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1. The Object of Inquiry
The aim of this essay is to examine briefly the nature and history of tân nhac, a kind of music that has been very much at the center of Vietnamese public life from the time of its first strong emergence in the country in the late 1930s up to the present day. The syllables that make up the expression tan nhac come from Chinese. Tân (pronounced xln in Mandarin Chinese) means "new," and nhac (yuè in Mandarin) means "music."1 Tân nhac, or "new music," is characterized by its creators as music based on procedures used in the West, but the term covers a broad spectrum of styles, including many which evolved from Southeast Asian and Chinese, as well as Western, sources. Its best singers use techniques, such as off-tone quavering and microtonal adornment, that cannot be represented on a Western five-line staff, and its instruments are just as likely to be monochords (dàn bau), vertically held Chinese violins (erhu), or bamboo flutes as they are to be cellos or saxophones. Pentatonic scales are as common in tân nhac as diatonic scales, and the pentatonicism one encounters there is often characterized by unstable or distinctively pitched notes that one doesn't hear in pentatonic music from other regions, such as China. Tan nhac is frequently less wedded to binary phrase patterns-tunes made up of groups of eight, sixteen, and thirty-two measures-than either Western popular or Chinese popular music. Tân nhac is widely accessible in live performances, CDs, audiotapes, videos, and printed scores. To procure examples in the U.S., one has only to go to any Vietnamese grocery store and pick through the display of CDs and videos inside. Hundreds of composer-lyricists and thousands of singers have devoted their careers to the production of tân nhac.
Tân nhac shades off into many other areas of cultural activity, such as folk music, traditional opera, spoken drama, movies, journalism, poetry, fiction, historical legend, religion, philosophy, and politics. Its significance, both as an outlet for the views and feelings of the populace and as an instrument through which those views and feelings can be influenced, is generally recognized. In the early 1970s, for example, President Thiêu of the Vietnamese Republic in South Viêt Nam made it...