Among nations that are "Surprisingly Hip," Vietnam probably wouldn’t be high on the list.

Julia Andrews

After a week visiting there, however, Monmouth College music lecturer Julia Andrews might have helped the Asian country rise a few spots.

Besides teaching at Monmouth, Andrews is also on Knox College’s faculty, manages the Galesburg Community Chorus and regularly performs across the Midwest with a jazz trio called Surprisingly Hip. She said her trip to Vietnam earlier this month changed her outlook, both artistically and as a person, and she hopes the feeling was mutual.

"I’d do it again in a heartbeat," she said. "It was worthwhile for the perspective I was able to bring back to the college and, hopefully, for the perspective I was able to bring to Vietnam. It’s an artistically conservative nation. They don’t hear a lot of new music. I think we were able to show them something they probably had never seen or heard before."

Andrews will share her experience as a guest lecturer for one of Monmouth’s Global Perspectives classes later this month. Among the topics she will discuss, she said, are the contrasts she saw in Vietnam.

"There were really fine pianos and facilities and performers," she said. "My impression of all that was quite favorable. But only three miles away, there were extreme levels of poverty."

The main purpose of Andrews’ visit was to premier a work by American composer Dirk Stromberg, who lives in Vietnam and teaches at the Saigon Institute of Technology, an offshoot of Alabama-based Troy University.

Although Andrews said that some of the funding for what was originally intended to be a "festival of contemporary music," was cut, her concert went off as planned. After a 16-hour plane ride and the struggle to adjust to the 12-hour time difference, she said she spent the majority of her time in rehearsal with Stromberg. The two go back to their days as undergraduates at Texas Tech University, where Andrews earned bachelor’s degrees in piano and music and theory and was the highest ranked undergraduate in the College of Visual and Performing Arts.

"I premiered a lot of his pieces there when he was first budding as a composer," she said. "Quite obviously, he budded."

Andrews premiered a 70-minute piece by Stromberg, which was divided into seven movements. She shared the stage with the composer, who played the guitar, and an oboist from the Ho Chi Minh City Conservatory of Music.

"The piece also featured an electronic component," she said. "Electro-acoustic music is different from what people in Monmouth are used to hearing, but I’m hoping to change that."

Specifically, Andrews is referring to a campus performance of some of Stromberg’s works that she has planned for the spring semester.

"I’d loosely describe his work as ‘contemporary classical.’ It has an improvisational element to it. Dirk has a jazz background, so instead of saying ‘Play A-B-C,’ the sheet music might say ‘Start at A, and play a motive that goes that way,’" she said, pointing up. "You could play it many times, and it would never sound exactly the same."

Besides the concert, another highlight came at Saigon’s jazz club, where Andrews had the opportunity to jam with celebrated jazz saxophonist Tran Manh Tuan.

"Any jazz artist that comes to Saigon – that’s where they go," she said. "Tuan is a very celebrated musician."

Tuan’s celebrity status in the country can best be described by his role as one of three judges on Vietnam’s version of "American Idol." In fact, Andrews said he had just arrived at the club moments earlier from a live telecast of the show.

The MC musician said she also "taught a master’s class at the conservatory. Well, it’s probably erroneous to say I taught it. I played some Gershwin preludes for them, and they played some folk songs for me. I could play the notes of their music, but there was a great idiomatic difference. Getting the ‘style’ of their music correct was a challenge."

She also worked with Chinese-American composer Bright Sheng, who is respected as one of the foremost contemporary composers.