Testimonials

Victoria, Thank you for your presentation at the Siam Society and a glimpse into the vanishing world of human integrity. I was touched, even shaken with the sense of integrity and timelessness.  Naturally, you are doing work of the very highest quality, work that is so rare. The fact that you are a musician, not an academic, allows you to look at the world without the baggage of years of academic training. Your work deserves to be widely distributed. It is on par with the work done by the best field anthropologists like Jane Goodall.

Victoria, I still feel vibrations from the exhibition (at the Jim Thompson Centre, Bangkok, 2009) and meeting you. Restorative. Connecting with humanity outside my diurnal matrix refreshed my soul. When I reflect on the photography, filming, and objets, I continue to be amazed at your stamina, patience, and work.

Victoria,  Pauline and I went to the exhibition at the Three Kings (Chiang Mai Cultural Centre, 2010) last Saturday and were truly amazed. Neither the Metropolitan Museum in New York, nor the Victoria and Albert Museum in London could have achieved what you have done. We spent a full two hours there until we could absorb no more.

We just this morning recommended a friend of ours who is House Mother to about 10 orphan girls in their late teens and early-20s from the Hills, to take them to the exhibition. They should have the advantage of understanding the words of the songs. It should also remind them of the villages from which they come.

Dear Victoria, My admiration for your work knows no bounds!  Each exhibition is better than the one before and all of them are superb. Thank you for your vision, your dedication, your artistic and musical skills, enhancing the story and history of the people of SE Asia

Deep thanks to bring to us a true world, slowly fading away. There are in it the roots of our common heritage. Its ancestral beauty and early rhythms, talking to our health. . .  It takes courage and determination to do it along your years of work, never giving up and deepening tirelessly your knowledge, skills, and sharing it with us. We are so grateful you did it.

Hmong Songs of Memory is much more than just a study of music. It is a tour de force.

As one of the most important initiatives to counteract the spread of cultural amnesia, Victoria Vorreiter’s Hmong Songs of Memory multi-media project deserves the highest recognition and support locally and globally. For the research community, her work points the way forward to a holistic methodological practice built on interdisciplinary partnership. This work is no doubt one of the most significant archives in recent musicological writings.

Victoria Vorreiter, the author (Hmong Songs of Memory Book/Film), is a formidably talented professional photographer, ethnographic filmmaker, musician, writer, and curator of tribal music and rituals of Morocco, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and China. Vorreiter’s book is coherently structured to carry the reader through her research experiences and perceptive understandings, with artistic sensitivity and intellectual rigor. . .   This masterful opus will serve not only to evoke the sweet pain of nostalgia for Hmong people, but will validate Hmong identity and history, as well as instilling pride in the human spirit, for all humanity.”

Encountering either of Vorreiter’s books, Hmong Songs of Memory or her 2009 work, Songs of Memory, one cannot help but open the book and become engrossed in her artistic design as well as its amazing array of eye-catching color photos. Vorreiter, however, is not just a gifted artist who made her own photographs, audio recordings, video recordings, and book designs, but also a skilled ethnologist with extensive musical training and a penchant for detail.  The result is an unusual balance of solid ethnography presented artistically.