Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

 is home to several large immigrant communities from every continent in the world.

Indonesian

See music of Indonesia

Music of Indonesia

The music of Indonesia demonstrates its cultural diversity, the local musical creativity, as well as subsequent foreign musical influences that shaped contemporary music scenes of Indonesia. Nearly thousands of Indonesian islands having its own cultural and artistic history and character. This...

Gamelan

Gamelan

A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....

 has been part of the music of Sydney since at least 1985, when gamelan instruments were purchased by the Centre for Performance Studies at the University of Sydney

University of Sydney

The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...

 and the Australian Museum

Australian Museum

The Australian Museum is the oldest museum in Australia, with an international reputation in the fields of natural history and anthropology. It features collections of vertebrate and invertebrate zoology, as well as mineralogy, palaeontology, and anthropology...

. The Sydney University Gamelan Society was founded the following year; this was followed by a student group in 1992, Kyai Kebo Giro.

Vietnamese

See music of Vietnam

Music of Vietnam

Traditional Vietnamese music is highly diverse and syncretistic, combining native and foreign influences. Throughout its history, Vietnam has been heavily impacted by the Chinese musical tradition, as an integral part, along with Korea, Mongolia and Japan....

Vietnamese-Australian music includes tân nhạc, a form of popular music

Popular music

Popular music belongs to any of a number of musical genres "having wide appeal" and is typically distributed to large audiences through the music industry. It stands in contrast to both art music and traditional music, which are typically disseminated academically or orally to smaller, local...

 that has been part of the music of Vietnam

Music of Vietnam

Traditional Vietnamese music is highly diverse and syncretistic, combining native and foreign influences. Throughout its history, Vietnam has been heavily impacted by the Chinese musical tradition, as an integral part, along with Korea, Mongolia and Japan....

 since the late 1930s. Elements of the vocal style, such as the use of vibrato

Vibrato

Vibrato is a musical effect consisting of a regular, pulsating change of pitch. It is used to add expression to vocal and instrumental music. Vibrato is typically characterised in terms of two factors: the amount of pitch variation and the speed with which the pitch is varied .-Vibrato and...

s and bent tones, are common Vietnamese techniques, while Western meter

Meter (music)

Meter or metre is a term that music has inherited from the rhythmic element of poetry where it means the number of lines in a verse, the number of syllables in each line and the arrangement of those syllables as long or short, accented or unaccented...

, rhythm

Rhythm

Rhythm may be generally defined as a "movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions." This general meaning of regular recurrence or pattern in time may be applied to a wide variety of cyclical natural phenomena having a periodicity or...

s, tonal harmony

Harmony

In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

, temperament

Musical tuning

In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:* Tuning practice, the act of tuning an instrument or voice.* Tuning systems, the various systems of pitches used to tune an instrument, and their theoretical bases.-Tuning practice:...

 and song form (ABA) are also used . Ensembles are generally made up of electric guitar

Electric guitar

An electric guitar is a guitar that uses the principle of direct electromagnetic induction to convert vibrations of its metal strings into electric audio signals. The signal generated by an electric guitar is too weak to drive a loudspeaker, so it is amplified before sending it to a loudspeaker...

s, keyboards and a drum kit

Drum kit

A drum kit is a collection of drums, cymbals and often other percussion instruments, such as cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, or tambourines, arranged for convenient playing by a single person ....

. Rhythms often used Latin or European dance rhythms like the tango

Tango (dance)

Tango dance originated in the area of the Rio de la Plata , and spread to the rest of the world soon after....

, cha cha cha

Cha-cha-cha (music)

The Cha-cha-chá is a style of Cuban music. It is popular dance music which developed from the danzón in the early 1950s.- Origin :As a dance music genre, cha-cha-chá is unusual in that its creation can be attributed to a single composer, Enrique Jorrín, then violinist and songwriter with the...

, waltz

Waltz

The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...

 or bolero

Bolero

Bolero is a form of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance and song. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins.The term is also used for some art music...

.

In addition to ordinary Western pop and rock, Vietnamese-Australian popular music includes the Quê hương style which often uses more traditional Vietnamese elements like the pentatonic scale

Pentatonic scale

A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave in contrast to a heptatonic scale such as the major scale and minor scale...

, call-and-response and pieces of folk songs. The Tân cổ giao duyên is a song style that developed in Saigon in 1964, developed by Bảy Bá. It was a combination of Western popular music and a traditional song Vọng cổ.

Vietnamese Australians hold large variety shows called đại nhạc hội, which are an important part of the ethnic music scene. Vietnamese-American performers sometimes attend. There are also Vietnamese chamber choir

Chamber choir

A chamber choir or group of chamber singers is the choral equivalent of a chamber ensemble, using voices instead of instruments. This prestigious choir will usually consist of 20-40 elite and dedicated singers. Several chamber choir formats exist, ranging from barbershop groups to exclusively...

s, such as Hương Xưa and Ðàn Chim Việ in Melbourne

Melbourne

Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...

.

Vietnamese Australian folk music includes both traditional Vietnamese styles as well as Anglo-Celtic style folk music, and, very often, a mixture of the two. Vietnamese chamber music, in two styles, nhạc Huế and nhạc tài tử, Buddhist chant

Chant

Chant is the rhythmic speaking or singing of words or sounds, often primarily on one or two pitches called reciting tones. Chants may range from a simple melody involving a limited set of notes to highly complex musical structures Chant (from French chanter) is the rhythmic speaking or singing...

s and sung poetry, Ngâm thơ are performed in the Vietnamese community. The cải lương

Cai luong

Tuồng cải lương or cải lương in short, which can be roughly translated as "reformed theater" or "renovated theater" in English, is a form of modern folk opera in Vietnam...

 is an important Vietnamese Australian tradition; it is a form of theater that ised at various holidays and celebrations.

The Vietnamese-Australian community has produced a number of composers who experiment with mixtures of Vietnamese and Western elements. These include Lê Thị Kim, Hoàng Ngọc Tuấn, Ðặng Kim Hiền and Lê Tuấn Hùng

Le Tuan Hung

Le Tuan Hung is a Vietnamese composer, performer, and musicologist based in Australia. He is a multi-instrumentalist with a strong background in Vietnamese traditional music and Western classical music. Known as a skilled performer of the đàn tranh, a Vietnamese zither, he plays traditional...

; others, like Bamboo Ochre and Nguyễn Anh Dũng

Nguyen Anh Dung

Nguyen Ahn Dung may refer to:*Nguyen Anh Dung , see Chess at the 2005 Southeast Asian Games*Nguyen Anh Dung, victim of Singapore Airlines Flight 006...

, use elements of jazz

Jazz

Jazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...

in their work.