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FROM FIELD TO ARCHIVE The Institute for Vietnamese Music also holds the largest Collection of Vietnamese Music which was resulted from Dr. Nguyen’s fieldwork. Six Earthwatch Expeditions (1993-1994) under the direction of Dr. Phong Nguyen (Director), Dr. Terry Miller (Vice-Director), Dr. Adelaida Reyes, and Ms. Tuyen Tonnu (Field Coordinator) covered a wide area of northern, central, and southern regions of Vietnam. This astonishing wealth of field materials is added by a special section which features the music of Vietnam’s Central Highlands collected during Dr. Nguyen’s independent work in seven mountainous provinces in 1996. This project was supported by the Asian Cultural Council (New York). The IVM is in process of cataloguing this archive. |
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VIETNAMESE
MUSIC IN THE UNITED STATES
Dr. Phong T. Nguyen spent two years researching Vietnamese communities of the US (1987-1989). This research was sponsored by the Social Science Research Council, New York. Dr. Nguyen amassed more than a hundred hours of audio and video recordings including interviews, demonstrations, narrations, and performances. A special section is made for the Archive of Folk Culture of the Library of Congress, the Institute for Vietnamese Music’s Archive, and Kent State University’s Ethnomusicology Archive including 58 audio recordings and 21 video recordings. The performances and interviews feature the best known Vietnamese artists in the United States. This is the first collection of Vietnamese music outside Vietnam as practiced by the Vietnamese immigrants (formerly called refugees), freshly contributed to these archives. The research also results in a double CD set entitled Eternal Voices – Traditional Vietnamese Music in the United States of America published by new Alliance Records NA053. |
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RESEARCH PAPER
[Huế music] and nhạc tài tử [tài tử music] are the two genres of chamber music, which originated and flourished in Huế (Central Vietnam) and Southern Vietnam, respectively. The concept of music and the social organisation of musicians in these two traditions present a mixture of indigenous and Chinese aspects. While the indigenous elements form the core of the tradition, Chinese elements were grafted onto indigenous ones for socio-cultural reasons. This study presents an examination of theoretical and social aspects of the music of these two traditions...
On April 29, 1975, the last Americans fled Saigon, marking the end of decades of U.S. military and political involvement in South Vietnam, and beginning the influx of the first waves of Vietnamese refugees to the North American continent. At the beginning of the evacuation, the first planeload of U.S. officials, their Vietnamese wives, and their Vietnamese collaborators landed at California's Travis Air Force Base on April 20, 1975 (Refugees: A World Report 1979: 14). A tragic exodus from Vietnam by sea began on April 30 and continued for a decade. In response, the United States and other major Western countries generously agreed to resettle within their borders the majority of Vietnamese remaining in Southeast Asian refugee camps. The U.S., which accepted the largest numbers of refugees, distributed them throughout all fifty states, although California and Texas were the two areas of greatest concentration. Large populations were also settled in New Orleans, Seattle, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and the Washington, D.C. area. In these new environments, the refugees began the process of adjusting to their new lives.
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