Nguyễn Thanh Thủy

Nguyen spelar

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy is KMH's first international postdoc. She investigates music and identity among Vietnamese female immigrants in the Nordic region.

Project title: Music and Identity in Diaspora: novel perspectives on female Vietnamese immigrants in Scandinavia
Accountable authority:
KMH and Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
Participating supervisor: Prof. Henrik Frisk, KMH
Funder:
The Swedish Research Council
Project period: 2021-2023

About the project

The purpose of the project is to determine how music contributes to identity formation among Vietnamese immigrants, with a particular focus on the role of different musical traditions in this context.

The aims of the postdoctoral project are:

  • to provide a more robust understanding of how music contributes to identity and social cohesion in immigrant communities;
  • to identify patterns of gendered behaviour in immigrant communities across generations; and
  • to develop effective strategies – including experimental music practices and other artistic expressions – that promote reduction of social inequalities among immigrant communities.

Syftet med det postdoktorala projektet är att undersöka hur musik bidrar till identitetsbildning bland vietnamesiska invandrare, med särskilt fokus på olika musiktraditioners roll i detta sammanhang.

Publications related to the project

About the postdoc

Nguyễn Thanh Thủy was born into a theater family and grew up with traditional Vietnamese music from an early age in Hanoi. She studied at the Hanoi Conservatory of Music where she received a diploma in 1998, followed by a Master of Arts at the Institute of Cultural Studies in 2003. She plays both traditional and experimental music. Her instrument đàn tranh is an old traditional instrument from Vietnam that has roots all the way back to the 11th century. It is mainly used in ensemble music, but Thủy does many solo concerts. Traditionally men have played the instrument but since fifty years that has changed and more and more women treat it. Thủy's music moves in the borderlands around folk music, modern art music and improvisation. She collaborates with contemporary composers as well as Swedish folk musicians.

Since 2000 she has been teaching at the Vietnam National Academy of Music. She is also the founder of The Six Tones, a group that has developed into a platform for intercultural collaboration between musicians in Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States since 2006.

Between 2009 and 2011, she was an artistic researcher in the international research project (re)thinking improvisation, through a collaboration between the Vietnam National Academy of Music and the Academy of Music in Malmö. Since 2012, she has lived in Sweden. Between 2012 and 2019, she completed an artistic PhD project that studied musical gestures in traditional Vietnamese music from a gender perspective. She completed her dissertation at Lund University in November 2019.

Between 2018 and 2021, she was a researcher in Musical Transformations, an artistic research project that studied how music is transformed and developed in transcultural and intercultural environments. Between 2021 and 2023, Nguyễn is an international postdoctoral fellow at KMH and at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences.