Viet Nam Echoes: Page, Song, and Stage
The first event of the annual “Viet Nam Lectures” series.
Tuesday, February 21, 2023, 3-5 pm, followed by a reception at HG 1030
Join us for a very special afternoon of talk, film, and performance featuring traditional music of Viet Nam past and present. Three prominent artists and authors will present on the Mekong Delta's ‘Don Ca Tai Tu’ folk music, the operatic 'Cai Luong,’ and multiple genres of Vietnamese music.
We’ll be hosting Dr. Alex M. Cannon, Associate Professor of Music at University of Birmingham (United Kingdom) and co-editor of Ethnomusicology Forum. Dr. Cannon will present on Don Ca Tai Tu, a traditional music genre of southern Viet Nam. This is the focus of his recently published book Seeding the Tradition (Wesleyan University Press, 2022). The second speaker will be Leon Le, who directed and co-wrote the 2018 film Song Lang on the Vietnamese Opera Cai Luong. In the past years, the film has won a total of 52 awards. We are going to show some excerpts of the film at the event. We also invited Van-Anh Vanessa Vo, an Emmy Award-winning composer and a Vietnamese traditional music master, who is currently commissioned by the Kennedy Center on her trilogies on the Mekong River. She’ll bring several musical instruments and perform her pieces.
This event is hosted by the Department of History, with the support of the Humanities Center and Center for Asian Studies at UCI. Other collaborative partners include the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Association (VAALA) and the UCI Vietnamese American Alumni Chapter (VAAC).
