Seeding the Tradition

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 H Ch 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 n ca t i t, a "music for diversion," practice creativity or sng to 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 H Chi Minh City, outdoor music cafes in Cn Th, and television programs in ng Thp, Seeding the Tradition offers a rich description of southern Vietnamese sng to and suggests revised approaches to studying creativity in contemporary ethnomusicology.