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Tradition is not enough: Hanoi is ready to be more daring in art. For example, with Cracking Bamboo: At the percussion festival, a throng of international musicians is producing things never heard before. They’re not only cracking bamboo, but even whistling milk frothers. Mirko Heinemann listened in.

Mention can be found of the pipa in 2,000-year-old manuscripts from the Qin dynasty. Today, the Chinese lute is held in the arms of multiple award-winning musician Lan Weiwei. The young woman closes her eyes and begins a sustained tremolo. For one moment everyone is still: the Turkish tabor player, the German drummer, the Mongolian overtone singer. It even seems that the constant concert of honking horns on the streets of Hanoi halt in order to not sully the purity of the delicate notes.

The latter impression is, of course, an illusion. It must be, for Hanoi, this city of six million on the Red River, is never silent. The honking, the rattling of engines, the cries – all of them rise from the lively streets to the upper floor of the Academy of Music, where the rehearsals for the international percussion festival Cracking Bamboo, organized in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, are taking place. Here, 60 musicians from Europe and Asia are seated together to develop a common musical language with the most varied of instruments.

It is the last week of March in the year 2010. In autumn, the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi will celebrate its thousand-year anniversary. At the same time, both Vietnam and the Federal Republic of Germany are celebrating another memorable anniversary: 35 years of bilateral relations. Former West Germany followed East Germany, which already had contacts with the North Vietnamese government in the 1950s. In 1975, following the Vietnam War, the first diplomatic relations were taken up between the Federal Republic and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, even before the official reunification of the country. Cracking Bamboo is one of many events with which Germany is celebrating this anniversary in Vietnam. The festivities will take place throughout the year and are being organized by the Goethe-Institut.

A high bar is set

The 60 musicians have already been rehearsing for a few days at the Academy of Music, a functional structure in the south of the city. The sky above Hanoi is leaden, almost daily the weather alternates from hot and muggy to cool and damp. Jetlag has not been overcome by everyone: the artists joke about their problems getting up early and about sudden attacks of sleepiness. The Babelic language diversity also repeatedly gives cause for comic relief. Misunderstandings are unavoidable when Germans, Vietnamese, Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, Dutch, Indonesians, Italians, Spaniards, Swiss, Brits, Poles, Cambodians, Mongolians and Chinese get together. All of these entirely different musicians aim to put a feature-length concert on stage in a few days. And all of the notes they play are supposed to be original music.

Project head Bernhard Wulff, a music professor from Freiburg, has divided the musicians up into three groups. His job is to set the bar high. The goal is not to produce pop, fusion or world music. No, more than that: “New Music” is the aim, contemporary classical music; it is no coincidence that Wulff is the chair of the Freiburg Gesellschaft für Neue Musik and founder of numerous ensembles in this genre. The first two performances of Cracking Bamboo will be held in the Hanoi Opera House, a magnificent building from the French colonial days: a venue that begs noblesse oblige.

Wulff has plenty of experience in international cooperation. Every June, he organizes an international festival of modern music in Mongolia. The event lasting several days entitled Roaring Hoofs is attended, Wulff tells us, by “groups of riders from far afield.” He already was in charge of a 2008 Cracking Bamboo project in Hanoi. Many of the musicians were involved in the forerunner project and are able to tie their experiences and musical friendships in to this year’s event.

Movement on the streets, movement in the mind

At the premiere, the opera house is filled to the very last seat. “There is nothing more peaceable than when musicians get together to make music,” Bernhard Wulff says in his opening speech. What ensues is rhythmic, rousing, makes you want to stand up and move. Dance interludes and artistry elicit show-stopping applause from the audience. Then, in turn, more vexing passages elapse, which sound exceedingly experimental even to European ears. Instruments that whistle. A milk frother that produces electronic sounds. A figure in a wedding dress that bangs two drum cymbals with the mouth. Hanoi street noise that is taken up by the musicians and reshaped, suddenly creating a strong local reference.

Millions of noisy and honking mopeds, cars, busses, taxis and an increasing number of private luxury vehicles push their way through the streets of Hanoi. Movement is everywhere save for the arts. The traditional music has been set down in stone for over a thousand years, as desired by the Confucian civil servants. The last reform movement in theatre was in the 1920s and since then, not much more has happened. At the Hanoi Water Puppet Theatre they perform the same play year in and year out for tourists and money is collected to preserve traditional music at the former stronghold of education, the Van Mieu or Temple of Literature. There are hit songs, Socialist revolutionary music and there is pop: American, Chinese, Vietnamese and catchy. Soon forgotten. Yet Hanoi wants not only movement on the streets, but in the minds. It hungers for ideas.

After the performance, the applause never seems to end. The otherwise very reserved Vietnamese shout and whistle. The foyer is humming like a beehive. A number of television crews hold interviews. “I’ve never experienced anything like it,” says a young newspaper reporter. Only then does she learn that this piece was created in Hanoi and that this was a world premiere. Her eyes widen. “Unbelievable,” she exclaims. The most astonishing part for her is that Vietnamese musicians were involved in the production. That, she says, is sensational.