What does bamboo feature among some special musical instruments of Viet Nam's ethnic minorities?
Viet Nam has fifty-four different ethnic groups, with the Kinh representing about eighty-five percent of the population. Each ethnic group has its own language and culture, including its own music.
The Mon-Khmer of Trutrng San Mountain Range and the Central Highlands play all four types of musical instruments. Their idiophones include many types of wooden bells, bronze gongs, cymbals, and wind chimes made of thin sheets of bamboo as well as prehistoric rock drums and the riling, which is made of bamboo tubes. Their membranophones made from skin stretched over a wooden resonator are smaller than those of their Austronesian neighbors. Aerophones include the kloong put, various kinds of mouth organs, the side-blown horn, the flute, and side-blown flute. They played chordophones with fingers or a bow.
The Mt_Ong people possess a rich musical tradition and a great variety of musical instruments. These include side-blown flutes, panpipes, oboes, two-stringed violas, bronze bells and drums, and percussion instruments. They play their instruments alone or accompanied by songs and dances in three types of ensembles. The first has a side-blown flute, panpipe, oboe, two-string viola, three gongs, and a bronze drum and plays for festivals, in particular for Te't (Lunar New Year).
The third has twelve girls who play twelve gongs - two chat gongs (high toned), six boOng beng gongs (middle toned), and four dam gongs (low toned) - for the Xec Beta Festival in the spring. The dam gongs provide the rhythm, while the boOng beng and chat gongs carry the melody. The musical instruments of the Tibeto-Burmese people in Wet Nam are also diverse and unique. Their wind instruments are the most unusual. One such instrument is made from a simple guava leaf, which is rolled inside a piece of tapered bamboo. Young Ha Nhi girls often play a bamboo flute that has two joined reeds and five or six holes. They also play the am ba, a piece of thatch split at the end with the hands serving as a resonator.
Among the L6 L6, men usually play the two-string viola and the two-string violin, which has a round resonator. Among the Ha Nhi, men play the tri-chord and use a sound amplifier made from a hollow tree trunk covered with thin sheets of polished bamboo. They also use skin-covered drums, cymbals, and gongs and play bronze drums at funerals. Only bachelors or men whose wives are not pregnant play these drums. The performers keep the drums underground and take them out only for funerals.