04:30 pm
Vũ Thị Thùy Linh Ả Đào, Phách, Trống chầu
Vietnamese composer and performer Lương Huệ Trinh builds her musical practice by exploring materials from traditional music, everyday life sounds, and electronic sounds. She shapes and places them in new relationships, creating multilayered sonic landscapes that blur the boundaries between reality and illusion. Her music becomes emotional wanderings that guide listeners through layers of memory, through space, through the sharing of personal thoughts.
In the Lách Tách concert, Lương Huệ Trinh invites Vũ Thị Thùy Linh, a traditional Vietnamese vocalist, to join this voyage. Vũ Thị Thùy Linh presents the ancient melodies of Ả Đào, a millennia-old traditional music form from Northern Vietnam blending poetry and music with highly refined vocal techniques and the most complex tonal system, accompanied by Phách (claves) and Trống chầu (drum). Two artists, two distinct approaches to sound, collide and create a space with folds in time.
What belongs to the past and what is unfolding in the present do not remain separate but interweave, generating sonic moments where the boundary between old and new becomes blurred – at once strange and familiar. The music here does not explain but poses questions – about time, about memory, about what still resonates.
Lương Huệ Trinh is a Vietnamese multimedia composer, sound artist, electroacoustic improviser, and organiser. After completing her B.A. in jazz keyboard at the Vietnam National Academy of Music, she went on to earn her M.A. in multimedia composition at the Hamburg Music Academy, supported by a DAAD scholarship. For her, sound is an essential vehicle for cultural memory and lived experience. This cross-cultural approach integrates elements of traditional and experimental music, creating immersive sonic worlds enriched by field recordings gathered during her travels. Using digital processing, she transforms these diverse sources into multi-layered compositions. Lương Huệ Trinh's practice encompasses multi-sensory performances in which sound is interwoven with visual elements, scenography, and site-specific works. She composes music for theatre, dance, installations, experimental and animated films, live painting performances, and contemporary ensembles. She has received international acclaim through radio networks and performances at museums, festivals, and art universities across Asia, Europe, Oceania, North America, and Africa.
Vũ Thị Thùy Linh (b. 1987 in Vietnam) is a lecturer in the 36-string hammered dulcimer, or yangqin, at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. Since 2008, she has been devoted to Ca Trù, also known as Hát Ả Đào, as a Ca nương (female singer). This is a form of sung poetry in which music and literature are closely intertwined. Considered one of the oldest traditional art forms in Vietnam, it is inscribed as Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding by UNESCO.
She studied Ca Trù under Nguyễn Thị Chúc, one of the last Ca Trù masters. In 2014, she co-founded the group Ả Đào Phú Thị, which participated in the project “Reconstructing Ritual Performance of Hát Cửa Đình” of the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Arts in 2017.
From 2019 to 2022, the group successfully organised monthly performances in Khâm Thiên, an area of Hanoi once famous for its Ca Trù houses. In 2022, she was invited to perform, introduce, and teach Hát Ả Đào in Taiwan. The following year, she participated in the TRAIECT project, performing in Berlin, Hanover and Bremen. Over the years, she has received numerous awards at Ca Trù festivals.