Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam

For artists, creativity plays a powerful role in understanding, confronting, and negotiating the crises of the present. Seeding the Tradition explores conflicting creativities in traditional music in Ho Chi Minh City, the Mekong Delta, and the Vietnamese diaspora, and how they influence contemporary southern Vietnamese culture. The book centers on the ways in which musicians of don ca tai tu, a music for diversion, practice creativity or sang tao in early 21st-century southern Vietnam. These musicians draw from long-standing theories of primarily Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused primarily - although not exclusively - on the individual genius. They play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to not only maintain their tradition but keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam. With ethnographic descriptions of zither lessons in Ho Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Can Tho, and television programs in Dong Thap, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sang tao and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.