Professor Barley Norton

Professor Barley Norton is an ethnomusicologist and filmmaker with research interests in the music and culture of Southeast Asia. He is the director of Goldsmiths’ Asian Music Unit (AsMU), the convenor of the MA in Music (Ethnomusicology), and the leader of the Goldsmiths Gamelan Group. He has conducted extensive field research in Vietnam and his publications include a monograph on ritual music and spirit possession titled Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

As part of a Getty-funded research project on contemporary experimental performance culture in Vietnam, he made the critically acclaimed film Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh (Documentary Educational Resources, 56 minutes, 2010). He is also co-editor of two books: Music and Protest in 1968 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), which examines how music was integral to the profound cultural and political change that swept the globe around 1968; and Music as Heritage: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, 2018). Barley is a member of the REF 2021 Sub-panel 33: Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies (2018-21) and he served as Chair of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology from 2015 to 2018.

Areas of supervision

• Christopher Hanby: Applied Ethnomusicology and the Revitalisation of the Endangered Language of Jèrriais: A study of music, language ideology, and cultural identity in Jersey (Research funded by a CHASE studentship]
• Lin Lin: Creative Realization in the Compositional Process: Exploring Hulusi Embellishing Techniques in Contemporary Flute Music
• Clare Salaman: Reimagining an exotic instrument of the past in a contemporary context: The trumpet marine restored (Research funded by a CHASE Studentship)
• Jasmine Hornabrook: Transnational networks, musical learning and performance in London's Tamil diaspora (Research funded by an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award)

Grants & awards

Barley Norton’s research has been funded by grants and scholarships from the Getty Foundation, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and ASEASUK (Association for Southeast Asian Studies in the UK). In recent years, he has worked on applied international projects concerning the revival of Vietnamese music and audiovisual archiving.

This has included consultancy work on music heritage projects with the British Council, UNESCO, the Vietnam Musicology Institute, and the Vietnamese Institute for Culture and Art Studies. His co-edited volume Music and Protest in 1968 won the American Musicology Society’s 2014 Ruth A. Solie Award. His film “Hanoi Eclipse: The Music of Dai Lam Linh” was awarded a "Commendation - Intangible Culture Film Prize" at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 12^th International Festival of Ethnographic Film.

Journalism, radio and television

• Writer for the world music magazine Songlines, including feature articles and CD reviews
• Consultant, interviewee and interviewer for several BBC radio programmes including the two-part radio documentary “Vietnam’s Rock ’n’ Roll War”
• Featured guest on several national Vietnamese Television (VTV) shows and documentaries, including a televised debate organised by the British Council on the theme of “Urban Beats” (“Dap Nhip Do Thi”) and the documentary “A Westerner Loves Our Music” (“Nguoi Tay Me Nhac Ta”)

Research Interests

Dr Barley Norton’s research interests include ethnomusicological filmmaking and theory, the cultural politics of musical practice, discourse on cultural heritage and music revival, music and religious experience, music and emotion, music and gender theory, music censorship, improvisation, performance and modal theory. His academic research is informed by practice. During field research in Vietnam he learnt to play two Vietnamese lutes: the dan day and dan nguyet. He also plays Sundanese music from Indonesia on the kacapi zither and the gamelan degung orchestra.