Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam by Lonán Ó Briain (review)

This is an important ethnographic contribution regarding the performing arts of the Southeast Asian Massif and its upland ethnic minority residents. Focusing on the music-making of an ethnic minority group in Vietnam, and based on three years of meticulous fieldwork—the permissions for which are challenging to acquire, especially for the northern borderlands where this book is based—Lonán Ó Briain is to be commended for this carefully documented account.

Three vignettes set the stage for this book and draw us into its highly readable and enjoyable ethnographic style. The first introduces the reader to the author heading off on his motorbike to the Vietnamese Institute for Musicology in Hanoi. Here, he joins an audience of visiting American tourists observing a series of musical pieces. After the lowland Vietnamese melodies are completed, a musical number is performed on a Vietnamese instrument called the sáo mèo, which Ó Briain later finds out is a modified version of a Hmong reed pipe known as the raj nplaim. He also finds out that Vietnamese scholars only know one piece to play on it, called "Hmong Pay Deference to the Party"—that is, the Communist Party.

This story is picked up again in chapter 2, where Ó Briain outlines how lowland Vietnamese musicologists have sought to research the music of the 'other' in the country, including the Hmong. Focusing on the work of Kim Vĩnh, a renowned Vietnamese composer and scholar of Hmong music, Ó Briain details how the compositions that Kim Vĩnh created for the sáo mèo have become so widely known across the country that even Hmong now regard the sounds as part of their identity. As Ó Briain persuasively writes: "a distant, minority Other from the mountains is sonically disciplined and symbolically brought within the artistic control of the urban majority though the sound of the sáo mèo" (p. 47).

Another sketch takes us into the relatively distant homes and fields of Hmong households, where Ó Briain is finally able to find authentic Hmong music; we almost feel his relief. Here a female Hmong singer performs kwv txhiaj, a form of Hmong sung poetry. We meet this singer, Mu, and other Hmong women singing kwv txhiaj again in chapter 3. Here, Ó Briain details the most widely discussed forms of Hmong music: the kwv txhiaj and the qeej, a reed pipe used in particular during funeral rituals. He notes that these Hmong traditions "are inherited, predominantly secular styles containing only subtle, non-transformational changes that enliven the music at each subsequent performance" (p. 78). I am not an ethnomusicologist, so I will not attempt to summarize the findings of this chapter more, but I will say I found his ongoing connections in chapter 3 between musical instruments, their construction and playing techniques, songs, and renditions of daily life an enjoyable read.

Far from the authenticity found in household renditions of Hmong music, another vignette takes us to the annual Khâu Vai 'Love Market' festival in Hà Giang Province; the 'Love Market' label being an enduring misrepresentation of Hmong courtship rituals (frustratingly repeated by lowland Vietnamese tourist guides). Here, staged performances of Hmong and other minority music and cultures are choreographed by state authorities to enchant the tourist audience, including many lowland Kinh (the majority nationality). These performances are replete with lip-synching to pre-recorded background tracks, and as Ó Briain notes, are often painfully loud.

Related debates on cultural tourism as experienced by both participants and audiences are drawn out further in chapter 4. Ó Briain clearly demonstrates how performances for tourists are decontextualized and carry little or no relationship to Hmong culture. I have also witnessed these 'presentational performances' in hotels in Sapa town and nearby Cát Cát village, where ethnic minority or Kinh performers are often called upon to pretend they are members of other ethnic groups, while dressing in 'cutified' versions of customary dress, replete...