The sounds of Hanoi and the after-image of the homeland

Stefan Östersjö

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.

The sounds of Hanoi

and the after-image of the homeland

Stefan Östersjö & Nguyễn Thanh Thủy

Bios

Dr. Stefan Östersjö is a leading classical guitarist. Since his debut CD (Swedish Grammy in 1997) he has recorded extensively and toured Europe, the US and Asia. His special fields of interest are interaction with electronics, experiments with stringed instruments other than the classical guitar and collaborative practices, also between different cultures. He is a founding member of the Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones. As a soloist he has cooperated with conductors such as Lothar Zagrosek, Peter Eötvös, Pierre André Valade, Mario Venzago, Franck Ollu and Andrew Manze. Östersjö is associate professor of artistic research at the Malmö Academy of Music and associate researcher at the Orpheus Institute in Gent. Between 2012 and 2015 he was the PI of Music in Movement, an international research project on musical gesture, with support from VR. He is also a member of Landscape Quartet (an artistic research project with support from AHRC).

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, PhD candidate in Artistic Research in Music, Lund University. She is a leading representative of traditional Vietnamese music and received the first prize in the national dan tranh competition in 1998. She works with both traditional and experimental music as a đàn tranh performer/improvisor; collaborates with many musicians and composers around the world. Between 2009 and 2011, she was involved as artistic researcher in the international research project (re)thinking improvisation, as a collaboration between the Vietnam National Academy of Music and the Malmö Academy of Music. Since 2012 she is carrying out an artistic doctoral project at the Malmö Academy of Music concerned with gesture in traditional Vietnamese music. She has published book chapters on Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Lund University Press. Her most recent CD release was “Being Together” with The Six Tones and other soloists at the Hanoi New Music Festival, released on Setola Maiale in 2015.

Tip

Tip