Research Catalogue

This Ph.D. project in artistic research is concerned with the function of gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. Building on gender analysis of musical performance in TV shows, and further on autoethnographic inquiry throughout the artistic projects, the artistic output articulates a critical understanding of these practices. The aims of the project are to investigate the social function and meaning of musical gesture in traditional Vietnamese music, and to develop artistic responses that articulate an individual voice. The research questions that emerge from these conceptual and artistic aims are: 1. What gender conventions can gesture analysis of musical performance unveil? 2. In what ways can music created through the choreographic structuring of movement reveal and question gender conventions in musical performance? 3. How can my performance, in intercultural and interdisciplinary artistic collaborations, challenge current gender norms and instigate change in practices of traditional Vietnamese music? The method and design of this Ph.D. project builds on qualitative analysis of gesture in musical performance, with particular emphasis on employing a gender perspective in this analysis. In the artistic work, analysis of gesture has constituted a point of departure for the creation of a series of intermedia works that seek to develop methods that combine the practices of choreography and musical composition. Intercultural collaboration has provided particular challenges and possibilities in the development of each of these works. The results of the artistic work are published online in The Research Catalogue. The outcomes of the project outline how gendered gesture is taught in higher music education in Vietnam, and taken together with the historical overview of how nationalism and communism has shaped the country, that this teaching has an immediate relation to nation branding. The teaching of traditional music is equally related to the commercialised views of women as it is grounded in the preservation of tradition. Further, the development of a practice of composing music using gestural-sonorous objects as material became the central artistic method throughout this Ph.D. project. It has offered novel possibilities of approaching gestural materials and creating new choreographies and music based on a critical approach to the image of women in popular media. The results finally suggest that intercultural and inter-disciplinary artistic practice can propose social change, and provide counter images of traditionally gendered behaviour.

Musical Transformations brings researchers in ethnomusicology and artistic research in music together in order to develop new knowledge and deepened understanding of processes of renewal of musical practices in intercultural and transnational contexts. The artistic research and ethnological fieldwork take shape in two sub-projects in Sweden and Vietnam: First, Vọng Cổ, exploring past and present transformation of music in the south of Vietnam from the Mekong Delta to the theatre stage in Saigon. Second, a pilot study in Sweden for The Ear of Migration, which lays the ground for an extensive piece of research on musical change in contemporary globalized society.

This exposition seeks to identify artistic strategies and challenges in intercultural experimentation with nhạc vàng (yellow music)—a Vietnamese popular music genre. It builds on the author’s experience as a professional musician and đàn tranh player on the Vietnamese traditional music scene, and on her long-term international and intercultural collaborations with performers and composers, as a member of the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones. In three video essays, the exposition presents the artistic process developed by the participating artists, and an analysis of how these strategies relate to the rule systems of traditional and popular music in Vietnam.

Gestures in Transformations: A Body Archive of a Vietnamese dan tranh player

This paper discusses the soundscape of Hanoi and of the countryside north of Hanoi in the Bac Ninh province with the experience of the two authors as artists in two collaborative projects, Arrival Cities: Hanoi and Que/Homelands. The content is structured in three layers, a conversation between the two authors on their individual experience of the projects, a jointly written text which takes a more distant perspective to the topic and a series of video and audio files taken from the two artistic projects. While the two projects were completely independent, this paper identifies ways in which they complement each other and, taken together, the sound art collected within the projects may have a further political meaning. The authors suggest that the shifting soundscapes of Vietnam are a direct reflection of social and political change in the country.