Fwd: [Reader-list] Music and property: Bulgaria

[Frederic Madre]

perhaps someone here has an article about music in india
to trade ?

f.

>Date: Wed,  3 Mar 2004 07:32:25 -0800
>From: "Rana Dasgupta" <eye at ranadasgupta.com>
>To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
>
>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)
>_________________________________________
>reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city.
>Critiques & Collaborations
>To subscribe: send an email to reader-list-request at sarai.net with 
>subscribe in the subject header.
>List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/>