Alexander Cannon

Prof Alexander M. Cannon is an ethnomusicologist with research expertise in Vietnamese music and creativity studies. He is Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Birmingham and currently serves as Principal Investigator of the ERC-selected and UKRI-funded project SoundDecisions. His 2022 monograph Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam (Wesleyan University Press) won the 2023 Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Monograph Book Prize. 

He previously taught at Western Michigan University, and has served as Secretary of the Society for Asian Music Board, Book Reviews Editor for the Yearbook for Traditional Music, Co-Editor of Ethnomusicology Forum, and a member of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Executive Committee. He holds an undergraduate degree in flute performance and mathematical economics from Pomona College (California) and a PhD from the University of Michigan.

Professor Cannon's current research project SoundDecisions examines the relationship between music, environmental change, and economic decision-making in the Mekong Delta of southern Vietnam. From 2025 to 2029 and with the SoundDecisions team, he will undertake archival, fieldwork, and quantitative research on the ways that farmer-musicians make everyday economic decisions and build trust through improvised music performance.

Professor Cannon’s previous research has investigated the changing nature of traditional music practice in southern Vietnam. He has studied the genre đờn ca tài tử, a ‘music for diversion’ also called the ‘music of talented amateurs’. His 2022 monograph examines notions of creativity used by Vietnamese musicians to sustain interest in traditional music and to rejuvenate debates concerning the Vietnamese identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan and globalised Vietnam. Titled Seeding the Tradition: Musical Creativity in Southern Vietnam, he argues that southern Vietnamese musicians draw from long-standing theories of Daoist creation while adopting strategically from and also reacting to a western neo-liberal model of creativity focused on the individual genius. These musicians play with metaphors of growth, development, and ruin to maintain their tradition and keep it vibrant in the rapidly-shifting context of modern Vietnam.