The Legend of the Hmong Khen

The sound arrives first. A long note, low and warm, threads through the early mist on the mountain before it reaches anyone's ears. But inside that low note there are other sounds. A higher one, thinner, climbs above it. Then another in the middle, then another, and another. Many notes rise at once, each one holding up the next, and none of them willing to fade first.

It sounds as if it would take a whole group of people, each with a flute, to make so much sound. Yet when the mist parts, there is only one person.

He stands in the middle of a mountain market square on market day, holding a smooth, polished wooden gourd in both hands. Six pipes rise from that gourd, long and short, gathered in a bundle like a sheaf of young saplings. The player presses his lips to the gourd, leans, and turns his feet gently with the beat. All six pipes sing together.

This is the khèn of the Hmong people.

The Hmong have a whole forest of sounds. There is the leaf khèn, as thin as a real leaf, and there is a tiny jaw harp. There is a flute, and there is a fiddle. Their folk songs alone come in seven or eight different melodies. But no instrument is played as much as this khèn. A Hmong man takes his khèn wherever he goes. At the spring festival, nearly every young man plays as he walks. The beat of the khèn falls in with the beat of his feet on the stone path down to the market.

Only one thing seems strange. Why six pipes? Not four, not eight. Exactly six.

The Hmong have long passed down the answer by word of mouth, and it goes like this.

Long, long ago, in a village high in the mountains, a Hmong family had six sons. All six brothers sang well, and all six played the pipe with skill. Each had a pipe of his own and guarded it like a treasure. On happy days they brought out their pipes and played. On days when something weighed on their hearts, they brought out their pipes and played as well.

A single pipe played alone gives only one note. But when the six brothers sat together around the fire and all six pipes rose at once, the whole village stopped work to listen. Their sound sighed like forest trees in the wind. Some notes trilled like birds calling to each other from the branches. Some murmured like a stream running through a rocky gully, and some roared like a waterfall behind the mountain. Anyone coming home late from the hillside fields heard it at the foot of the slope and knew at once that all six brothers were home.

Then the six brothers grew up. One by one they married, and each had a roof of his own, a fire of his own, a hillside field of his own. Every house had its own work to do. Some days it took a lot of calling before all six were together. And even when all six were there, they had gone too long without playing together, and their pipes sounded scattered and out of tune. One came in early, another late, and no note could hold up the next the way it once had.

The youngest brother sat and listened, holding his pipe but no longer playing. He kept turning one thought over. For the pipes to sound in harmony, all six brothers had to play at the same moment. But what if one day one of them was away, gone far and not back in time?

He tried to picture such an evening. By the fire, only five pipes would rise. Five notes would still be lovely. But in the middle there would be an empty space, like a missing step on a stone path up a slope. Anyone listening would know something was missing.

Then one day he went looking for a large gourd, an old one with a thick, strong shell. He asked his older brothers to work on it with him. The six pipes of the six brothers would no longer lie apart. All six would be fixed into that one gourd.

The longest pipe, with the deepest note, he saved for the eldest brother. The pipe a little shorter was for the second brother. Then came the third, the fourth and the fifth, each one shorter than the last. And the shortest pipe, with the highest and thinnest note, was his own, the pipe of the youngest brother.

When it was done, the six brothers stood around the gourd, and no one dared to try it. At last the youngest pressed his lips to it. He took a very deep breath.

And all six pipes rang out together.

There was still the sigh of forest trees in the wind, the trill of birds on the branches, the murmur of the stream in the rocky gully. And then the waterfall behind the mountain. All six pipes were sounding, not one missing. The sound filled the whole mountain and the whole village, and everyone who heard it grew still inside.

The six of them stood there, and nobody spoke. For in the sound of the khèn that had just risen, they could hear all six of themselves.

From that day on, one person was enough to play all six notes. Going to the fields, going to market, going away for several days on the road, a man only had to carry the khèn, and he carried all six brothers with him.

And that, the story goes, is how the Hmong khèn was born.

The khèn today keeps exactly that shape. Six pipes of uneven length are set into a wooden gourd body, with a band tied tightly around the outside. The best bodies are made of white or red pơ mu wood, a wood that is supple, light and does not warp. The pipes must be boiled so they will not crack. Then they are dried in the sun, or laid on the rack above the kitchen fire until they are completely dry.

But the hardest part is the thin copper reed inside each pipe. Casting it is the most painstaking step in making the whole instrument. Several kinds of copper are blended together, with a little white silver added. The reed is tiny, but without it a pipe is only a hollow stem.

The sound of the khèn goes with the Hmong through their whole lives. At the Gầu Tào festival at the start of the year, the khèn leads the dancers' steps. The players walk and spin as they play. Sometimes they lean right down close to the ground, and still the sound never runs short of breath. At the New Year, there are contests of khèn playing and khèn dancing in the middle of the festival ground. There, the sound of the khèn calls people close to one another.

In 2015, the khèn art of the Hmong of the far north was entered on Vietnam's national list of intangible cultural heritage. But that long name is not how a khèn is passed down. At around 12 or 13 years old, Hmong boys begin learning the khèn. They practice patiently, as if learning a language that belongs to their own clan.

On the most solemn days of a family, when something is too great for anyone to put into words, the khèn is there too, speaking for the people of the house. To the Hmong, the khèn has never been a mere object.

When the sound of a khèn drifts through the mist, its notes are too many to count. The pipes are easy. There are six of them set into one gourd, ranged from the longest to the shortest, like a row of brothers standing in order of age.

Then there is the player. Just one person, carrying the gourd across the market square, while the sound travels as six, together, all the way along the road home to the village.