Musical Links Investigation -- Claude Debussy's Piano Music & Vietnamese Traditional Music -- by Harrison Suh -- Navigate through pages using the tabs!
Achille-Claude Debussy is a famous French composer who was born in 1862. He is considered to be the founder and one of the leading figures of the Impressionist movement, successfully creating a new style of music that suggests certain atmospheres or feelings rather than painting a clear picture (Schrott, Allen). This was achieved by Debussy's use of many non-traditional compositional devices, of which some include tonality, texture, and meter. Debussy's musical characteristics can be categorized into the following: - Frequent absence of tonality - Use of parallel chords - Bitonality and use of bitonal chords - Pentatonic and whole-tone scales - Abrupt modulations These traits can be seen in almost all his music, including his ballets, chamber music, piano music, and orchestral pieces. However, his musical ideas and innovations were most prominently represented in his piano music (Jane, Fulcher).
Two of Debussy's most famous piano pieces include: Voiles (1909) and Pagodes (1903), which is part of a larger three-part piano composition called Estampes. An in-depth analysis of these pieces will be included in the next page.
This is a video of Debussy's Voiles being performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, a famous Italian classical pianist ("Biography").
This video is a recording of Debussy's Pagodes as performed by Davide Cabassi, another famous Italian classical pianist (Schollum, Esther).
VIETNAMESE TRADITIONAL MUSIC
The Dan Tranh - a Vietnamese Traditional Instrument
The traditional music of Vietnam has roots in a variety of other East-Asian countries, and is therefore described as highly diverse and syncretistic ("Music of Southeast Asia"). Because Vietnamese history is so heavily involved with China, Korea, Mongolia, and Japan, its music has been influenced by these cultures in similar ways. But despite these foreign influences, Vietnam has preserved its native roots and managed to create a unique musical tradition ("Music of Southeast Asia"). Among these is the famous dan tranh, a long, 17-string zither used either as a solo instrument or in an ensemble of instruments accompanying a vocalist. Originally a 16-string zither, the dan tranh was modified to contain 17 strings by Master Nguyen Vinh Bao in the mid 1950s. Since then, the dan tranh has become one of the representative traditional instruments of Vietnam ("Dan Tranh").
The dan tranh is a long, narrow zither with a convex surface ("Dan Tranh"). The performer wears picks on their fingers - usually made of metal or tortoise shells - used to pluck the steel strings that stretch across the wooden board. These strings are tuned to the pentatonic scale, giving it a specific timbre unique to that of Asian music ("Dan Tranh").
The dan tranh usually plays cheerful and bright solo pieces, although they are occasionally used in a bigger chamber group or even an orchestra. Its performance techniques are unique to each hand, as the left hand is used to add ornamentation to the notes while the right hand plucks the strings. The ornamentations, including vibrato and microtonal inflections, are added usually by pressing on the strings to vary their length, and thus changing the pitch of the note given off by the string ("Dan Tranh").
A famous Vietnamese traditional piece is the Khong Minh toa lau, a solo dan tranh piece. An in-depth analysis of this piece will be included in the next page, as well as its score.