MEMORABLE MUSIC: PHẠM’ DUY’S “RIDDLES” (“ĐỐ AI”), TRACK 17 ON SAIGON ROCK & SOUL

“Riddles” was part of a larger move by musicians to incorporate Vietnamese folk music (dân ca) into the Western-influenced “new music” (tân nhạc), thus creating the new genre of “new folk music.” The emergence of the genre reflected migration patterns and cultural changes in mid-century Vietnam. During the last decades of the French colonial period, Vietnamese village elites moved to the cities to complete their education at the same time that poor peasants flocked to urban areas for employment. Vietnamese migrants of all class backgrounds brought their musical traditions with them, including folk songs that evoked memories of home and familiar village customs. At the same time, they also became exposed to Western-style music in the cities, and those that returned to the countryside brought those styles back home. Vietnam’s war of independence against France, known as the Resistance War (1945-1954, also the First Indochina War, with the slightly different date range 1946-1954) accelerated internal migration. Civilians fled to the countryside when French forces attacked the cities, but many went back to French-controlled urban areas during the late stage of the conflict when conditions stabilized. Large numbers of Vietnamese also migrated between different rural regions in search of safety. The greatest migration of all took place at the end of the war when Vietnam was partitioned into two zones, and over 800,000 people moved from the northern to the southern zone (which I discussed in my post about Phạm Đình Chương’s “Springtime in Exile”). The urban-rural circulation created an intermixing of old and new as well as Western and native, and musicians composed and arranged music that captured the sensibilities of Vietnamese who still thought fondly of their village home but whose tastes had been transformed by their residence in the cities.

Phạm Duy is the most important Vietnamese musician of the twentieth century, and “Riddles” was part of this musical trend. He started arranging “new folk music” in the late 1940s when he was musician working for the Việt Minh, a communist-led nationalist organization that fought for independence during the Resistance War. He composed many songs in support of the independence struggle, often drawing inspiration from the Vietnamese peasantry and rural musical traditions. Like many artists and intellectuals, he left the Việt Minh after the organization abruptly imposed restrictions on art, music, and literature in 1948. He moved to Saigon and then spent the early 1950s studying abroad in Paris. Many websites indicate that “Riddles” was composed in 1954, which meant that Phạm Duy either arranged it towards the end of his studies in France or soon after he returned to Saigon. He continued his musical career in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) and later overseas after the Vietnam War (1954-1975).

This rendition of Phạm Duy’s “Riddles” is performed by Phương Dung. The software I am using does not allow for footnotes on some posts, so they appear below my translation but are not linked. There are minor differences between the recording and the sheet music, and flourishes and changes in the CD version appears below in red to make it easier for the listener to follow along. Note that the song contains numerous non-lexical vocables that are common in Vietnamese folk music. Here, the vocables consist mostly of vowels such as ơi, ơ, ới, ư, and y. (In English-language music, common non-lexical vocables include fa la la la, la la la la, and dee dee dum.)