Học Trò & Claude AI
There is something peculiar about the name "Học Trò" [The Student] that I use to sign my articles: it has never been false modesty. A student is someone who is learning. Not someone who has finished learning, not someone who is teaching others. Just learning — and will keep on learning. Over twenty-some years of writing about music, both Vietnamese and world music, I find that I can never escape that role. Not because of a lack of materials or lack of time. But because every time I think I understand, music opens another door I have never seen before.
This article is not a summary. It is also not an introduction of myself or a promotion of what I have written. It is a way of looking back — looking back at the teachers I have never met face to face, those who taught me to listen to music differently, not through textbooks but through their very music.
Phạm Duy and the Invisible Craft
I began writing about Phạm Duy around 2005, with an analysis of "Hoa Rụng Ven Sông" — music set to a poem by Lưu Trọng Lư. Back then I wrote by hand, no AI, no corpus of hundreds of songs, just a CD, a player, and a pair of ears listening over and over again. Twenty years later, I sat down to redo that piece with Claude Code, and only then realized that what I had written in 2005 had only scratched the surface.
What Phạm Duy taught me — through decades of listening and reading about him — was not music theory. It was the way mastery becomes invisible. When you listen to "Tình Ca," you don't hear technique. You hear the homeland. You hear the people. But behind that feeling is an extraordinarily refined system: the pentatonic scale, the way he handled the tonal nature of Vietnamese in melody, question and answer embedded in every musical phrase, the harmonic progressions he experimented with from the late 1940s — while Western musicians didn't systematize them into textbooks until the 1960s. He left no curriculum. One must excavate it from each song, each album, each compositional period.
That is precisely what I did: selected roughly a hundred melodies, then sat down to compare them against Western compositional rules to find the common denominator. It turned out that the material of Phạm Duy's music — that which makes "Chiều Về Trên Sông" or "Còn Chút Gì Để Nhớ" linger in the listener's mind without explanation — can all be traced back to a concept Arnold Schoenberg called the motive: the opening phrase of a piece, containing a complete idea so that the second phrase has something to compare against and develop. Phạm Duy used motives with the decisiveness of a master craftsman — nothing in excess, nothing lacking, no ostentation. Technique serves emotion; never the other way around.
People often speak of genius. I think of discipline. Phạm Duy wrote over a thousand songs in sixty years — not because he was born with greater talent, but because he never stopped experimenting, never stopped asking questions, never stopped wanting to hear how far Vietnamese music could go. The small book I wrote about his compositional methods — Tản Mạn Về Âm Nhạc Việt Nam Và Thế Giới — was granted permission to use musical examples by the composer himself and his children. Among those children was Duy Cường.
Duy Cường — full name Phạm Duy Cường — was not merely Phạm Duy's son. He was the one who brought his father's music into a different space: New Age orchestration, melodies expanding beyond the salon and into the stillness of meditation. The collection Mười Bài Rong Ca [Ten Wandering Songs] that Phạm Duy wrote in California in 1988 — with songs harboring Confucian-Taoist philosophy in every note — bears no small imprint of Duy Cường's sonic artistry. Listening to Duy Cường play and arrange, I understand why Phạm Duy chose this son to preserve his musical legacy: not because Duy Cường imitated his father, but because he had the ability to expand without losing the original soul.
Phạm Duy is a special case in this article: he is the only one I had the opportunity to meet in person. In the years when he still lived in California, before he decided to return to Vietnam in 2005, I helped him with some matters on his website. Meeting a person you have studied for years through their songs is a very different feeling — but what I remember most is not that meeting. It is the truth that twenty years of reading and analyzing his music still taught me more than any conversation could. The greatest teacher was not him — but the very songs he left behind.
Phạm Đình Chương and the Craftsman's Precision
I once read a passage by composer Cung Tiến about Phạm Đình Chương's musicianship that remains to this day the best articulation of this musical style:
"His world is rid of that 'pentatonic' obsession, and is instead the dazzling world of the seven-note Western scale without bewilderment, of the Western major/minor modes without awkwardness..."
"Without bewilderment, without awkwardness." I like the words Cung Tiến chose. Some Vietnamese composers received Western harmony with a kind of hesitancy — like someone wearing fine clothes they aren't yet accustomed to, always glancing down at themselves. Phạm Đình Chương did not. He wore it as naturally as wearing his own clothes.
The question I pursued for many years was: Trịnh Công Sơn also used the Western heptatonic scale, so why do the two styles sound so clearly different? The answer lies in the way Phạm Đình Chương built his motives. The four songs I analyzed most carefully — "Người Đi Qua Đời Tôi," "Nửa Hồn Thương Đau," "Đêm, Nhớ Trăng Sài Gòn," and "Mưa Sài Gòn, Mưa Hà Nội" — each has a clear motive from the very first phrase, and everything afterward is a development from that initial nucleus. When Phạm Đình Chương writes "người đi qua đời tôi" [a person passing through my life], the descending sine-wave of that musical phrase will be the theme of the entire song. The phrases that follow — including the chorus — are all variations, developments, or inversions of that sine-wave. No phrase is superfluous. No phrase stands outside that system.
And there is one small detail that few people notice: the composer is "thrifty" with his motive. He doesn't just use the motive in the opening and leave it there. He tucks it into the chorus, into the ending — small variations, same rhythm — as if from beginning to end the song is a conversation a person is having with themselves, with no one interrupting partway through. That tightness is something I have rarely seen in other Vietnamese composers.
Lê Uyên Phương and the Jazz Rhythm from Đà Lạt
Lê Uyên Phương wrote an essay recounting his childhood in Đà Lạt, about the first time he heard the sound of a loudspeaker playing Mozart's concerto en C majeur from the theater on Hàm Nghi Street before a film screening. He sat "at the edge of the open space" and listened. Then he slipped into a church to watch Mass — and afterward stole a black leather-bound hymnbook to bring home to read, to become acquainted with Mendelssohn, Bach, and Schubert from that point on.
He concluded: "I knew that I had come to belong to some place very precariously situated between human reason, the soul of God, and the breath of love."
I read that passage and immediately understood why Lê Uyên Phương's music sounds like no one else's. His music is the product of those three things combined: the reason of a person who had taught himself music from the age of eight or nine; the soul of someone who grew up in Đà Lạt, with the mist, with the church and its bells; and the breath of love — real love, not love from poetry and books.
What took me the longest to discover in Lê Uyên Phương's music was his way of placing rhythms. He used only a fixed number of rhythmic patterns — mainly groups of two and three syllables — but he freely added or subtracted a syllable from each phrase, making the musical line bob and shift, impossible to fully predict. This was the influence of Jazz — the jazz rhythm he listened to secretly on the colonel's wife's radio, turning the volume down very low so as not to disturb her afternoon nap. But he did not write Jazz. He wrote love songs. And that Jazz, passing through Lê Uyên Phương's hands into Vietnamese love songs, became something else — no longer rhythm, but breath.
Analyzing fourteen songs in his two collections, I found that every song had at least two distinctly different sections, many with three. That was not accidental. That was the deliberate choice of someone who did not want to repeat himself, who did not want the music to stand still. Together with his wife Lê Uyên, the voices of the two blended not in perfectly harmonious rounds — but in the manner of two people genuinely talking to one another, sometimes singing in unison, sometimes interjecting, sometimes one singing while the other only breathes.
Từ Công Phụng and the Mark of French Chanson
If there is one Vietnamese composer in whose every chord I can feel most clearly the shadow of French music, it is Từ Công Phụng. Not because he uses French words in his lyrics — he does not. But because of the way he places his harmonies: harmonic progressions that travel far and return close in the manner of chanson, gentle key changes that the listener doesn't notice until they realize they are already in a different space. The way he moves through harmonies reminds me of the music of the generation of Georges Brassens, Jacques Brel — understated, undramatic, quietly guiding the listener along a path they cannot see ahead of them.
He was born in 1941 in the Đơn Dương area near Đà Lạt — again Đà Lạt, that misty city which seems to have something that makes those born and raised within it hear music differently. Lê Uyên Phương also came from Đà Lạt. And the two, though their styles are clearly different, share a common quality of quietude, an unhurriedness, a sense that music does not need to convince anyone — it only needs to be there.
Songs like "Bây Giờ Tháng Mấy," "Mùa Thu Mây Ngàn," "Trên Ngọn Tình Sầu" — I had listened to them for many years before sitting down to analyze them. And the curious thing is that after analyzing them, I didn't find the music had lost any of its beauty. On the contrary, I found that beauty more solid, more rooted, because I understood where it came from. That is something only the music of a small number of composers can do: allow you to both feel and understand simultaneously without one destroying the other.
ABBA and the Video Screening Room at Ngã Sáu Phù Đổng
There was a hotel at Ngã Sáu Phù Đổng, Saigon, that people called the Royal Hotel. In the mid-1980s, people bought tickets to sit before a 20-inch screen and watch ABBA. No concert hall. No albums sold at the record shop. Just a small screen, four Swedes, and music coming from television speakers. Nobody in that room understood the words — but everyone understood something else. And that was the question I pursued for many years while writing about music: how does music do that?
ABBA taught me that honesty is a form of courage. "Happy New Year" was recorded in 1980, a year after the marriage between Agnetha and Björn officially ended. In the video, Agnetha sits on the sofa with a faraway expression, gazing into the space before her, and sings: "may we all have a vision now and then." Not asking for much. Just asking for a vision occasionally. Knowing the true circumstances of the song and listening again, that line is no longer a song lyric — it is a real prayer, from the lips of someone who genuinely needs it. No band deliberately engineers that effect. It appears because the singer does not conceal what is happening in their life.
Then there is "Chiquitita." On January 8, 1979, ABBA flew to New York alongside The Bee Gees, Donna Summer, Rod Stewart, Earth Wind & Fire — not to perform for a paying audience, but to organize a charity concert for UNICEF. Each band donated a new song, with all royalties going to a fund to fight child hunger in more than a hundred countries. ABBA donated "Chiquitita" — written especially for the occasion. No one required them to do this. And that song — written by two Swedes, bearing a Spanish name, performed in New York — is still being sung forty-five years later. Sometimes music is an action, not merely a product.
Some bands are remembered because their music is glamorous. ABBA is remembered because their music is honest. That is the difference it took me many years to put into words.
The Carpenters and the Wisdom of Knowing What You Have
Karen Carpenter began by playing the drums, not singing. She was self-taught, played well, and performed on many of the group's recordings. Then Richard heard her sing and decided that voice was more important than those drumming hands. Karen did not give up her drums easily. But Richard was right — and that is what I think of every time I write about The Carpenters: the brother's genius did not lie in his compositional ability or his harmonics, but in the discipline to recognize that the greatest instrument in his hands was his sister's voice, and to never do anything to overshadow it.
Most of The Carpenters' most famous songs were not written by them. "(They Long To Be) Close To You" is by Burt Bacharach. "We've Only Just Begun" started as a jingle for the Crocker Citizen Bank in California — Richard Carpenter happened to see it on television, ran into Paul Williams the next day in the A&M Records parking lot, and asked if there was a complete song. There was. And that song reached number two on the Billboard charts in the autumn of 1970, outlasting every banking advertisement campaign in the world.
Karen's voice was in the contralto range — a rare low range for a female voice. Richard deliberately placed her singing lower than most producers would. At that lower register, her voice had a warmth that to this day has never been fully explained in technical terms. One can only listen and recognize: this voice is different. I once wrote that The Carpenters' music creates a very particular temperature in a room — not the temperature of a concert hall, not of a dance floor, but something quieter than both: the temperature of an afternoon listening to music through an open window, together with the smell of rain, or from a radio left on in the kitchen while people are doing something else. That is not an image I fabricated. That is how I hear The Carpenters.
Paul Mauriat, Françoise Hardy, and French Music Entering Saigon
Many French songs I loved in my youth I came to know through two names: Paul Mauriat and Raymond Lefèvre. Not through original vocal performances. But through their orchestral arrangements — those instrumental arrangements these two made from French chanson and British-American pop, then spread throughout Asia. Saigon heard French music through that filter. And in a certain way, that filter created a particular affection — not a love for the voice, but a love for pure melody.
Paul Mauriat was born in 1925 in Marseille. He did not merely arrange music — he recreated it. "Love Is Blue" (L'Amour Est Bleu) that he arranged in 1967 reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks — an uncommon achievement for an instrumental piece by a French musician. In Japan and Southeast Asia, he was beloved almost as an idol. People bought his records not because they knew his name, but because listening to them was listening to something very smooth, very beautiful, very pleasing — and with no need to understand the lyrics.
But behind those orchestrations was an entire world that took me many years to understand more clearly. The world of chanson française — the music that the French consider the lyrics as important as, often more important than, the melody. Françoise Hardy sang "Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles" in 1962 when she was just eighteen — and that song was not a typical love song. It is the question of a person looking around and seeing everyone else walking in pairs, while she walks alone across the street, and asks: when will I have that for myself? That question needs no translation into any language to be understood.
Also in 1962, Claude François — whom fans affectionately called CloClo — wrote and sang "Comme D'habitude." A song about a couple who have lost affection for each other, living side by side out of habit rather than love. Six years later, Paul Anka bought the rights, translated it into English with a completely different meaning, and Frank Sinatra sang it as "My Way." From then until now, over a thousand singers have recorded "My Way." While the French original still stands there — sadder, more truthful, and largely forgotten in the shadow of the translation. There is something unfair in that. But perhaps that is also how great music works: it finds its own way to survive, even when that path leads it far from its origins.
France Gall won the Eurovision prize in 1965 at just eighteen with a Serge Gainsbourg composition. Then she met Michel Berger — her future husband — and reinvented herself with a completely different style: La Déclaration D'amour, Ella Elle L'a, Résiste. That transformation, from ingénue yé-yé to mature pop, is one of the longest and most fascinating journeys in French music of the second half of the twentieth century.
Ennio Morricone and an Afternoon in Lockdown
Summer 2020, lockdown. The whole world stayed home. YouTube played on automatically and suddenly produced a melody I had never paid close attention to: "Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso." Later, researching, I discovered this was actually written by Andrea Morricone — Ennio's son — with his father adding a few small touches to tighten it. But at the time I knew nothing. I only knew that that melody, by turns gentle and surging, resembled nothing I was listening to then.
After that afternoon, I bought an 18-disc collection of Morricone film music. Then another 14-disc Volume 2. Then read Ennio Morricone: In His Own Words in English — painful because of all the Italian director names I didn't know, but I read it anyway. Then bought a French book, then even an Italian book, using scanning software to translate key passages. Then bought a PAL-compatible player to watch the documentary "Ennio" by Giuseppe Tornatore. Then bought piano sheet music to learn "Cinema Paradiso." All of that happened within two years.
I recount all this at length because that is precisely what Morricone taught me: when great music comes to find you, it does not give you a choice in how to receive it. You can only follow or let it pass. And if you follow it, it leads you very far — farther than you imagined at the start.
He was Italian, writing music for Westerns set in America, directed by Italian Sergio Leone, filmed in Spain. Nothing in that chain was native. Yet "Once Upon a Time in the West," "Once Upon a Time in America" sound as if they were born from that very soil. In the documentary, Tornatore asks Morricone about this. Morricone smiles and says he never planned for it. The music was in his head; he only wrote it down. Just as Beethoven when deaf — the notes were in his head, you only had to transcribe them. He also wrote every orchestral score entirely by hand, not delegating a single line to anyone.
Raymond Lefèvre and the Unanswered Question
Lefèvre is the only person in this article about whom I have no certain answers.
He was born in 1929 in Calais, studied music in Paris, formed his own orchestra in 1956, and wrote orchestrations whose architecture I often compare more closely to Beethoven than to Paul Mauriat — not in terms of scale but in the depth of contemplation within, the feeling that someone is genuinely thinking within those notes, not merely decorating. He died in 2008. And today, his catalog sits in the archives of Victor Entertainment Japan. In France — the country where he was born — almost no one knows his name.
I wrote an article about Lefèvre and placed a question right in the title: "Raymond Lefèvre's Orchestral Music — Will It Last Through Time?" I had no answer. I still do not. Phạm Duy is remembered because there are people who preserve his legacy, because there is a community. ABBA is remembered because their victory at Eurovision in 1974 placed them in the mainstream of world pop and there is no way out. Lefèvre did not have those things. He only had beautiful music — and it turns out that beautiful music alone is sometimes not enough.
That is not sad in the ordinary sense. It is simply truth. And I think writing about Lefèvre — writing about someone whose being written about may not change anything — is one of the times I best understood why I write about music. Not to save music. Only to record that this once existed, that someone listened and found it worth remembering.
Mika Nakashima and What I Have Not Yet Written
There are teachers I have never written about. Not because I don't understand them — but because I am not ready, or because I haven't found the angle of approach.
Mika Nakashima is one of them.
She is a Japanese singer and actress, born in 1983. Her most famous song is "Yuki no Hana" — Snow Flower — written by Makihara Noriyuki in 2003. I cannot explain simply why that song is beautiful, other than to say that when I first heard it, I knew immediately this was a voice born to sing that song. Not because of technique — Mika is not a singer of technique. But because of the way she lets the silences in her voice speak in place of what the lyrics cannot say. Japanese music has the concept of ma (間) — the gap, the deliberate silence between sounds. In Mika Nakashima's singing, that ma is not a learned technique. It is instinct.
I came to know her through the anime and film Nana (2005), in which she plays the role of NANA Osaki — a punk rock girl with a hard exterior but the most vulnerable person in the film. That contradiction is also in her singing: the surface cold, subdued, nearly expressionless — but behind that coldness is something very fragile. I have not written about Mika Nakashima because I have not yet found a way to put that contradiction into words without making it trivial.
Perhaps that is also a lesson: not everything we love needs to be explained.
Leaqua and One Hundred and Fifty-Eight Songs
Among all my teachers, there is one for whom the name "Never Met" carries the truest and yet strangest meaning. Morricone in Italy, ABBA in Sweden — never being able to meet them is obvious. But Leaqua is different: she was in Saigon, I was in California, and we collaborated across more than one hundred and fifty-eight songs without ever seeing each other's faces. I wrote introductions from this side of the Pacific; she translated Vietnamese lyrics from the other side — and that form of meeting took place entirely through the t-van.net blog.
One hundred and fifty-eight songs. The Beatles, The Carpenters, ABBA, Air Supply, Simon and Garfunkel, Eva Cassidy, Sting, Lionel Richie, Gérard Lenorman. Each song was a time Leaqua sat down to listen — not just once but many times, listening from one version to another until she found the voice that suited her. She wrote about "Time After Time" that every time she decided to translate a song, she would seek out all the singers who had performed it: "sometimes a song I've known for years has no inspiration, then suddenly hearing a different version that fits my taste and I write very quickly." For "Time After Time," she chose Eva Cassidy's voice — the singer who died at thirty-three, and was only recognized after her death. Then she spent two days reading The Bridges of Madison County. Then she wrote.
That taught me something no music book records: the craft of song translation is first and foremost the craft of listening. Not listening to understand the words. But listening to understand the feeling. Leaqua did not translate "Time After Time" according to the original meaning of Cyndi Lauper. She placed the song in the context of Francesca — the woman in the novel, who every August sits and looks again at old photographs and remembers those four brief days. The song did not change. But the soul within it had become another soul. And the Vietnamese version, therefore, is not merely a translation — it is a new work standing on the foundation of an old one.
I wrote introductions for each of those songs — researching Billboard, reading biographies, finding release dates, finding how many weeks they spent on the charts. No one required me to do this. But Leaqua had translated with that level of seriousness, and I found I could not introduce a song in two or three sentences. "All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles — I sat down and listed all twenty of their number-one Billboard hits, compared with ABBA who had only one, researched why George Martin chose "La Marseillaise" as the intro for the song broadcast live worldwide. That work was not so much helping Leaqua. It was the way I tried to be worthy of her work.
Each of Leaqua's translations carries a date and place: "Saigon, 30/09/2011." "SG, 14/8/2012." "Saigon, 26/06/2012." Those dates are not decoration. They tell me that someone, on that specific day, sat down somewhere in this city, listened to a foreign song again and again, then found a way to place it into Vietnamese. No audience. No contract. No deadline. Only the song and the decision: this song deserves to be heard in Vietnamese, and I will do that.
What I learned from Leaqua was not the technique of translation. It was the attitude. The attitude of someone who works because they believe the work needs to be done — not because someone will pay them or praise them. One hundred and fifty-eight songs stand there as evidence: not a career, not fame, just a love for music expressed through concrete work, set down one day at a time in Saigon.
I Am Still a Student
Looking back over twenty-some years of writing about music, what I see is not a journey from ignorance to knowledge. I see a chain of unplanned encounters: a video screening room in Saigon, a parking lot in Los Angeles, two horse paintings hanging in Phạm Duy's room in 1988, a lockdown afternoon in California, the radio turned down low so as not to disturb the colonel's wife's afternoon nap, the loudspeaker in front of the theater on Hàm Nghi Street in Đà Lạt from which an eight-year-old child sat listening without understanding why they did not want to stand up and leave.
Those moments were not planned. They happened because someone left a door open.
The name "Học Trò" is not a posture of humility. It is a way of seeing. A student does not need to understand everything — they only need to keep their ears open and recognize when they hear something they have never heard before. Phạm Đình Chương, Lê Uyên Phương, Từ Công Phụng, ABBA, Karen Carpenter, Morricone, Lefèvre, Françoise Hardy, Mika Nakashima, Leaqua — none of them I have ever met. Phạm Duy is the sole exception — I did meet him in California before he returned home. But whether met or not, all of them taught me something about music, about time, about the way human beings use sound to say things that ordinary language cannot.
I am still learning.