One of Vietnam's leading musicians, Tran Van Khe, musicologist and Honorary Member of the International Music Council of Unesco, died June 24. He was 94.
Musicologist Tran Van Khe
Khe died at 2am local time in Nhan Dan Gia Dinh Hospital in HCM City, where he was admitted nearly a month ago with pneumonia, kidney failure and heart illness.
His home, in Huynh Dinh Hai Street, was in 2012 turned into a private library for those wishing to study music among his vast collection of reference books, research papers and audio recordings, to promote and preserve Vietnam's traditional music and culture.
Khe's La musique viêtnamienne traditionnelle (Paris, 1962) was for many years a standard text of Vietnamese musicology.
Tran Van Khe was born on July 24, 1921 in Tien Giang Province, to a family devoted to composing traditional music.
In 1949, Lhe went to study in France and became the first Vietnamese to earn a PhD in music in that country. He devoted his life to the promotion of Vietnamese traditional music and culture to the world. He lived in France for some 50 years, travelling the world to promote, lecture and perform Asian music.
He was director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the largest governmental research centre in France.
Khe returned to Vietnam in 2004 and enthusiastically encouraged building Vietnam culture, both its food and its music. In 2008, he was named an honorary member of the International Music Council of Unesco. He coordinated "The Universe of Music, A History" project.
He helped make Don ca tai tu gain recognition as part of the Unesco Intangible Culture Heritage of Humanity.
Khe won many wards for his research, among them Japan’s Koizumi Fumio Prize for Ethnomusicology in 1994 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Music from the San Francisco-Ho Chi Minh City Sister City Committee.
His last request was that his funeral, to be attended by friends and students, feature Don ca tai tu, a Southern folk music. He asked that prayer donations be used to create a scholarship fund to support Vietnamese traditional music researchers.
