Carting along a mandolin, a few scholarly papers and a digital video camera, UC Davis assistant music professor Sandra Graham — an ethnomusicologist — is flying to Vietnam in early January.

Her mission: to support Vietnamese colleagues in their establishment of the country's first formal program in ethnomusicology.

As an ethnomusicologist, Graham works along side UC Davis composers, musicians and musicologists -- the scholars who study musical scores -- to research and teach others how to find the social significance of music in people's lives. More than simply entertainment, Graham says, music has important political, religious and other social roles.

"What I love about ethnomusicology is it encourages us to really think critically about what we take for granted in our everyday lives."

At a conference on the role of traditional music in a globalized world, Graham will offer parallels between her specialty, preserving Negro spirituals in the United States, and the Vietnamese challenge in preserving traditional art and folk music. And, she will give an overview of ethnomusicology in the United States: what is studied and why.

"Just as Native American and African American songs are seen as the root of our national identity, there are overlapping issues for Vietnam and its art and folk music," Graham says.

She also sees parallels between the work of setting up an ethnomusicology program in Hanoi and her own work at UC Davis where, during the past two years, she has created a graduate curriculum, hired a lecturer and drawn the program's first graduate students. As part of the program, Graham has equipped a lab for student field work, with digitized video cameras and high-quality tape recorders.

Graham is one of a handful of Westerners invited to this academic conference. Given the meager funding for conferences in Vietnam, each participant is paying his or her own way.

Phong Nguyen, an ethnomusicologist from Kent State University, invited Graham to participate. Nguyen, in fact, visited the UC Davis music department last spring, and he and his musical troupe performed at Mondavi Center.

Now Nguyen is finishing a Fulbright scholarship in Hanoi, where he has been establishing the first formal project in ethnomusicology in Vietnam. His quest has been spurred by concerns for his native country's heritage given its history of war and isolation for most of the past half-century.

"War and communism have been big deterrents for collecting traditional music," she points out.

One of the requests for the Hanoi conference was that each presenter bring a traditional instrument from their home country.

Graham is bringing a mandolin -- and an instruction manual.

"Sure, the mandolin was created in Italy, and Vivaldi wrote for it, and you can find mandolins in Celtic bands, but we Americanized it," Graham says. "You can find mandolins in American social orchestras of the early 20th century, in blue grass, Celtic folk songs, in Appalachian string bands and in jazz."

Because stringed instruments are also traditional in Vietnam, Graham thinks the Hanoi musical faculty and students will relate to the mandolin.

She also hopes this conference is the beginning of an ongoing relationship between the National Conservatory in Hanoi and UC Davis.