Musical Transformations is an international research project, funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation,
concerned with the ways musical change can be related to processes of transculturation. The project has studied the dynamic history and contemporary performance practices of Vọng Cổ, a song which has undergone a radical set of transformations since the 1920s. Its syncretic history also pertains to the development of the Vietnamese guitar, and this chapter seeks to outline the connections between processes of transculturation and urbanization, and specifically the duality between tradition and modernity they involve. The Musical Transformations project seeks to develop decolonizing methods for music research, and uses stimulated recall of video documentation of artistic process as a means. Hereby, the project aims to include the perspective of each participating musician in the analysis, seeking intersubjective and collaborative approaches to the emic-etic problem of ethnomusicological research. The project design brings artistic research and ethnomusicology together, and takes the intercultural practice of The Six Tones—a group created in 2006 by two master performers of traditional Vietnamese music, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Ngô Trà My, and two Swedish musicians, Henrik Frisk and Stefan Östersjö—who engaged with contemporary western and Vietnamesemusic as the basis for a series of artistic projects. Together with the ethnomusicologist David Hebert, the members of the group constitute the core research team of the project.
In the first phase of the project, set in the Mekong delta and the city of Sài Gòn, The Six Tones invited masters of Tài Tử, a form of chamber music which is discussed further below, to document versions of the Vọng Cổ, and also to experiment with the tradition and create new versions of the song. This work was carried out in recording studios in Sài Gòn, and resulted in an album which features Phạm Công Tỵ, Phạm Văn Môn and Huỳnh Tuấn, together with The Six Tones. Under the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a second phase, the project explored telematic performance as a means for intercultural collaboration and experimentation with traditional music, using the Vọng Cổ as a building block.
