The band The Six Tones, including two Vietnamese traditional instrumentplayers Nguyen Thanh Thuy, Ngo Tra My and Swedish guitarist StefanOstersjo, will join string players from the Seattle Symphony Orchestrain a concert later this month.
The concert, titled CelebrateAsia, which lasts for around two hours and will showcase piecesspecially designed for Vietnamese instruments, is scheduled to takeplace at 7.30pm, March 21 at the Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle,Washington.
The show will include four works, namely the ThreeFilm Scores for string orchestra by Toru Takemitsu; multi-media work NamMai by Richard Karpen; the Overture to the Siege by Shuying Li; andPiano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16 by Edvard Grieg.
The orchestra will perform under the guide of conductor Julia Tai.
NamMai is a 25-minute-long multi media piece for traditional Vietnameseinstruments, based on a melody of tuong (Vietnamese classical opera)art.
Karpen composed music for the work based on that specificmelody, while film director and playwright Jorgen Dahlqvist used thetale of Dao Tam Xuan, a female general in an ancient tuong play, todesign the images for the work, which include a film excerpt shown on alarge screen and dance movements on stage.
The Six Tones, willplay Vietnamese string instruments with the symphony orchestra to createindependent soundtracks for the film screening and dancingperformances.
"I have worked with The Six Tones andwriter/director Jorgen Dahlqvist on a few large-scale pieces, includingIdioms, a theatre work for the trio plus three actors and liveelectronics," said American composer Richard Karpen, a pioneer ofelectronic music and professor of composition at the University ofWashington.
"More recently, we collaborated on Seven Stories, afeature-length dance film inspired by traditional Vietnamese tuongtheatre subjects, which added choreographer Marie Fahlin to our artisticgroup. Excerpts from this film accompany the performance of Nam Mai inthis concert," he said.
Composer Karpen joined the University ofWashington in 1989 as a professor of Music Composition and ExperimentalMedia. He went on to found the school's Centre for Digital Arts andExperimental Media in 2001. He was named Director of the School of Musicin 2009.
He has continued to produce groundbreaking compositions, with a focus on electro-acoustic timbres and computerised sounds.
"Idiomscaptured the interest of my colleagues at the Seattle Symphony, whosuggested composing a new work for the Celebrate Asia concert. While Iwas working on Seven Stories in Seattle last year, the ideas for Nam Maibegan to take shape," he said, "It is based on a traditional Vietnamesetune that we were using in the film, which then became the source ofeverything heard in this new piece."
Karpen added that he wasdelighted to have conductor Julia Tai join them for the creation of NamMai, a work composed for and with close friends from three continents -Asia, Europe and North America.
Since 2006, The Six Tones hasbeen bringing art music from Vietnam and Europe together, touring as aninstrumental music group or in music theatre projects, and working withchoreographers.
The band members Thuy and My are both lecturersat the Vietnam National Music Academy. In the piece, Thuy plays dantranh – the 16-string zither, while My uses dan bau, also known as monochord.
Ostersjo won the Swedish Grammy in 1997 and has travelledto perform throughout Asia and Europe. Since 2006, he has engaged withvarious contemporary music projects involving Vietnamese artists likeTran Kim Ngoc, Vu Nhat Tan, and Tri Minh. The name of the group,emanating from a composition by Henrik, is inspired by the six tonesused in the Vietnamese language./.