An Oriental in Paris

Even in the steamy climate of Indo-China, the spark of music burns bright. For the better part of three decades, delicate, dark-haired Louise Nguyen Van Ty nursed hers in the environs of Saigon, finally coaxed it to the point where she thought it might ignite a cosmopolitan audience. This week, with Paris' noted Lamoureux Orchestra, she played the piano solo in her own La Fete du Tet.

The music, descriptive of the IndoChinese New Year's Day, savored strongly of the Orient, with moments of mysterious atmosphere, trombone blasts to describe a "menacing tiger," rumbling drums for a "creeping dragon," and an anthem-like "Song of Hope" for its finale. Said Conductor Jean Martinon: "A very nice talent."

If Louise's father had not learned about Western music in Paris, his daughter's music might have been entirely in the native singsong style. But when she was six, he decided she should learn to play the piano, bought her a metal-bodied, warp-proof (but tinny-toned) instrument. By the time she was twelve she had learned everything the sisters in a local Roman Catholic missionary school could teach her. After four more years of private lessons, she went to the Paris Conservatory. She soon found that her talents lay in the light-fingered piano music of Mozart, Chopin and Faure, that she would never have the power to pound out a Rachmaninoff concerto. Weighty romantic music never appealed to her anyway: "I feel as if I'm wearing a coat that is too heavy for my shoulders."

Before she left for home, Louise began to compose. Back in Saigon, she married Nguyen Van Ty, an engineer who has since become a Viet Nam delegate to the Assembly of the French Union. She spent the next 15 years there, giving piano lessons and an occasional recital, jotting down native dance tunes and turning them into her own compositions. Eventually, she abandoned the Western seven-note scale in favor of the Oriental five-note kind, but her music still had some of the impressionist quality of Debussy and Ravel.

When her husband was sent to France in 1951, Louise and the two children went along, and she began to compose in earnest. Her biggest (yearlong) musical problem to date: scheming up the orchestral part for La Fete. Although she was unfamiliar with the instruments, she visualized a solution. "To me," she says, "an orchestra is like a palette of a painter. I see the instruments as colors: trumpets are red, violins are green, flutes are blue."

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