Having started our journey in the south of Vietnam, we have now finally arrived in the capital Hanoi in the north of the country. The cuisine tastes different here, as it is neither as sweet nor as spicey as in the other regions we’ve visited so far. We especially enjoy Bia Hoi – freshly brewed draught beer – to battle the relentless humid heat.
Vietnam is the only country on our entire journey, where I had no contacts to any musicians or composers beforehand. Stubborn as I am, I still wanted to come here, experience the culture, broaden my horizon, and learn new things. So, I reached out to the Austrian embassy, and I am forever thankful to Dr. Hans-Peter Glanzer and Le Anh Do for their help connecting me with the National Academy of Music in Hanoi and the conservatory in Ho Chi Minh City.
Visiting countries where you don’t speak the language as a tourist can be quite challenging, but is mostly a fun adventure, for example, when you’re not sure what food you are ordering. BUT coming here for work is something completely else. I wrote and answered numerous emails with a number of different people as well as countless messages in WhatsApp groups in both English and German. Formalities and hierarchies are extremely important in Vietnam as far as I experienced it. Still, it’s inevitable that some information gets lost in translation. For the masterclass I gave at the National Academy of Music, there was a lot of planning going on in advance. However, I didn’t know how many students I would be teaching that day, nor how long the whole lecture was supposed to be. So, I stayed flexible with my program and went along with the lead of the clarinet professors. We started class with a coffee break until the first student would show up.
As I wanted to have a real exchange, I suggested playing one piece together at the final concert the next day. The clarinet teachers happily agreed to play with me until I showed them the graphic score of Christoph Herndler’s piece “quicksand”. Generously, they offered their students the possibility to play instead of them. So, we practiced how to read this graphic score and talked about what kind of aesthetics the composer had in mind. I could see how with each trial, the students gained confidence in performing the piece. My most important mission was to make them feel safe while playing experimental music in front of an audience for the first time in their life.
The concert was quite different to any other one so far. I already knew that the faculty teachers were playing classical chamber music by Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Doppler and therefore suggested to have a classical half and a contemporary one. But in the end, we played alternately hopping through time with each piece. I tried my best to take the audience along and introduce each piece in simple English. Judging by some reviews I found online “the audience was surprised by the excellent performances of female artist Anna Koch with the strange sounds of the clarinet”, one can tell that not only I broadened my horizon with this cultural exchange.
