Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture

This book has four main goals. First, it provides an overview of a wonderful music tradition, created and preserved by the accidents of history and the efforts of talented individuals. Modernization and urbanization have dealt serious blows to many rural folk traditions in Europe, but a few, including Bulgaria’s, have managed to flourish in the face of the pressure from these trends.
 
Second, it suggests ways for those with and without musical training to engage intellectually and aesthetically with the sound of Bulgarian music. The descriptive language is learnable and understandable by all (see the glossary at the back and the series framing volume, Thinking Musically); the musical notations can be ignored or studied, depending on the reader’s training and the availability of help from a teacher; and many activities provide suggestions for how to listen carefully and even sing and dance to the music provided on the accompanying CD.
 
Third, the book demonstrates how music, in addition to being an art and an entertainment, is deeply embedded in the cultural, social, economic, and political life of a locale, a nation, and the world. It does this by arguing that, depending on time and place and the history of people’s individual experience, music can be an art used for aesthetic satisfaction; a social behavior contributing to gender, kinship, and other forms of relationships; a symbol or text with meaning and reference to a world beyond music; and a commodity with economic value for its composers, performers, producers, and consumers.
 
Fourth, the book offers brief lessons on how ethnomusicologists collect and interpret the musical, social, and cultural material that forms the basis of scholarly inquiry in our field. In this way, readers can learn not only some of the results of research, but how research in this discipline is conducted.