The Gong Concert

Geoffrey S. Poor   |   geoffpoor@gmail.com

Set-up: Kontum. I've met a local government tourist office representative named Huyhn and we've hit it off well. He's invited me to join him and a Japanese visitor and scholar, Yoshi, in visiting a 106 year old man, Kuonh, who is one of the few left who can play the gongs, a ceremonial instrument in Montagnard culture. We have arrived at Kuonh's simple wooden house.

When I hear the door open I turn to look but see no one at first because my gaze is too high. Kuonh is standing in the doorway, but his back is bent so much that his head is almost level with his waist, the unstable angle supported by a rough wooden pole in his right hand. He looks slowly around the porch, one eye dead and milky and the other a bright beaming brown, and sits down.

I’ve never seen such a combination of life and age, such an image of living age. His face, a sharp triangle with the base at the top, is sunken and topographical. His eyes lie in deep sockets peering over high round cheekbones covered with the thinnest film of skin; the lines stretching away from those eyes could carry rivers. His long nose points downward past a mouth that seems in retreat, as if the few remaining teeth no longer require cover, but his jaw is firm. On his head is the only gray hair I’ve seen so far, and it sticks up and out at random angles. His tissue-thin cotton clothes, a sleeveless shirt and baggy trousers, are dark blue and hang on his bony frame is if drying from a recent wash. Small faded tattoos line his forearms, and on his left wrist is the same kind of simple brass bracelet that the Montagnard kids gave me and Rivera.

...

Eight gongs have been fetched and are arrayed before Kuonh on the floor.

Kuonh ambles over and stoops, looking at the array of faded discs. He appears lost in thought, and one of his hands mimes beating a drum. Turning to a collection of children who have been collecting at the doorway, but not setting one foot inside, he says a few words and two boys dash down the steps. They return in a minute with a couple of eight inch sticks cut as dowels about an inch thick. These are not trusted and venerable tools of the musician’s trade; they are fresh and green, their leaf nodes newly sliced off, and it hasn’t been long since they were part of the local flora. Yoshi, who’s just finished setting up his recording equipment -- a chopstick-thin tripod supports a camcorder about the size of my wallet, from which a cord stretches to a small microphone -- is clearly worried that we’re being played for fools, that this old man is an imposter dreamed up by Huynh to exploit gullible tourists.

Kuonh lowers himself slowly in the middle of the back row, ending in that south Asian crouch that makes chairs and stools seem an unnecessary and troublesome luxury, and surveys his arena. Without preliminaries -- no weighing of the silly looking green beaters in his hands to test for balance, no tapping of the drums to remind himself of their sound or bounce, no rearranging of the gongs’ placement -- he starts to play.

This room, this house, our universe, suddenly shifts, seems to lift. I almost check to see if my feet are still planted on the floor, because gravity seems to have lessened. He starts quietly, moving his hands in gentle curving motions over the gongs, more brushing than striking them with the beaters. Other than his arms and hands, his body is completely still. There is no hesitation, no pausing to think about where a hand should go or when a beater should drop, nor is there any sense that what he’s doing is memorized; it’s as if that lilting force I feel is guiding his movements. A soft rhythm quickly emerges in his playing, a nudging, rocking insistence that rolls smoothly back and forth in the room like a breeze persuading tree branches to move. I can’t quite identify all of the intervals in the gongs’ pitches; the three biggest are tuned to thirds, but I don’t hear the fifths and fourths of western music, nor the sound of in-between tones and jumps I associate with Asian music. But the varied resonances, from low to upper mid-range, have a comfortable and comforting relationship with each other. The music rises. Tempo, volume and intensity rise, ebb and rise again in a series of soft waves. I do not hear a tune; it sounds more like emanation than composition, like something passing through us on its way to somewhere else. If Kuonh is improvising, as I suspect, he seems more of a conduit than a creator. I have no idea how long he plays, time being again irrelevant, and I feel not the slightest temptation to think about anything.

There is silence when he stops. Even the children in the doorway are still. After a few moments Kuonh smiles and looks around as if emerging from a pleasant dream and reminding himself where he is. The women pack up the gongs, and Yoshi puts his equipment away.