Forewords by Guest Editor

Composer Ngô Minh Trí is writing a book about his musical journey and has asked me to write a two-pager, basically recalling and expanding on my comments of "Buồn C Major” which I had offered at the album’s debut in 2005. 

For the reader of the memoir who is new to the music of NMT, might not these words inspire you to take a listen to the songs, then to sit down at the piano or with your acoustic guitar, your cello... and truly enjoy.

To the reader already familiar with NMT music, might these observations shed some different and interesting insight to an intriguing work of art.

I love all kinds of music, but for different reasons.

The composers: Phạm Duy, Cung Tiến, Nguyễn Ánh 9, Trịnh Công Sơn, Ngô Thụy Miên... 

Their songs: Áo Anh Sứt Chỉ Đường Tà, Hương Xưa, Không/Thôi/Buồn, Ru Mãi Ngàn Năm, Giáng Ngọc...

The singers: Thái Thanh, Lệ Thu, Hồ Ngọc Hà, Khánh Ly, Tuấn Ngọc... 

         For half a century, I grew up with these composers and songs and voices, and I love them despite the irrefutable confinedness in both musicality and technicality of Vietnamese music. 

Then there is The Beatles that taught me how to play music -- through The Compleat Beatles song books with voice and piano score sheets, with chords and recorded left-hand lines. Across the Universe through Yesterday... generations of amateur musicians, like me, learn the basics and then some, from the occasional off-beat syncopation ending a bar, to the cycle of fifth, major and minor and sixth and seventh, to a little bit of fancy chords like the diminished, augmented, and sustained forms.

I then discovered in the Just Jazz Real Book  that these fancy chords and odd syncopations are in fact "features and not bugs". In theory, the diminished and augmented chords are used to transition from one major or minor triad to another, while the up-beat inserts surprises into a possibly otherwise monotonic rhythm. After an initial terrifying period, one quickly learns to read and execute the myriads of variations, not by memorization but rather through seeing that they are just  simple and systematic transformations on a root chord, using mental manipulations similarly to and no harder than third grade math. But reading and playing is one thing, it's quite another creative tour de force to compose these pieces. 

Back in 2006, while researching for the Viet Youth Orchestra some Viet music that could be featured by the students, I stumbled upon a song by an unfamiliar composer. It's called Hạnh Phúc / Happiness by Ngô Minh Trí. It's beautiful. The "A“ section starts out quite stately and "classical" in the manner of Bach, carrying in the lyrics a story about new love. The "B" section rings in drama by inserting a dramatic pause in each phrase; the four phrases call-and-response pairs, with a diminished chord in the response. Heart break is in the air. The final section A returns to bring back renewed calm, promising a hopeful reconciliation. You practically don't need the lyrics to confirm the sentiment of the music.

I found the whole Buồn C Major album on line. It was full of surprises. I noted a tango song by the obvious name Đêm Tango / Tango Night, a bossa bova number Phố Lạ/ Estranged Boulevard, and three that felt like the Blues, and several others. The scores are fully arranged and played by an excellent chamber orchestra.

Đêm Tango is a gorgeous tango that immediately conjures up a man, a woman, a quiet passion. The piece is no less sophisticated than any of the most famous tangos, like La Cumparsita. I am particularly proud on the composer's behalf , that in this piece, the tones of the Vietnamese lyrics are perfectly put to music without compromise. 

Phố Lạ is an exciting song that might be mistaken for a number by Antonio Carlos Jobim himself. The up- and missing-beat syncopation is authentically bossa bova. Long stretches of half-note-rises or -falls in the melody indeed show an interesting and different use of diminished and augmented chords, not just as transitions between triads. The lower tempo of the "B" section is drama unto itself.  

The blues songs are slow and are easiest to play, perhaps because they still follow a certain tradition, not so much of Viet music but rather the modern jazz genre. These include: Một chút Jazz vào giọng hát em/ A bit of Jazz in her voice, Buồn cung Sol/ Sad in G, and Buồn C Major/ Sad in C Major. 

It's been some 15 years when I heard again from NMT this month. The composer asked me to take a look at a draft of his musical memoir. There, I saw for the first time the complete portfolio of some 60 songs.  It's interesting to note that the COVID-19 pandemic has fortunately been a productive time for NMT who composed almost half of the songs in these three years.

Some of the latest, like Tháng Mười Thương Tiếc /Mourning in October and Nương Nhau Mà Thương / Lean On To Love are my personal favorites.

Working through the NMT music book on the piano, I was pleasantly surprised by the astounding freshness and breath of style and creativity. Each song was meticulously arranged, some with guitar compositions, several for a piano and strings, but all carefully annotated with fully adorned harmony with chords. 

The songs are written in a major key or a minor key in equal numbers, but they all sound rather sad, or at least a bit melancholic. There are four tango that play quite stylistically in the best tradition of Argentina. There are four that are marked explicitly as bossa nova. 

The melodies are clearly leading the lyrics, although the compositions are not unmindful of the need for the accent of Viet words to not clash with the rising or falling notes. Only on the third or fourth going through the songs that I started to silently “sing” the words along with the piano right hand. I can’t wait to hear NMT’s favorite singers Kim Phượng and Triệu Vinh perform them, to appreciate the full impact of these musical masterpieces as actual songs. But I learn that there is a repository of audio recordings on line where one can listen to the original 2005 performances as well as most of the remaining 60 songs, performed by the composer NMT himself, and others.

I noticed the technical challenges facing the singers. Besides an ability to read (and understand) the Viet lyrics, the singer needs to pay special attention to the “swings” of the music due to the use of off-beat syncopation (hardly any phrases end on a beat!), as well as the frequent departure from the “standard” major or minor keys and one should expect to encounter any semitone in each octave, and to carry a healthy “high” note. In fact, I looked and found that half of the songs high note above Eb5, and 7 of them hit F5 or higher! Although, transposition is no longer difficult, nowadays on an electric keyboard or on a karaoke machine, or using a capo on a guitar, or using Sibelius software, with a fair trade off of emotional impact of the original.

In the best sense, the technical demands are no doubt the mark of quality. A new golden era awaits; the world of NMT music is where Liszt, Jobim and Phạm Thiên Thư come together to play! 

There are quite a few songs that are simply astonishing in their beauty and boldness. I particularly like the songs Nhật Thực (Solar Eclipse), and Nếu Anh Chỉ Có Một Điều Này (If I have only one thing to say), and Nghịch Âm Buồn (Sad and Off-Key), and those are just the titles starting with “N”! It’s cumbersome and probably futile trying to explain why. It’s faster the reader just try it out.

I should mention the explicit arrangements (not just chords in lead-sheets) that are made for guitar in half a dozen songs, and a couple arranged for piano and cello. I made the Sibelius play these songs and recorded them as YouTube videos with the lyrics shown in closed caption. The guitar arrangements are exquisite. The ensemble piece Nhớ Hồ Cầm (Old Cello) has a beautiful cello line. 

There are several popular musical pieces that NMT re-wrote the chords and provided Viet lyrics for:  Mộ Khúc (à la Addison’s Warsaw Concerto) and Quên Lãng (based on Oblivion by Piazzolla). These works nicely demonstrated NMT’s poetic sense and his master of the Viet language. I am quite touched by the calls to friends in longing for one day returning to our home country (“Bạn Ơi….Ta ước mong trời quang chiêu dương ….Nắm tay nhau về cố hương…“) in Mộ Khúc; and similarly the goodbye to her  (“Nàng hỡi, mới hôm qua đã là dĩ vãng…). It was easier for me to appreciate these lyrics, perhaps because I didn’t have to tax myself so much with trying to get the melody and harmony, as I did with the other songs!

On a whim, I suggested to NMT to name his music book after the song titled Nương Nhau Mà Thương / Lean On To Love. I explained: That phrase I had never heard uttered in Vietnamese, but was fully understandable, and I understood it to convey the essence of this NMT song book. That: We must lean on each other in our loving struggles through life. I offer that bit here as a notional comment on the lyrical aspect of the song book, that is the focus of guest editor’s forewords.