Phạm Duy
| Phạm Duy | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Phạm Duy Cẩn |
| Also known as | Phạm Duy |
| Born |
October 5, 1921 Hanoi, French Indochina (now Hanoi, Vietnam) |
| Died | January 27, 2013 (aged 91) Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam |
| Occupation(s) | songwriter, folk singer |
| Years active | 1943-2013 |
Phạm Duy (October 5, 1921 – January 27, 2013) was Vietnam's most prolific songwriter. With a musical career that spanned more than seven decades through some of the most turbulent periods of Vietnamese history and with more than one thousand songs to his credit, he is widely considered one of the three most salient and influential figures of modern Vietnamese music, along with Văn Cao and Trịnh Công Sơn. His music is noted for combining elements of traditional music with new methods, creating melodies that are both modern and traditional. A politically polarizing figure, his entire body of work was banned in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War and subsequently in unified Vietnam for more than 30 years until the government began to ease restrictions on some of his work upon his repatriation in 2005.
Phạm Duy was born Phạm Duy Cẩn, on October 5, 1921, in Hanoi. His father Phạm Duy Tốn was a progressive journalist and writer, and one of the earliest writers of European-style short stories. Phạm Duy Tốn was also one of the founders of the Tonkin Free School movement. Phạm Duy's father died when he was two, and he was raised largely by his older brother Phạm Duy Khiêm, whom he described as a strict and tyrannical figure. Phạm Duy Khiêm later became a professor and South Vietnam's ambassador to France, as well as a Francophone writer.
He attended Thang Long High School where his teachers included Võ Nguyên Giáp. He then attended the College of Arts and the Ky Nghe Thuc Hanh Vocational College. He taught himself music and studied in France in 1954-55 under Robert Lopez and as an unregistered student at the Institut de Musicologie in Paris.
He started his musical career as a singer in the Duc Huy musical troupe, performing around the country in 1943-44. He then joined a musical cadre for the Viet Minh during their resistance against the French. He and the musician Văn Cao became great friends while there and they collaborated on some of their earliest songs together. He left the Viet Minh after 6 years for French-controlled Hanoi and subsequently moved south to Saigon after becoming disenchanted with their censorship. His work was subsequently banned in communist-controlled areas. In 1969 Đỗ Nhuận, a leading young North Vietnamese composer of revolutionary opera, singled out Phạm Duy's music as typical of reactionary music in the South.
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