Cao Van Lau, who in 1919 composed Da Co Hoai Lang, which later developed into vong co, without which no cai luong (reformed theatre) performance is complete these days.

Speaking at a workshop on Wednesday, he said: “They feel an urge to go back to their homeland, whether they live in the US, France, Australia or anywhere else, whether they are Buddhists or Catholics, and whether they are native of the north, south or centre.”

The workshop brought together music experts, culture and theatre officials, and cai luong and vong co practitioners among others to celebrate Da Co Hoai Lang, the original song of cai luong (reformed theatre) composed by Cao Van Lau 90 years ago.

Da Co Hoai Lang provided the inspiration for creating the vong co style of music.

The new version was quickly adapted by cai luong and became its “king” song, experts told the workshop.

The reason why Da Co Hoai Lang gained instant popularity, according to Cao Kien Thiet, Lau’s eldest son, was its emotional appeal, coming as it did “from his father’s heart.”

Lau composed the song to express his own feelings rather than to present it to an audience, Thiet said, adding at that time he was in agony after being forced to part from his beloved wife.

Lau, born in 1892 in Long An Province in the Mekong Delta, moved further south with his parents to the province of Bac Lieu at age five.

At 23 he married a young woman who failed to give birth to a child even after three years of marriage.

Lau’s mother compelled him to dump her and marry another woman who could beget a child.

He was broken-hearted but could not defy his mother and had to let his wife go.

After she left, every day Lau took his zither to the spot where they bid farewell to relive her misery and extreme love for him.

He did that for months until he came up with the song. As he was finishing it, he heard drums from afar that deepened his sorrow, and he named it Da Co Hoai Lang, meaning “on hearing the drums on a silent night, a wife misses her husband deeply.”

Da co later became ‘vong co’, or just “hearing the drums from afar.”

The song, composed of 20 verses divided into two rhythms each, brims with nostalgia and sadness. It tells the story of a wife whose husband receives orders from the King to go to the front. She is pained by his absence and desperately looks forward to reuniting with him. Lau was then a student of tai tu music which he began learning from a great master while just a boy. He was an excellent student of the art which was then very popular in the south.

His life story, however, had a very happy ending. Not long after he wrote the masterpiece and a year after they parted, he found his wife at a Buddhist temple. They were reunited and she gave birth to their first son in 1920. They lived together for many years before Lau died in 1976.

The ancestor song

“Da Co Hoai Lang is a dynamic, not a static, song,” Dr Khe said, explaining that it lends itself to twists and creativity allowing composers to write new lyrics to the original tune.

The original 20 verses were later reduced to 12, six, and finally four and the double rhythm grew to four, eight, 16, 32, and finally 64 within a frame.

However, the 32-beat frame, devised 54 years ago, is the most common form of vong co, according to Le Thi Ai Nam, director of Bac Lieu Province’s Department of Culture.

The addition of rhythm, according to experts, was one of the most significant twists the genre got, extending its frame and providing composers more space to write about long stories and complicated feelings.

From a personal-feeling song, vong co built on its popularity among the masses to make its way into cai luong, a new theatre in the south which borrowed western elements.

Early vong co songs were sung by people like Nam Chau, Tu Choi, Nam Nghia, Tu Sang, Tam Thua, Nam Phi, and Phung Ha among others, many of whom owed their success to it.

Vong co also catapulted the careers of composers like Vien Chau, who has a repertoire of more than 2,000 songs so far, and singer Ut Tra On who is dubbed the “king of vong co” for his emotional voice.

The saying in theatre circles these days is: “without vong co, cai luong is nothing.”

“There are bits of southern lullabies, bits of paddy field ditties, and bits of Buddhist chanting in Da Co Hoai Lang,” Dr Khe said. “That’s why it had such an appeal to the masses who found it familiar.”

“On the other hand, many couples who were parted during the time when the French colonialists sent local men to the battlefield for World War I also found themselves in the song,” he said, noting that new inventions like the gramophone and radio also played a huge role in popularising the song.

He urged researchers and musicians to find out the most original form of the song, given that it now has lots of different versions.

Musician Vu Duc Sao Bien, who successfully adapted Da Co Hoai Lang to seven-note western music with a modern orchestra, hailed the beautiful melody of the song which he said inspired most of his songs about the south.

“I composed Da Co Hoai Lang, but many masters, musicians, and composers have developed it to what it is today,” Cao Van Lau once said, “I wish they would preserve its root, rather than transform it into an alien.”

VietNamNet/VNS