Van-Anh Vo & Blood Moon Orchestra
Vietnamese traditional music
Blood Moon Orchestra (BMO), formerly known as The VA’V Ensemble, was founded in 2010 by master musician Vân-Ánh Võ as a chamber ensemble featuring Vietnamese traditional instruments, the Japanese taiko drum, and Persian tarhu. BMO is a genre-bending musical collaboration, featuring a collective of immigrant master artists and art educators who blend different sounds and musical genres together, creating surprisingly new and fresh musical dialogues. In addition to performing live in concert, BMO has facilitated workshops serving underserved and immigrant communities for the past five consecutive years, successfully reaching at least 4,000 individuals and families.
In 2021, Blood Moon Orchestra was a grantee in ACTA’s Living Cultures Grant Program. In partnership with the Vietnamese Education and Cultural Association (VECA), BMO will produce a series of online and live presentations designed for a multi-generational audience, to teach and share Vietnamese traditional lullabies with the San Francisco Bay Area’s Vietnamese community, as well as the public.
In 2019, the VA’V Ensemble received a grant from ACTA’s Living Cultures Grant Program to, in partnership with VECA, produce a pilot music workshop series for the multi-generational Vietnamese-American community in the East Bay. The project culminated with a recital for students, parents, and friends, as well as for the public.
