Lonan O Briain

en

Dr. Lonán Ó Briain is Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Nottingham. Prior to taking up his post at Nottingham, he taught at the University of Birmingham and the University of Sheffield. His first monograph, Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.  Ó Briain has published shorter essays in Asian Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Hmong Studies Journal, the Journal of American Folklore and the Yearbook for Traditional Music. He currently serves as reviews editor for Ethnomusicology Forum and chair of the ICTM Ireland National Committee.

research

research expositions

  • Domesticated Noise: The Musical Reformation of Identity in Urban Vietnam (2016) author(s): Lonan O Briain published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    In his composition “New Moon” (Trăng non), saxophonist Trần Mạnh Tuấn appropriates sounds from the musical cultures of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities to create a fusion of regional Vietnamese and international jazz music. The musical cultures are reduced to the raw sounds of instrument timbres which are then reformulated as part of a new popular style by the composer. His detachment of these sounds from the minority cultures and propagation of them as sonic referents to an internal Other nurtures an essentialized understanding of the minorities as different and distant from the urban majority. This research deploys Georgina Born’s proposal of four planes of distinct socialities that are mediated by music and sound (2011) to examine how the musical domestication of these ethnic-themed sounds contributes to the conceptualization of new economically-endowed social classes in urban Vietnam.
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