A manuscript by the Vietnamese composer Duong Thu for the roundtable discussion on the relationship between music and art. With French translation.

The roundtable discussion, organised by Salon Natasha at AllianceFrançaise in Hanoi, took place on 12 April 1995. It was held together with a conference (10 April 1995), on the occasion of the group exhibition 'Music'. The roundtable was moderated by Natasha Kraevskaia and Eric Leroux. It invited participants from various fields, including composers, musicians, artists, art historians, sociologists, historians, and writers. Among the keynote speakers were composer Duong Thu, historian Dao Hung and poet/art critic Duong Tuong. The roundtable aimed to present the discourse on the subject music and painting, as well as to explore different methodologies employed by the participants on the particular topic.

The group exhibition ‘Music’ was organised to encourage artists to explore the relationship between art and music, and hence to express visually their euphoric perceptions. Such interrelation had been established in the West in the late 19th Century, where artists experimented with the spiritual connection of art and music. Vietnamese artists, on the contrary, were rather negligent to such correlation even by the late 20th Century, when ‘Music’ was presented. Vu Dan Tan, among all the participating artists, was the one who had been constantly going back to explore the connections between colours, sounds, music, and visual arts, out of his personal interest in classical music.
With such specific artistic concern, ‘Music’ could be seen in relations to the painting performance at ‘Le Trio d’Argent’ concert, which was initiated by Salon Natasha in the following year 1995.
Participating artists of the exhibition include: Do Minh Tam, Le Hong Thai, Le Tuan Anh, Eric Leroux, Geoff Dorn, Bui Viet Dung, Maritta Nurmi, Alain Bailly, Mai Chi Thanh, Tran Thieu Quang, Truong Tan, Lana Sundberg and Vu Dan Tan.