[Reader-list] Music and property: Bulgaria

[Rana Dasgupta]

MUSIC AND PROPERTY
The processes by which Bulgarian folk music became national property

(These brief notes are based on Timothy Rice's overview of Bulgarian music, May It Fill 
Your Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).)

INTRODUCTION

When Bulgaria became a Communist state in 1944, all property became "of the people".  
This did not simply mean, however, that land and factories were taken from private 
owners and made the property of the state.  It also meant that many goods that had 
never previously been considered "property" were now made so.  These are some notes 
on how this happened in the case of music, and what it entailed.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

>From 1396, present-day Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire.  At the Treaty of 
Berlin in 1878, under pressure from the western European powers, Istanbul in 1878 
made Bulgaria an "autonomous principality" and the country chose for itself a prince, the 
German aristocrat Alexander von Battenberg.  His successor took advantage of Ottoman 
crises to declare full independence in 1908.  Bulgaria's own crises of ethnic violence, 
labour unrest and military vulnerability led to an increasingly authoritarian, Fascist-
friendly, monarchy in the 1920s and 30s.  In 1941 Tsar Boris signed the Tripartite Pact 
and allowed Germany to use Bulgarian territory for their planned invasion of Greece.  In 
1944, with the Red Army at its borders, Bulgaria surrendered to Russia.  The monarchy 
was abolished and a Communist state established under Russian control.

Like all the Balkan states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, 
Bulgarian C19 and C20 nationalism faced a problem of definition: What was Bulgaria?  
Despite the fact that the territory had been ruled by Istanbul for five centuries, Bulgarian 
nationalism sought to erase the "Oriental" from its culture, and focussed both on its own 
medieval, Orthodox past and on the western European Enlightenment for its cultural 
identity.  Turks were killed in large numbers in 1878 and after, and Bulgarian 
intellectuals rued the fact that Turkish rule had excluded them from the Renaissance.  

As far as music was concerned, the growing urban bourgeoisie adopted the institutions 
and styles of Paris and Moscow, with operas, ballets and orchestral concerts.  Music in 
the villages, however, was thought to have been largely unaffected by Ottoman rule and 
to represent the pure Bulgarian tradition.  Until 1944 it continued much as before, and 
was also idealised in symphonic and operatic compositions by Bulgarian composers.

FOLK MUSIC UNTIL 1944

Folk music was closely integrated with agricultural life.  Bulgarian villages were 
organised around a number of smallholdings surrounded by common land for grazing.  
Bulgarian peasants identified their livelihood with the land and very few became 
professional musicians.  In this they were self-consciously different from the gypsies 
who travelled from village to village giving performances.  Enthusiastic musicians 
exchanged melodies while working, and practised them in groups during spare time.  
Music was extremely important to village life and those who became talented and/or 
managed to commit large repertoires to memory were popular members of the 
community.  Individual invention - new songs, new variations, etc - was added to a 
store of commonly-held music which was not written down.  Women, especially, spent a 
lot of time teaching each other songs.

There was a complete gender division in musical performance: men played, women 
sang.  Everyone in the village danced.

Bulgarian folk music was played by small bands who would either accompany sung 
ballads or play dance music.  The rhythms of this music could be extremely complex, 
and recordings from the period show dazzling virtuosity on the part of soloists, who 
would decorate melodies with elaborate ornamentation.

MUSIC AND THE COMMUNIST STATE

The new Communist state reformed music in a single-minded and epic way.  Music was 
to serve a modernising, nationalistic purpose.  The essence of Bulgarian folk music 
would be taken and used by modern composers to produce a new music that would 
both educate the peasant, and, since it would be made for the concert hall rather than 
the village square, close the gap between peasants and the bourgeoisie.  The new music 
would characterise the new, beautiful nation: sophisticated rather than visceral, and 
purged of all Turkish excess.  Along with a number of other rural practices, traditional 
folk music, as it stood, was stamped out as a sign of old, dark times.

The new music was often considerably different from folk music.  It was written by 
Paris- and Moscow-trained composers on the basis of folk music and was supposed to 
be a step in the civilising process on the way to everyone listening to Bach and 
Beethoven.  It was written down, and was formally more complex than traditional music 
whilst being less complex in terms of ornamentation and improvisation.  It did not invite 
the participation of audiences as singers or dancers, since they were now expected to be 
passive "concertgoers".  The new music gave rise to new technologies of musical 
instruments, since suddenly folk instruments that had been made in villages by 
craftsmen were being produced and modernised by urban manufacturers used to 
making clarinets or cellos.

This new music would be produced by professional composers for the state and 
performed by professional performers.  Both groups of people now made their living as 
musicians and were paid wages for compositions and performances.  Music was 
completely professionalised, partly as a natural result of the collectivisation of rural land 
and the consequent destruction of village ways of life, and partly as a deliberate and 
monumental project.  Educated urban musicians were sent out across the country to 
hold auditions for village performers.  The best were brought to Sofia where they joined 
the new Bulgarian-style orchestras who performed in concert halls and on Radio Sofia 
(in cultural terms at least, the intellectuals of the Bulgarian Communist state saw the 
project of becoming modern as one of becoming-bourgeois).  They were trained to read 
music and to standardise their regional techniques.

MUSIC AS PROPERTY

The ownership of music now changed in curious ways.  All Bulgarian music became the 
property of the state.  This meant that it was suddenly considered to be "property" when 
it had not been before.  Most importantly, it became assigned to a particular composer 
who would be paid for his work and credited in concert brochures etc.  This led to many 
disputes; for many compositions were simply arrangements by urban composers of 
traditional songs that many rural people knew, and there was resentment at composers 
who cashed in on this knowledge at the expense of everyone else.  Sometimes 
composers credited the "informants" who supplied them with melodies and songs; more 
often they anonymised the tradition by referring to "folk texts" or "folk tunes".  About 
one woman whose large repertoire of songs made her particularly attractive to 
composers at this time, Timothy Rice writes:

"Todora was ... hurt by the ethical issue of credit for performance, part of a problem 
caused by the collision of village and literate traditions.  In Gergebunar, songs were not 
private property; everyone knew them ... since they were performed and potentially 
learned at public events like village dances.  In any case, since no money was involved, 
the issue of ownership was moot.  Songs were freely and gladly passed between family 
and friends, who were proud to acknowledge the sources of their songs: my mother, my 
aunt, my girlfriend from Drachevo.  In the new postwar society, however, copyright - or 
"author's rights" ("aftorsko pravo") as it is called in Bulgaria - reared its ugly head 
because the radio and Balkonton were willing to pay fees to the performers, conductors, 
or arrangers involved in the recordings.  Todora and others, who served as the "izvor" or 
"source", were lost in the shuffle, reduced to invisibility by the intellectuals self-serving 
understanding of folklore as anonymous art.  Conveniently, the performer and arranger 
claimed "author's rights" for songs learned not from anonymous tradition but from 
living singers and musicians."

(ibid, 213)