Miranda Arana’s "Neotraditional Music in Vietnam" is an insightful and highly readable work about the renovated traditional music that is as widespread throughout Vietnam as it is controversial. Although this modern form of traditional music draws from Vietnam’s collective heritage, it is also a fascinating construct of twentieth-century Vietnam. Arana’s book explores the instruments, genres, musical training, performance practices, and modern compositional strategies used by conservatory-trained composers and performers over the past 50 years. With music as her window, she reveals the complex and often contradictory forces that helped to shape contemporary Vietnam, including French colonialism, nationalism, war, socialist revolution, independence under the shadow of Sino-Soviet influence, and now the global market economy.

“Arana’s presentation brought into the open a highly contentions topic. [It] received a great deal of articulated support from many Vietnamese scholars and musicians… While her topic pertains to Vietnam, it must be seen in the broader context of studies of musical identity, the politics of representation, the process of musical modernization, and power and hegemony in presenting a nation’s music.” Terry E. Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Ethnomusicology, Kent State University.

To order this book, please send your email to IARVM@earthlink.net (International Association for Research in Vietnamese Music).