A tribute to Yodayas - II

As noted by Hla Hla Htay (see my last post for the link), converting Myanmar text image to Unicode text through Google Docs would be rather expensive, unless you have a fibre internet connection installed and that is considerably underutilized, like me. So I am sharing the entire set of 35 Yodaya songs extracted from the collection of Maha Gita mentioned in my last post. It has just been converted to 8 pages of Unicode text, but it is shared as is, raw and complete with coversion errors. The file is in open document text format as “MahaGita_yodaya 1-35.odt” and it is available here.

About this collection of Yodaya songs, the nineth song carry a note to say that of the 12 traditionally classified categories of the Yodaya songs, all names except two were not identifiable as belonging to the Thai language:

Looking for information on the relation between Yodaya songs and the classical Thai songs on the Web, I couldn’t find more than a few. Earlier I could find only the article on Ramayana which touched some aspect of this Yodaya genre in an article by U Thaw Kaung. In my earlier post, I had quoted U Thaw Kaung from his article “The Ramayana Drama in Myanmar”:

… Prince Pyinsi and the young U Sa, only 23 at the time, wrote some of the songs set to adapted Thai music, as these songs called Yodaya (or Ayutthaya = Thai) have come down to us in the Maha Gita, collections of Myanmar classical songs and music where their names are appended under the songs they wrote. ..
U Myint Kyi, Myanmar scholar and researcher of Myanmar music, wrote that though Thai songs and music of the Ramayana were at first directly translated into Myanmar, “later new lyrics were composed in our own language with melodic adaptations of the original Thai style in the same manner as western pop music has been adapted to our own lyrics now”.

Recently, I was lucky find the article by Suradit Phaksuchon et al:YODAYA: THAI CLASSICAL MUSIC IN MYANMAR CULTURE. From Suradit Phaksuchon’s article it is interesting to learn that

The oldest Yodaya song ever recorded has its original title and lyric in Thai but is called by Myanmar people as “Pleng” (ဖရင်း) or “Chu Cha, Chui Chai” (ချူချာ)in Thai. The title of the song was derived from the first word of the song lyric, called “ei ei chu yei chai” (ဧဧခြူရေးချိုက်) in Myanmar. (7Myint Kyi, personal communication, 7 August, 2011

Understandably, the Thai songs introduced to the Royal Court would be in their language and at least one such song survived in the Maha Gita collection and as Suradit quoted:

However, it is obvious that we Myanmars couldn’t have understood a word of the lyrics, as were the Thais themselves, because we couldn’t have pronounced their words right. And at least some of what could have been recognizable by the Thais would also have been lost when the lyrics of their songs were rendered in our script.

Here We have to note that this song in Thai language had been transmitted orally from musician to musician for a century or so.

Fortunately, Suradit was able to recover some of the words of this song!

Also, regarding the findings on the twelve categories of original Yodaya songs as noted in the Maha Gita National Version song anthology, Suradit was able to extend it considerably.

Suradit was able to identify the lineage of nine out of the twelve of our original Yodaya songs. According to Suradit (reformatted to bulleted list by me):

1. Kaek Morn Song is a simple time song using an old Ayutthaya melody. This song has 3 verses with a beautiful melody.
2. Nok Khamin is a simple time song. It is one of the songs in the song series called “Pleng Cha” using an old Ayutthaya melody. Pleng Cha, the song series comprised of Nok Kamin, Surintarahoo and Kratai Chomjan.
3. Tanow is a simple time song using an old melody. It is played in the drama.
4. Pleng Cha is a simple time song and played in the Khon, Thai masked play or drama enacting the coming and going movement of Protagonist characters that look beautiful and tidy.
5. Cherd Charn is plengnaphat (the soundtrack to the interaction of the characters). It is played in the chasing scene between human and animal characters such as the Khon play enacting Ramayana chasing a golden deer or Yaran chasing the peacock in the Inao play.
6. Ngong Ngid or Ngu Ngid is a simple time song using an old Ayutthaya melody. It is normally sung and played in Lakhon Nai (the play enacted by female performers only in the palace). This song is also found in song series like Pleng Yao,
7. Chuichai is an old song from the Ayutthaya period. It was originally sung in the Mahoree song series such as Kaki song series.
8. Krabi Leela is a simple time song using an old Ayutthaya melody. It is normally sung and played in Khon and drama (Pidokraijt 2014).
9. However, some song titles such as Touptuan, A Lei Mei and Ma Hou Ti are not found in Thai song titles.
10. Phayan Tin is the song title which is close to the Thai song title Phayadern. Phayadern is plengnaphat used for the play of noble character because it has a majestic melody. It is found that both Payan Tin and Phayadern are significantly correlated as described on pages 71-73.

Suradit also noted: All the Yodaya songs presented above have their lyrics in Myanmar with the accompaniment of traditional Yodaya melody. Only one song was found to have Thai lyrics, which is “Chuy Chai.”