Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition
496
Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition
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Overview
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled the onset of tumultuous political, economic, and social reforms throughout Eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union these changes were linked to the activities and philosophies of political figures such as Václav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Mikhail Gorbachev. In Bulgaria, however, these changes were first heralded and even facilitated by particular musicians and shifting musical styles.
Based on fieldwork conducted between 1988 and 1996 with professional Bulgarian folk musicians, Donna A. Buchanan’s Performing Democracy argues that the performances of traditional music groups may be interpreted not only as harbingers but as agents of Bulgaria’s political transition. Many of the musicians in socialist Bulgaria’s state folk ensembles served as official cultural emissaries for several decades. Through their reminiscences and repertoires, Buchanan reveals the evolution of Bulgarian musical life as it responded to and informed the political process. By modifying their art to accommodate changing political ideologies, these musicians literally played out regime change on the world’s stages, performing their country’s democratization musically at home and abroad.
Performing Democracy and its accompanying CD-ROM, featuring traditional Bulgarian music, lyrics, notation, and photos, will fascinate any reader interested in the many ways art echoes and influences politics.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226078274 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2006 |
| Series: | Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Performing Democracy
BULGARIAN MUSIC AND MUSICIANS IN TRANSITION
By Donna A. Buchanan THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-07827-4
Chapter One
Transits
ARRIVALS AND DEPARTURES
The man standing opposite me on the bus moving us from the tarmac to the international arrivals gate of the Sofia airport on this unseasonably warm afternoon in June 1996 introduced himself as Radko Todorov. Once Minister of the Economy, Todorov explained that he was now the new director of Albena, the huge complex of resort hotels located south of Varna on the Black Sea that had long served as a popular vacation spot for West European tourists. I had observed this gentleman since we boarded the Delta Airlines/ Swissair jumbo jet at New York City's JFK airport; in his shirt pocket he carried well over two hundred business cards that he incessantly shuffled and sorted in his lap. While I always found it interesting to survey my fellow travelers on the ten-hour trip to the southern Balkans-hardly any of them Bulgarian citizens before 1990-Todorov struck me as particularly representative of the fierce changes that had barreled through Bulgaria in the last ten years. His very presence on the flight, his knowledge of English and participation in an American business fair-these epitomized the eradication of travel restrictions imposed on citizens by the formersocialist regime as well as the nation's post-1989 ambition to become a viable member of the European Economic Community (now the European Union) and the NATO alliance. Certainly, Todorov's move from high-ranking government administrator to private entrepreneur characterized the lives of many former members of the political elite, who had quickly incorporated themselves into Bulgaria's emerging class of biznesmeni (businessmen).
Despite these changes, the experience of entering the country was much the same as it had been since my first trip to Sofia in autumn 1986, when I enrolled in a four-month intensive Bulgarian language course at the G. A. Nasur Institute for Foreign Students. The same sandstone-colored walls and red-tiled roofs of village homes lying on the lush green slopes of the Balkan mountains surrounding Sofia were evident during the landing approach. However, while I could now enter the country on a thirty-day tourist visa granted at the border, which eliminated the need to obtain entrance documents in advance, as a US citizen I also paid a new $20.00 "border tax" (later abolished). Registration of my address while in Sofia with the authorities, carried out at a separate, confusing, and continually mobbed Bureau in the city's center, was still mandatory, but identity cards and exit visas were no longer required. The procurement of such exit documents was once a nightmarish month-long adventure, entailing several trips between my host institute, the Academy of Sciences, the Passport Bureau for Foreigners, the Central Bank, and other governmental offices for requisite letters, forms, signatures, and tax stamps. Very nearly prevented from leaving the country in 1987 by a forbidding customs officer because, unbeknownst to me, my entrance visa expired twelve hours before my flight home, I viewed such matters with a seriousness bordering on obsession. Then as now, no printed instructions about visa policies were made available to incoming foreign visitors at the airport; like other scholars I depended on Bulgarian friends and recently traveled American colleagues to keep me updated on the latest regulations.
I passed through baggage inspection and walked out into the thronged arrivals hall where Tsenka Iordanova, head of the ethnomusicology section of the Musical Sector at the Institute for Art Studies (the post-perestroika name for the Institute for Musicology), awaited me. Fluent in at least five languages and a highly trained pianist, folklorist, ethnomusicologist, journalist, and political activist, Tsenka was appointed as my otgovornik (advisor, supervisor) in 1988, when I began my dissertation research concerning professional folk orchestras in affiliation with that institution. Despite the initial awkwardness of this relationship, which entailed that Tsenka keep track of my activities, over the years we became close friends and colleagues. In fact, Tsenka had graciously invited me to be her houseguest during my summer fieldwork. The crime rate in Sofia, once a very safe city, had skyrocketed to such heights since 1990 that my friends feared that I, as a single woman with a non-Bulgarian physiognomy, would be robbed or otherwise assaulted if I checked into a hotel, or even a room or apartment rented through Balkantourist (Bulgaria's state tourist agency), as I had proposed. They also shuddered at the high cost; the favorable currency exchange rate aside, accommodations were fairly expensive, even by American standards.
For similar reasons, Tsenka avoided the airport taxi brigade and shepherded me and my two modest but heavy cases onto the crowded city bus. Here I immediately encountered the effects of escalating inflation: the price of a single bus, trolley, or tram ticket had been 6 stotinki in 1988-89 and 5 leva in 1994; it was now a whopping 10 leva. Likewise, the cost of a three-month pass valid for all public transportation-considered a bargain for multi-line commuters-had shot up from 13.50 leva in 1988 to an astronomical 2200 leva in summer 1996. I knew that salaries had not increased proportionally and wondered how my friends, many of them now pensioners, were managing to live under such circumstances.
As we rode toward the city center along Tsarigradsko Shose (Tsarigrad Way), a wide-laned thoroughfare formerly called Lenin Boulevard, I noticed the dusty, decayed, and overgrown appearance of streets, sidewalks, and the cinderblock highrises, called bloks, in which so many of Sofia's citizens resided. The socialist government had employed large numbers of people to maintain landscaping and keep the city clean, but after 1989, as property ownership was privatized, funds for upkeep grew scarce. This general atmosphere of decline contrasted sharply with the many new, colorfully placarded shops, restaurants, and cafés blossoming in every conceivable location; some investors had even begun restoring the ornate façades of turn-of-the-century buildings, so that the historic charm of old Sofia was reemerging amidst the otherwise monolithic, granitic, socialist architecture. The city and its population had been substantially transfigured by the events of the last ten years-for worse as well as better.
CHRONICLING "THE TRANSITION" THROUGH MUSIC
This is a book of changes. It chronicles the growth, success, and gradual demise of one of the most visible, nationalistic symbols of socialist culture-state-supported folk song and dance ensembles-as a means of understanding the complex interaction of music, politics, and identity in Bulgarian society during the last hundred years. Created during the 1950s on the basis of earlier Soviet Russian, Balkan, and local models, such ensembles comprise a predominantly male, symphony-like orchestra of modified indigenous instruments, a choir of well-schooled female voices nevertheless steeped in rural musical practice, and a mixed-gender dance troupe performing stylized village choreographies. Such ensembles were endemic to Bulgarian society and indeed to all of Eastern Europe under state socialism; although the country is only about the size of Ohio, by 1990 fourteen professional groups and literally hundreds of similar amateur companies were distributed among every city, town, and village, in association with all manner of bureaucratic, labor, and entertainment enterprises. Until the collapse of state funding precipitated by the events of 1989 caused many to fold, these ensembles actively reinvented and molded late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century village musical and dance practices into a neo-traditional, staged art form predicated on images of pastoral authenticity on the one hand, and the elite values of western European classicism on the other. An integral force in Bulgarian music history, their activities and repertories impacted every dimension of music-making, from symphonic compositions to songs for the elementary school classroom.
This book is also the story of how a single community of professional musicians employed by Sofia's two leading national folk song and dance companies, the Koutev Ensemble and Radio Ensemble, utilized their knowledge of pre-1944, village-derived musical practices to create new performance styles indicative of the radical political, social, and economic changes that accompanied two important junctures in Bulgarian history: the post-World War II shift from a tsarist monarchy to a totalitarian socialist state modeled on the former Soviet Union, and the post-1989 transition to parliamentary democracy. One central theme concerns how these musicians imagined, interpreted, negotiated, encoded, and enacted, through changing styles, genres, performance media, opportunities, and contexts, notions of the past and its adjutants-history, tradition, and authenticity-in relation to the equally negotiated and problematic political philosophies of democracy, socialism, and communism. Many of the older ensemble members, now retired, served as official cultural emissaries of the Bulgarian nation for several decades; their memories, experiences, and repertories, as biographies of musical practices, are repositories of information about the evolution of modern Bulgarian musical life as it corresponds to political process. Indeed, more than in any other East European country, Bulgaria's professional ensemble musicians acted as vibrant, celebrated icons of their country's democratization, both at home and abroad. While the tides of recent political change were marked elsewhere by governmental figures such as Havel, Gorbachev, and Walesa, in Bulgaria the performance activities and styles of groups such as Balkana, Bulgari, Ivo Papazov and His Wedding Orchestra, and the State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir associated with the recordings and tours known as Le mystère des voix bulgares functioned not only as prominent harbingers, but as agents of political transition. How such musicians now remember the "path to communism" forms another important aspect of their narratives, because for most, demokratsiya has signified not a better life, but a more stressful existence in which they and their art have become steadily dislocated from and devalued within the public mainstream.
TRANSCENDING DICHOTOMIES
My concern with the implications of sweeping reform for musical practice holds an inherent analytical danger: that of falling prey to numerous stereotypical dichotomies common in discussions of modernizing states in general, and especially in anthropological studies of Europe. As Sharon Macdonald (1993, 5) observes, in an effort to conform to conventional anthropology's focus on the exotic other, social scientists have historically maintained a division between "the declining Europe of small rural communities with quaint customs and 'folk-life', and the rapidly expanding Europe of rationality and rationalization, social problems, urban life, and change." In my own research, too, I found similar oppositional constructs at work; beyond the urban/ industrial/modern vs. rural/village/agrarian/traditional binarisms implied above, these included West vs. East; European vs. oriental, Ottoman, Turkish, or Islamic; inauthentic vs. authentic; professional vs. amateur; classical vs. folk; socialist/communist vs. pre-socialist, and socialist/communist vs. democratic. In Bulgaria, however, such essentialisms were not simply the province of academics, whether local or foreign. Rather, I found that musicians, academics, friends, and politicians alike implemented them nearly every day to make sense of their heritage and position within the contemporary world, using symbols or metaphorical expressions whose multivalence bridged any inherent paradoxes (cf. Herzfeld 1997, 26-32; Turino 2000, 24).
These dichotomies are best understood, of course, as continua whose dialectical complexity and relativity of scope become obvious through the anecdotal evidence gleaned from localized ethnographic study (cf. Noll 1997, 174). Yet their strategic importance for how Bulgarian citizens conceptualize fundamental abstractions like "nationalism" and "nation" is also revealed by the manner in which each binarism becomes mapped onto the others, both in spontaneous conversation and political rhetoric (Buchanan 1995b, 403; Herzfeld 1997, 171-72). For example, institutions like folk ensembles, which the socialist government established as "modern" and "national," were also largely instigated by urban professionals and advanced as European or Western in outlook (although rooted in Soviet models); they derived from, but did not necessarily promote, the pre-socialist peasant customs of Bulgaria's Ottoman, rural, and agriculturally oriented past. In effect, the entire folk ensemble world was created to bridge each of these dichotomies; it retained, to varying extents, the distinctive landscape of both shores; but as an innovative, hybridic type of cultural performance, both nationalist and socialist in form and content, it took on a significance and life of its own.
The pages that follow focus on these and other dichotomies which, at key historical moments like the present political transition, were implemented or manipulated to arbitrate metaphorically the inherently paradoxical nature of social change. In particular, I consider the competition between Bulgaria's socialist and democratic political factions, the local tendency to view 10 November 1989 as a historical divide, how Bulgarians position themselves vis-à-vis Europe, and the interpenetration of urban and rural life as points of departure for exploring the nature of the political transition, interpretations of democracy, and aspects of Bulgarian identity, including notions of nation, nationalism, and national consciousness that pertain to any and every instance of cultural expression during this period.
Socialism and Democracy
Perestroika itself can only come through democracy. Mikhail Gorbachev, 1988, 18
"Come back next year! During 1988 I'm perestroika-ing." Cartoon of a sign in a store window by Tsvetan Tsachev
Forces of change begin with individuals but can and often do acquire the implementational power of institutions, whose effects on the construction of culture are often far-reaching, multidimensional, and enchained within a web of social interactions that extend simultaneously into diverse communities and sociocultural domains (cf. Turino 1993, 12). The platforms of glasnost and perestroika fostered by the former General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, and adopted by the Bulgarian government are a fine illustration.
In both the USSR and Bulgaria, glasnost, which literally means "openness," and perestroika (Bulg. preustroistvo), meaning "restructuring," encouraged citizens to speak out publicly about civic and employment-related problems, technically without fear of repercussion, and to redesign the internal workings of firms and institutes accordingly. Gorbachev and his colleagues formally inaugurated this program for "new political thinking" at the April 1985 Plenary meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to counteract several increasingly destructive forces at work in Soviet society: declining economic growth, inefficient production, shortages of goods, decreasing commodity quality, and a "decay ... in public morals" provoked by an increasing "credibility gap" between "the world of day-to-day realities and the world of feigned prosperity" (Gorbachev 1988, 5-9). They deemed such economic stagnation "alien to socialism," because growth, measured in both production output and technological advancement, constituted an intrinsic feature of socialist progress toward communism (ibid. 5, 31).
The Plenum participants therefore promoted a developmental strategy emphasizing managerial reform rooted in self-government, organization, and increased personal responsibility for the nation's social welfare. No longer were the activities of Party bosses and industry directors to be conducted in secrecy, enshrouded in networks of personal or political connections (Bulg. vruzki) and bribes (ibid. 15, 17). Rather, openness would unmask such "distortions of socialist ethics" (ibid. 21), where powerful individuals harbored illegal privileges or mismanaged funds or resources, thus rectifying a situation in which, as Verdery (1983, 359) has noted, those state representatives and institutions allegedly leading Lenin's revolution against the bourgeoisie had in fact become-financially, politically, and hierarchically-the bourgeoisie themselves. That such "control from 'below'" depended on the words and actions of individual citizens is terribly important, because, as I will illustrate, it provided an effective countermeasure to entrenched notions of collectivity and served, for policy makers, to bridge Leninist principles and democratic ideals (Gorbachev 1988, 15, 18-19).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Performing Democracy by Donna A. Buchanan Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Contents List of Illustrations....................ix
Preface and Acknowledgments....................xv
Notes on Transliteration and Pronunciation....................xxiii
PART I Socialist Culture in Transition One Transits....................3
Two "Going as Guests": Ethnography and Commensality under Socialism....................52
Three From the Square to the Stage: Musical Life through the 1940s....................79
Four The "Folkloric Philharmonia": Building Professional Ensembles and Orchestras....................132
Five Writing Nationalism, Rewriting Tradition: Politics, Professionalism, and Music Composition....................177
PART II Nationalist Narratives: Marketing Bulgarian Identities through Folk Ensemble Tableaus Six "Cutting the National Crystal": The "Koutev Line"....................227
Seven A Pirin Spectacle....................256
Eight Legendary Rodopa: Cradle of Orpheus....................276
Nine Thracian Tales....................314
PART III Ethnography and Antistructure Ten Balkana and Le mystère des voix bulgares....................341
Eleven "Tell Me How a Pepper Is Planted": Song as Social History....................386
Twelve Democracy or "Crazy-ocracy"? Musical Interpretations....................426
Glossary....................481
Discography....................487
References....................491
Index....................511