Hồ Chí Minh City, December 2003
“During my visit to Hồ Chí Minh City I heard a distinct sound, short and accented, coming from the small lanes in District 1. Listening, I tried to determine if there was an ostinato or sequence to the rhythms, but there wasn’t any. Fascinated by the sound, I ventured outside the guesthouse where I was staying to try to determine from where this sound was coming. I was unsuccessful in finding the source of the sound, so I made an enquiry with the guesthouse management. I was told it was a shaker type of instrument commonly heard at night, played by bicycle-riding masseurs offering their services.
Dining out on the following night, I heard another distinct sound that was accented with shorter sounds. That’s when I saw, for the first time, a type of shaker that belonged to one of the hundreds of people who commonly carry these instruments on their bicycles. Within minutes of this initial finding, I noted two more cyclists with their shakers.
After dinner, I approached one of them to ask as to what these were called. Unfortunately, he spoke almost no English and instead offered a massage. Upon returning to the guesthouse, I asked the management to write my question in Vietnamese. I was then able to communicate with another cyclist/masseur to establish the instrument’s name, function, and measurements. The effort was successful for his answer was a chuông gõ.
On my second trip to Hồ Chí Minh, I made a similar enquiry of several cyclists/masseurs to confirm the name of the instrument given to me on my first trip. Though this time the names of chuông gõ, cál lắc, and lắc lắp were given. I noted the variations in the construction of the instrument. The best-constructed ones of the lot were the chuông gõ, which seems to have been made with wire, pierced through the middle of bottle caps, and attached to a handle. Some handles were made of old garden trowels, while the most creative used an old squash racket grip. All variants combined recycled resources.”
Read more from Terry Moran in Vietnamese musical instruments: A monographic lexicon (2020). Find it in RILM Music Encyclopedias.
