Several works composed or performed by artists and musicians from Southeast Asian countries including Vietnam, Myanmar and Singapore will be featured in the Connecting Heritage Concert “Verdant Luxuriance” at L’Espace in Hanoi on December 18, starting at 8 pm.

This is part of the Hanoi New Music Festival 2018 aimed at promoting and experimenting with Vietnamese and regional heritage.

Despite political, economic and social differences and particularity, Southeast Asian countries have many things in common, one of them a long history of being colonized. This particular circumstance has stretched out even until today, when each country is finding ways to grow its contemporary cultural “tree” from its own “roots”.

The concert will feature four works, which use elements from the heritage of some Southeast Asian countries.

“The Leaves” for solo piano will be performed by Ne Myo Aung from Myanmar. The title of the work is inspired by a famous Burmese saying that reads: “Don’t let a leave cover the stalk”. When it comes to traditional music or culture, Burmese people use this saying as a reminder not to destroy the traditional culture by new creativity which is not suited to the original one.

“The Leaves” will be accompanied by “White Chrysanthemum” for bamboo flute, plucked zither, two-chord fiddle, moon lute, and percussion composed by Tran Manh Hung. “White Chrysanthemum” is a composition written for five Vietnamese traditional instruments, with inspiration taken from the old tale of white chrysanthemum. The old tale tells about the piety of a girl towards her parents. This work was first performed in HCMC in 2013.

There will also be the “Transformations: The Six Tones and Masters from the South Play Vong Co”, which explores the musical traditions of Nhac Tai Tu and approaches this practice through a long-term collaboration and experimentation together with master performers from the south of Vietnam.

Monochord artist Nguyen Thuy Linh and Vietnamese Jew’s harp artist Le Duy will perform “Hurl and Curl”, a collaborative multimedia work by Singaporean composers Hoh Chung Shih, Alicia da Silvia and Joyce Beetuan Koh.

It surveys the physical space by hurling and curling musical cells spatially in various speeds and diverse density zones. These musical cells are made up of sounds recorded and collected from the surroundings and environments of Singapore, and layered to create an immersive experience for listeners as they navigate through a body of pointillistic texture guided by the sonorities of the viola.

After the contemporary classical concert “Verdant Luxuriance”, only a few blocks away on the same side of the street, there will be a completely different space and time and spirit packed in the Night Club Experimental: Noise Music event.

The program, featuring Indra Menus from Indonesia, Caliph8 Rigor Mortiz from the Philippines, and Otomo Yoshihide from Japan will take place from 10:30 pm until midnight.

Martinus Indra Hermawan, also known as Indra Menus, sparked the project To Die in 1998 as an off-shoot band playing hardcore punk music in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. To Die later developed into a solo project where he plays in a vocal composition with Drone and Ambient Noise. 

Arvin Nogueras (Caliph8) is a composer, sound and visual artist. For the past 20 years, he has been active in Manila and overseas, primarily involved with the local outsider culture. As a sound artist and vinyl archivist, his background spans from hip-hop to experimental, folk, and ethnomusicology among others.

Otomo Yoshihide is a musician and producer. As a film composer, he produced over 100 pieces of music for visual and film and TV works. In recent years, he has been making musical pieces and organizing a unique style of concert, mainly in collaboration with various artists and regular citizens under the name of “Ensembles”.

Saigon Times