ĐẶNG HỮU PHÚC

SONATA POLYPHONIQUE FOR THE SOLO
OF THE PIANO

It has been 33 years since Tết holiday (the lunar New Year) in 1978. Human life actually passes very quickly. A 25-year-old young man now is nearly 60 years old.

At that moment, Vietnam was very miserable (Phong trần đến cả sơn khê, tang thương đến cả hoa kia cỏ này, written by Nguyễn Gia Thiều). The slogan of those days was “to change the earth and the heaven, and to re-arrange the country” (Thay trời đổi đất, sắp xếp lại non sông).

The rations included bo bo (C. lacryma-jobi var. ma-yuen); the war at the Northwestern border was happening; and the war at the Northern border could take place at any time.

At that time, I was a student of two Departments (the Composition Department and the Piano Department) of the Musical School of Vietnam, located at Ô Chợ Dừa, Hà Nội. I, like other Vietnamese people, lived and hoped.

The living conditions were very poor and difficult. It was even more difficult to find a quite space and to have a piano for piano composition. Luckily, Ms. Tào Hữu Huệ, my beloved teacher, brought her family to their homeland in China in order to enjoy Tết holiday there for three months. She asked me to take care of her house, which was really the great chance of my lifetime.

That was a 25-square-meter room for five people on the second floor of the collective residential quarter of the Vietnamese School of Musicology. I completed a sonata with a droit piano of the branch Forter of the German Democratic Republic in that room.

After the completion of three parts (the introduction, the sonata, and the ending), I performed this sonata many times. My most remarkable event was my recital on November 15, 1978 at the Association of Vietnamese Musicians at 51 Trần Hưng Đạo street. That was the only place in Hanoi for chamber music performances at that time. I played the piano from the beginning to the end during that performance. In that performance, my compositions comprised five romances for the tenor and the piano, a trio of the flute – the cello – the piano, “three pictures” for  the soprano and two pianos, a suite for the piano, and a sonata polyphonique, which ended that performance.

The second remarkable performance of this musical piece happened in December 1988. I had a chance to participate in the festival “The first exchange of young musicians from the socialist countries” in the former Soviet Union (it was the first time and also the last time because the Soviet Union collapsed after that). This was the first time I went abroad. Traveling abroad at that time was a privilege that such a very righteous person like me could hardly gain.

Before traveling, I must have sent the scores and the recording of the sonata, which was recorded in 1978 at the Voice of Vietnam for the organization board’s examination in advance. They agreed to invite me with one condition that I had to play this sonata solo in one performance. At that time, I strove to make a living, which made my playing be not as good as before. Additionally, this musical piece was extremely difficult; thus I requested the organization board to prepare an instrument for my rehearsal when arriving in Moscow. Under the temperature of minus 15 degrees centigrade, after rehearsal nights at the Association of Soviet Union Musicians, it was very hard for the interpreter and me to wait for hours for calling a taxi under white snow. In that performance, I still remember that it was the first time I played a “Steinway & Sons" piano that was not available in Vietnam.

The famous musician Đặng Thái Sơn performed this sonata twice. The first one was in early 1980 at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music and the second one happened in 1986 in Hanoi.

I wrote down this musical piece and offered as a present to Prof. Ghenxler (Russia), who was my piano teacher when he worked as an expert in Hanoi. He taught that musical piece to his students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music.

Many people analyzed this musical piece in their master thesis in Russia such as Prof. Trần Thu Hà, Tạ Quang Đông, Phạm Lê Hòa, and so on.

Cursory analysis of the Sonata Polyphonique for the piano

This musical piece is very difficult in terms of performance techniques; therefore, it is a challenge to any pianist.

It comprises three parts.

I. Introduction: It creates boundless space, which is suitable to contemplation and concern. It does not have clear melodies.

II. Sonata: Exposition

- Subject 1 comprises two contrast elements. This subject is developed throughout the work in accordance with the leitmotiv style. The subject is presented according to the Fuga three-part polyphony of Bach. After beat 23-49, this subject develops strongly.

- Subject 2 includes contrast elements (beat 50-115). It is also presented according to the polyphony gently and is of the Northern mountainous folk melody. Similar to subject 1, subject 2 is developed quickly. Its melody is sometimes spreading like the maestoso and sometimes like the norcturne.

Development: This part is played with allegro (beat 116-285), comprising two episodes:

- Episode 1 (beat 116-176) mainly develops two motifs of the main subject with fierce nature, which is performed in changeable rhythms to create disillusion (5/8, 11/16, 9/16, 7/8…).

- Episode 2 (beat 176-285) is played with beat 5/16 and allegro that creates the climax of the whole episode (beat 240-259). Afterwards, subject 2 appears with the rhythm, imitating five rounds of drumbeat (the drum’s sound signaled such dangers as dike breaking or invasion in the old days). Next is the transition to the reappearance part.

Recapitulation: Because the development part has been already presented strongly in subject 1, the recapitulation is presented in subject 2 (at gis-moll). The motif of the main subject appears when this part nearly finishes like an echo: “Kiếp phù sinh trông thấy mà đau”….

The last chord reminds us of the way of finishing Fuga of Bach (a change from minor to major).

III. Final: This part creates a scene of a jubilant folk festivity with very quick and changeable rhythm (10/8, 5/8, 9/8, 6/8…).

A PIZZICATO CONCERT OF VIETNAM

Pizzicato is an Italian terminology, which means “plucking instruments” rather than using a bow.  In brief, “Pizzicato for the string orchestra” means that the whole orchestra plucks instruments from the beginning to the end of a musical piece.

In the world, there are many Pizzicato masterpieces such as the Symphony No. 4 in chapter III of P.Tchaikovsky, Playful Pizzicato in chapter II Simple Symphony of B. Britten, Pizzicato Polka of J. Strauss, etc.

In Vietnam, there has never been any musician, composing a Pizzicato for the string orchestra. I mean that the whole musical piece is Pizzicato rather than only some parts of a musical piece is Pizzicato.

I would like to tell more about my creation in the way of playing this musical piece. Normally, the instrumentalist puts a violin or a viola on his left shoulder and uses the index finger of the right hand to pluck the instrument (Pizz.), which is the popular way of executing a pizzicato in the world. However, I requested all players to put the violin and the viola on their thigh and pluck it like the guitar or the nguyệt lute. Similar to the guitar, five fingers of the right hand had to be used for plucking. The advantages of this plucking style were that plucking could be done quicklier and chords were more jubilant like the guitar.

It originated from my study on the nguyệt-lute performance of chầu văn (a traditional Vietnamese folk art). When the nguyệt lute accompanied trance singing and dancing, the dances were gradually done quicklier and two strings of the nguyệt lute were fingered very animatedly, which attracted the dancer and audiences.

This is a very special art of Vietnamese people that the youth should study. Only the sound, produced by the nguyệt lute, sounds "Tiếng mau sầm sập như trời đổ mưa" (rain pouring) (the tale of Kiều).

According to Western instrument-playing techniques, this musical piece can be mistakenly supposed that it cannot be performed on account of my new instrument-playing creation.

Thanks to my inspiration from “going-into-a-trance” enjoyment, I have long nurtured new artistic creation to write a Pizzicato for the string orchestra with a desire to present the musical quintessence of Vietnamese people to the world.

In the summer of 2006, after studying chèo (a traditional Vietnamese folk art), I tried to write a musical piece basing on the tune of Con gà rừng (the forest cock). However, I just wrote a short paragraph and left
it unfinished.

In April 2009, after the deep research on chèo and chầu văn, one day I accidentally saw that unfinished musical paragraph in a rough notebook. I tried to develop it and suddenly found inspiration. I always contacted stringed-instrument players such as the violinist Trần Mạnh Hùng and the cellist Nguyễn Tiến Phúc during my writing, in order that they checked whether that musical piece can be played or not.

The players had to adapt to my created techniques because what I wrote was unprecedented. This musical piece was written only in 10 days (between 18^th and 28^th April 2009) with full of inspiration. During my composition, this contingency was like predestination, which I could
not  explain.

After finishing two thirds of the musical piece, I intended to use the cello part to perform the four-note chord like the guitar. I was very puzzled whether the cello part could be performed that or not. On a Sunday morning, my friend, Mr. Nguyễn Tiến Phúc who was the Meritorious Cellist of the symphony orchestra, visited me by chance. I was as happy as picking up gold when Mr. Tiến Phúc said that performance could be done very easily and quicklier.

After completion, I introduced it to the Vietnamese Symphony Orchestra. The artist Ngô Hoàng Quân, the orchestra director, allowed his orchestra to perform it in the fifty-year foundation anniversary of the Vietnamese Symphony Orchestra. The conductor Tetsuji Honna highly honored my intentions and always consulted me during the musical arrangement. On May 20, 2009, this musical piece was performed the first time at the Hanoi Opera House.

What I am most satisfied about the Vietnamese Pizzicato is my full usage of the Vietnamese musical material, including chèo tunes (Con gà rừng, Xẩm xoan, and Hề mồi), and chầu văn tunes (Cờn and Xá). Any exotic composition technique (except polyphonic methods) is hardly used in this musical piece. For example, the triad, the minor scales, and the major scales of the Western musical technique are not used in harmony. In short, this musical piece is of purely Vietnamese nature.

THE SUITE FOR THE PIANO, A PRESENT TO
ĐẶNG THÁI SƠN

In 1973, Vietnam was still in the hot war.

The Musical School of Vietnam, the present-day Vietnam National Academy of Music has just evacuated to Hanoi from Đại Mão - Hà Bắc to avoid B52 bombardment. They were very ragged, hungry, and poor.

The living and learning conditions of that time were similar to fairy tales in the old days, which the present generations cannot imagine.

The Musical School of Vietnam was situated on a land that was formerly the village’s cemetery. The Musical School of Vietnam included three four-storey buildings, one of which was called the practice house for learning, instrumental practice, and singing practice. Each storey of that practice house comprised 25 small rooms with the area of six square meters and two big rooms at two heads of the house, numbered from P1 to P27. Our generation never forgets that the first storey was for the Department of Traditional Musical Instruments; the second one was used for the Department of Pianos and Vocal Music; the third one was for the Department of Chordophones and Theory-Composition-Conduction; and the fourth one was for the Department of Wind Instruments, Percussion, and Accordion.

At that time, electricity was usually cut off, and people must connect the wires with their bare hands to turn on lamps and fans with the 220V electricity system.

At that time, because there were not enough pianos for practice, limited hours were assigned to each student for practice. As a result, I usually hid myself in the practice house and slept in that house for some years to practise pianos after security guards locked all the doors after 9 pm. At nights with wind, rain, thunder and lightning, I slept alone and heard hundreds of glass windows in  four storeys of the building, that were not closed carefully, beating thunderously like bombardments at that time. In addition, at very cold nights, I slept alone in the dark inside the locked building, in which there were only the sound of mosquitoes and sometimes the sound of running rats.

To think back that period, everybody was miserable because of uninterrupted wars, poverty, and the irrational social structure that created good opportunities for incompetent people. The most miserable thing was ourselves, who always envied, tormented, and maltreated each other.

Chống tay ngồi ngẫm sự đời
Muốn kêu một tiếng cho dài kẻo căm”

 Thinking of life

Wanting to scream to decrease indignation

                                       (Cung oán ngâm - Nguyễn Gia Thiều, 1741-1798)

In 1973, I was 20 years old, the intermediate student of both the piano and composition.

The Suite for the piano was composed in that context. In comparison with my first piece Prélude Es for the piano written in 1971, this Suite was a leap out of the influence of the European romantic period of Chopin.

This musical piece comprises three paragraphs, in which you can feel the scenery of mountains and forests, the sound of the tính tẩu lute of Tày and Nùng minorities, the wind instrument in the moonlight of Thái ethnic minority, the sound of Hmông flutes and the pure, natural and simple tunes of Vietnamese Northwestern people. Despite the fact that I had never been in the Northwest, I passionately recorded those tunes with LP (the Long Play with the speed of 78 revolutions per minute) at the Musical Publishing House.

Regardless of the rules in “musical theory”, these tunes, like mountainous flowers, perfume in their own way. Those tunes will … die if we treat them with the techniques in books. Instead of analysing them for understanding, we must be in harmony with those tunes via the shaking from our heart. That is my way to study folk songs.

After finishing the Suite for the piano, I dedicated it to Mr. Đặng Thái Sơn with the sentence “A compliment to Đặng Thái Sơn. I wish you success”.

At that time, Đặng Thái Sơn was a piano legend of the Musical School of Vietnam when he was only 15 years old.