Song of the steering wheel

Song of the steering wheel: the Rhythm of a Generation in Motion

Within the vast body of Hoàng Vân’s wartime songs, Song of the steering wheel occupies a singular place. While many of his contemporary works develop either epic breadth or inward lyrical depth, this piece reveals a different energy: that of youth in motion — vibrant, nervous, driven by the everyday urgency of war.

Composed around 1964–1965, at the moment when North Vietnam entered one of the harshest phases of the air war, the work belongs to a period in which transportation networks became the vital heart of the rear front. Truck convoys transporting resources, weapons, and men day and night thus became a concrete image of national resistance.

Composer Nguyễn Đình San wrote:

“It is a war song, for drivers in wartime… The rugged intervals evoke roads torn apart by craters, those barely opened routes that nevertheless had to be crossed.”

This observation accurately describes the very nature of the musical writing.

At first hearing, the work may evoke the aesthetics of light popular music. Researcher Thụy Kha considered it one of the earliest signs of Hoàng Vân’s introduction of a modern rhythmic language long before the official emergence of Vietnamese popular music.

The score fully confirms this intuition.

Fast tempo, regular pulse, bass ostinato, slightly displaced accents: everything contributes to creating a sense of uninterrupted propulsion. This is no longer the ceremonial step of a classical military march, but the mechanical vibration of an engine racing across a broken road.

Here lies one of the work’s major modernities. Hoàng Vân assimilates certain procedures of urban light music, yet completely redirects them toward a poetics of war.

The form unfolds like an expanded rondo. The principal theme returns several times, each reappearance subtly transformed through intensity, pitch, or harmonic density. This organization creates the sensation of continuous progression.

The harmonic writing reveals remarkable refinement. Although rooted in a bright major tonality, it multiplies secondary dominants, suspensions, subdominant detours, and delayed cadences. These procedures create a controlled instability that physically evokes the jolting of the road.

The line:

“Crossing mountains, rivers, and rice fields…”

with its leaps of fourths, fifths, sevenths, and octaves, transforms physical landscape into sonic topography.

The text, deliberately direct, rejects excessive poetic sophistication. Trucks, destroyed bridges, bomb craters, bombed schools, harvests, supplies: war appears here in all its concrete materiality.

The line:

“Beneath collapsed roofs, schoolchildren’s notebooks are still burning”

constitutes one of the work’s most poignant moments. War suddenly ceases to be a historical abstraction; it becomes immediate and visible loss.

Compared with Song for supply soldiers, this work appears less monumental, more nervous, and closer to individual experience.

Hoàng Vân does not erect a sonic monument here; rather, he captures the immediate heartbeat of those who were making history without fully knowing it.

It is precisely this human truth that gives the work its enduring power.

More than fifty years after its creation, Song of the steering wheel remains a testimony to Hoàng Vân’s singular ability: transforming the most ordinary material into a living musical architecture in which historical reality, rhythmic energy, and artistic rigor merge into a single form.

Artist

Other recordings (1)

Articles