Blog posts

Many productive conversations emerged during my time at Residency for the Master’s program that inspired me to reflect on my music education and my positionality in this profession. Experiencing academia through the lens of a composer-educator of color provides perspectives that are difficult to overlook regarding curriculum, the power dynamics and representation. It is worth addressing that being perceived as a non-White scholar itself already causes me to feel discomfort. This term implies “otherness” compared to my white colleagues, which is a common pattern that immigrants went through, according to my conversations with other non-White scholars. 

I chose music education because I love music. As we know, more often than not, classical music training was imposed on us at some point in our American music education. As much as I love singing, teaching, and conducting choral symphonic works and madrigals, I can say that part of me also learned to love it as a survival mechanism. Learning to do classical music myself was my form of code-switching, altering my communications style to adhere to American society, similarly to a time in my life where I wanted to be a white person to fit in. 

Academia in the United States gave me an insight in assumptions and the “standard” ways of doing things that are taken for granted. Growing up in a country where freedom of speech and expression was limited and questioning authority was a true legal offense, I’ve always been accustomed to accepting things as they are. To have academia encouraging critical thinking felt foreign. To this day, though I’ve spoken up multiple times, presented my graduate project and told my stories, I still feel that I will get in trouble for having an opinion.

Working and teaching in this space, it was hard to ignore the fact that Vietnamese music was not a part of the equation, especially because this was the reason I chose music as a career. From writing my first arrangement, writing my composition to reaching out to publishers and music directors, I do this work not because I seek to replace madrigals, rather, I seek to offer another way of storytelling for this community, the students, music educators and colleagues who experienced the feeling of identity invalidated due to the lack of representation in the curriculum. If the US is truly the “melting pot” that we believe it is, the music repertoire should reflect that. Vietnamese music should have a place in that melting pot. I used to do this because I wanted a seat at the table, but what if there was no table to begin with? 

Identity and immigration rooted in family and childhood highlights the disconnect between two selves have always been the heart of my story. The purpose of this work is to give a voice to people who shared a similar experience. I didn’t see a change so I do this work to be the change.