Vietnam's Ca tru: Courtesans' Songs By Any Other Name.

Abstract

Ca tru (“token songs”) is a genre of singing poetry with lute and drum accompaniment in modern Vietnam. It is framed today most often as ritual music of the village dinh (worship house), although many of the performing practices come from courtesan singing for elite entertainment of the imperial period, which effectively ended in 1945. As in other contexts in East and South Asia, because of licentious and elitist associations, the courtesan music was shunned and performed infrequently after 1945. In this time, Vietnam experienced the end of French colonialism and decades of war and became a socialist nation with a market economy. In the modest revival of the music thereafter, performances have commonly included remnants from these various histories, all of which today fall under the name “ca tru.”

Fieldwork for this dissertation was conducted in Hanoi, Vietnam, with a family of musicians known as the Thai Ha Ensemble. This research adds to the literature on Vietnamese music and ca tru specifically. It illuminates for music scholars elements of Vietnamese modes. It also explores connections between language and music, examining in this case vocal and lute technique in the context of singing and accompanying poetry in the tonal language of Vietnamese.

Another fundamental question driving this study was: How did imperial music for elite consumption become a symbol for nationalism in a modern socialist state? The historiographical aspect of this study involves the questions of why we revise history and how music can be treated in this process. In this case, in public discourse since the 1980s, the music has been used as a symbolic force for national unity and historical continuity in re-unified, post-war Vietnam. As a practice of individuals, however, it provides a context to remember one’s precursors and express one’s identity as nghe nhan (an “art person”), and, for female singers, it provides a format to resist historically rooted chauvinism and reinvent what it means to be a songstress in modern Vietnam.