Knowledgebase

Instruments beyond the gongs

The Dega people Explainer 11 views 3 min read Back

The gongs are the voice of the highlands, but they are not the only one. Our peoples made music from bamboo, gourds, stone and a single string: xylophones, mouth organs, tube zithers, one-string fiddles, jaw harps and panpipes. Most were recorded by outsiders in the 1950s and 1960s, and their names survive in those recordings.

A row of bamboo tubes of different lengths laid on a wooden frame — A Bahnar *klông pút*, bamboo tubes sounded by clapping air into their open ends. Photo: Binh Giang, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

The instruments and their names

The names below are as they appear in the catalog of the CNRS–Musée de l’Homme sound archive in Paris, and on the published recordings listed on Films and recordings. Spellings are the recordists’.

Instrument	Names in our languages	Recorded
Bamboo xylophone	trüng (Jarai); kok (Laac)	Jarai, Gia Lai, 1963 (Dournes); Laac, 1960
Mouth organ, gourd and bamboo pipes	ding nam (Rhade); rökel (Sre); kombuot (Laac)	Rhade, 1961 (Hauteclocque); Sre, 1960; Laac, 1959
One-string fiddle	köni (Jarai)	Jarai, Gia Lai, 1963 (Dournes)
Bamboo tube zither	gông (Jarai); bro (Rhade)	Jarai, Buôn Kênh, 1960; Rhade, 1961
Two-string zither on a gourd	ddong (Jarai)	Jarai, Gia Lai, 1963, and in Dournes’s 1966 collection
Zither	dding dhüt (Maa)	Maa, Lâm Đồng, 1960
Jaw harp	goc (Rhade); gôc (Laac)	Rhade, 1961; Laac, 1960
Panpipe, bundle	dding dek (Jarai)	Jarai, Gia Lai, 1963 (Dournes)
Flutes	ding tut, buôt (Rhade)	Rhade, 1961
Stone lithophone	gôec (Mnong Gar)	Mnong Gar, 1953 (Condominas)

A man in a red headscarf playing a bamboo xylophone on a frame — Playing the *t’rưng*, the bamboo xylophone, 2009. Photo: Chris Feser, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The xylophone and the clapping tubes

The t’rưng — the Jarai trüng — is a set of bamboo tubes of graded lengths, hung or laid on a frame and struck with sticks. The klông pút of the Bahnar and neighboring peoples is played without touching the bamboo at all: the player claps cupped hands in front of the open tube ends and the air sounds the note. The 1966 US Army handbook describes a Rengao instrument, the ding but, “a series of hollow tubes,” which girls were forbidden to beat during the planting season for fear of displeasing Yang Xo’ri, the goddess of rice and the hearth.

The stone that sings

At the Mnong Gar village of Ndut Lieng Krak the ethnologist Georges Condominas found prehistoric cut stones used as a lithophone, the gôec, and recorded it being played in 1953. The story is on Gongs and epics.

Where to hear them

Several of the recordings in the table are on Viet Nam: Musiques des Montagnards (Le Chant du Monde, 1997), and the catalog entries of the Paris archive are free to read; some items can be played online. Links to both are on Films and recordings.

Help us

The catalog gives names and places, not how the instruments were made or when each was played. If you or your parents make or play any of these, we would like to record how, and in whose words. See How to record an elder.

See also: Before history.

Sources

Compiled September 2026. The description of how the t’rưng and klông pút are played is our own; the names and recording details are the archive’s.

music instruments trung xylophone klong put kni mouth organ ding nam zither goong jaw harp lithophone flute crem dournes condominas culture peoples

Dega culture A village, the land around it held in common, kinship that decides obligation, and a moral order older than any state that has claimed us. Around thirty peoples, each with its own building, weaving, music and dance, held together by an animist thread that runs through all of them — and by a gong tradition UNESCO has recognized as a masterpiece o... Spotlight 58 views Read More How many Dega there are Nobody knows exactly. The published figures disagree with one another by a factor of six, and the disagreement is itself part of the story. What is not in dispute is the direction of travel: there are far fewer of us than there were, in a homeland now holding many times the people it did, and we are a minority in every province of our own country. Reference 68 views Read More The country itself A plateau country of red basalt soil, forest and river valleys, between 500 and 1,500 meters above the sea, some 54,548 square kilometers of it. Its boundaries were drawn on May 27, 1946, by the colonial power itself — and the drawing left out the coast we had already been driven from. Reference 42 views Read More The tribes and their languages Around thirty tribes, in two language families that are not related to one another. The Chamic-speaking peoples — Jarai, Rhade, Raglai, Chu Ru — are Austronesian, cousins of the Cham of the coast and, further out, of Malay and Indonesian. The rest speak Bahnaric languages of the Mon-Khmer family, related to Khmer. Below: who is who, where, how m... Glossary 48 views Read More Dega women, and a record written about men Among the Rhade and the Jarai, land, livestock and the heirloom jars pass through women. Yet almost every source this library is built from is about men — because soldiers, prisoners and petitioners are who got written down. This page sets out what we can establish, and is explicit about the shape of what is missing. Explainer 39 views Read More Films and recordings Where to see and hear the Dega: American wartime films now in the public domain, later documentaries, community videos made in our own languages, and the field recordings of our music held in Paris, some of them free to listen to online. We list what we have been able to find and check. Reference 19 views Read More