of songs. Since the 1950s, Vietnamese musicologists have produced two books (H?ng 19971 and Duong 2010), a series of articles (e.g. H?ng 2003[1967] and 2004[1975]; Tr?n (2003[1968]); Tr?n (2003[1978]); Trinh and Nguyen 1978; Luong 2003[1997]), and numerous songbooks on Hmong traditional music which include extensive musical transcriptions of kwv txhiaj (e.g. Anon. 1960 and 1961; Hùng 2001, 2002, and 2003). This body of research has been largely motivated by showing how the musical culture of the Hmong differs from that of Vietnam's other ethnic minority groups (cf. Pelley 2002). Kwv txhiaj has served as an ideal genre for this exercise because of its perceived historical ties with the Hmong people. The transcriptions have also been appropriated for...