Fears gongs will be lost in mists of time

Gong correctors use skills handed down through generations but experts fear their talents will be lost and that the ancient instruments will soon only exist in private collections and museums.
Inspired by stories of a skilled gong tuner living in the Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands), we headed to Kon Tum Province to find the man famed throughout the region as one of the few people qualified to "teach gongs how to sing".
His name is A Ver and he lives in Kon Robang, a community of Bana ethnic minority people in the outskirts of Kon Tum Town.
We were surprised to see that A Ver, dubbed locally as "the best gong tuner in Kon Tum", lives in a house built in the style of the Kinh majority people, but this is typical of his adaptability. At the age of 74, his mannerisms are very youthful.
While waiting for him to gather other members of his gong band to perform for us, writer Nguyen Ngoc told us A Ver was the chief architect of the rong house (communal house) of the Bana people, built at the Ha Noi Museum of Ethnology.
"He built the house in 2002, the same time he set up the gong band in Kon Robang Village," Ngoc says.
"He led 30 Kon Robang villagers to Ha Noi to build the house. It should have taken only six months to build the house but in the end it was two years because of a shortage of timber."
During the months that they were waiting for timber, A Ver sought to pep up the spirits of the bored construction workers by teaching them how to play the gongs. They practised everyday, so after six months, A Ver had a team of 12 skilled gong players."
Ages of the team range from Tuut, 39, to Tih, who is 74. All of them look like they have just returned from working on the fields in their ragged clothes. They stand around A Ver, waiting for his cue.
They begin to play. A Ver closes his eyes to concentrate on the sound of the 13 gongs. Suddenly he looks at H’rung, a gong player. H’rung hurriedly passes his gong to the old man who turns it upside down, and uses his small iron hammer to beat the gong lightly several times. There’s something wrong with it, he tells us – perhaps it was misshapen by the weather or had been beaten too many times. He taps it gently with his hammer and hands it back to Hrung.
The other players smile at him to express their agreement.
Once again, A Ver closes his eyes, and some minutes later he identifies another gong, which he correct with his iron hammer in the same way. A Ver says a gong corrector should make sure the gong has the right surface so it will make the best sound.
"In the past, people used a bronze hammer to correct the gongs. Today bronze is very hard to come by so we have to use an iron hammer. The metal is very hard so you can break the gong if you’re not too careful," he says.
Asked if a gong player can determine for himself whether his gong needs corrected, the players says "yes."
"Why don’t you try to correct it yourselves?" we ask them.
"We can’t," they reply.
Musical instruments in Western cultures usually have special instruments to tune them. But Tay Nguyen gongs do not.
Each instrument has its own special sound, different even from other gongs in Southeast Asia, like Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, and Malaysia. When Professor To Ngoc Thanh presented the art of gong culture at the UNESCO International Council for Traditional Music, all the council members agreed to vote for Vietnamese gong culture to be a masterpiece of world culture.
Part of the reason these instruments are one offs, is down to their history. In many other Southeast Asian countries, gong performance became professional and was used to serve Royal Families. But in Tay Nguyen, gongs are performed for communities and are part of the communal space of each village and tribe.
Each ethnic group has their own gong bands with different numbers of gongs. For example, the Brau have two gongs in a band, the Chu Ru and Gie-Trieng have three gongs. The Ma have six gongs, while the Giarai, Bana and Steng have up to 11 or 12 gongs. Women in the Churu, Xodang, M’nong, Giarai and Bana tribes often accompany gong music with a dance.
Tay Nguyen people do not know how to make gongs. They buy them from Laos and from the Kinh majority people living in lowland areas. When they just buy a new gong, it has no sound. And so they rely on the gong correctors to manipulate the surface of the gong to "teach it how to sing."
Family bond
You have to be patient to be a gong corrector. Most play the instrument for decades before taking on the job. Skills are passed down from generation to generation.
Normally, each area has its own gong corrector. A Ver’s father, A Yong, who died in 1975, was famous for his skills in Dak Rinh region.
"My father ‘taught’ the gong to sing so quickly, after just one hour the gong was ‘alive’, " A Ver says.
In Dak Ma Commune of Dak Ha District, A Ver’s younger brother A Bom, 70, is also a gong corrector.
But both men agree their skills can’t compare to the best gong tuner in the region, Kuonh from Tongnhe Village, who passed away two months before we arrived in Kon Tum to find A Ver.
"We are only half as good as Kuonh," says A Ver.
Even though he is in his seventies, A Ver still rides his motorbike to teach gong bands in the region. He says it saddens him that he won’t be able to pass down his enthusiasm to his children. The elderly man has four sons, but none of them are interested in taking on their father’s career. His eldest son, A K’Lin, 42, works in Kon Robang Village, he is skilled in carpentry, building and iron mongery. He is also a good gong player, but he did not want to follow his father’s footsteps and become a gong corrector.
According to statistics from Gia Lai Province’s Department of Culture and Information, before 1980, local Giarai and Bana people had tens of thousands of sets of gongs, a few sets to each family and dozens for each village.
In 1999, the province had 5,117 sets of gongs, and the number fell dramatically to less than 3,000 in 2002. From 1982 to 1992, Dak Lak Province lost 5,325 sets of gongs, and from 1993 to 2003, another 850 disappeared.
Along with the instruments, the music is also fading into oblivion. The M’nong people used to have 40 pieces of gong music, but now local people can perform only 10 pieces.
Many experts worry that in the future, when people like A Ver pass on, their skills will only be remembered in stories, and gongs sets will exist only in museums or private collections. Separated from their cultural space, these instruments will become mute, and their unique voices lost to the mists of time.