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Based on the Keith Negus’ idea distinguishing three types of popular musicians - genericists, pastichists, and synthesists (Negus 1996), - the paper is focused on the music of Kou-Kou Band , one of the icon-bands in Bulgaria during the 1990s, which can be qualified, in general, under the label of ‘’world music”, and also as a kind of ethno-rock. Seen as a specific synthesis of different genre, style, and a variety of ethnic musical sources drawn from Bulgaria, the Balkans, the European, the Oriental, the established and the alternative, the folk and the non-folk, blues, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and latino, the band is analyzed in terms of its dialogical and alternative cultural potential giving a birth to new developments in today’s popular music which features a fascinating interplay between the global, the local, and the concept of the music irony, innovates the trivial idiomatic language, and questioning however the idea of the national identity as a frozen category.
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Though already acknowledged in modern humanities as ‘music that matters’, contemporary popular music is often studied mostly on the ground of its extra-musical rather than on its intra-musical qualities. Usually, such a neglecting is a result of the still prevailing attitude among scholars (especially in musicology) who - even ready to appreciate popular music’s social significance - note the inferiority of the ‘music itself’ and reproduce in fact a mis/wrong-understanding of the specific logic, tools, priorities, meanings and values, articulated in popular music practices. This paper aims to identify a concept, hopefully applicable in distinguishing and understanding popular music ‘as both music and culture, which I name metaphorically playing on repetitive. Employing the concept of the ‘changing same’ (Gilroy 1993), I am going further to outline specific, priority aesthetic attitudes shifting the ideas of artistic complexity and creativity in major 20th century music practices which favor - in general, and in one by no means historically accelerated way - the repetition. The discussion is based around reflections on the music-narrative vs. the music process, the repetitive vs. the shocking new, the communication vs. the alienation, the signifying and the playing as a from of resistance. In addition to the obvious impact of African and African-American derived practices giving priority to the category of repetition, I consider as well the parallel fuel for such aesthetic shifts coming both from other ‘marginal’, traditional or ethnic minorities music practices and from innovative technological flow, outlining, after all, an Alternative to Modernity rooted in the European Enlightenment. The Alternative is seen as stimulating folk-like, neosyncretic cultural forms, based on the repetitive rather than the shocking innovation, the playing rather than the fixed opus, the conventional rather than the autonomous, the circular rather than the linear, the dialogical rather than the monological, the shared performing and participation rather than the alienated music making, the intertextuality rather than the single textuality, the passing temporality rather than the idea of eternal universality, etc. While being aware of the limitations of one only concept in distinguishing the peculiarities in the: variety of popular music styles, the discussion on the playing on repetitive would give possible insights into basic artistic approaches shaping the specific creativity observed in dominant 20th century popular music styles.
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Since 1985 there have been created festivals of the wedding orchestras or groups for instrumental folk music in Stambolovo. Even in this way, observing strict reulations and directions, the unique qualities of the musicians show. The followers of the most successful folklore musicians from the 1930s and the 1940s have appropriated the best traditions and developed a specific performance style of their own. To name a few among them, Hassan Chincheri (the violin player and composer), the family of Budakovi, the accordion players Boris Karlov, Ibro Lolov, Petar Ralchev, Traycho Sinapov, Ivan Milev, the clarinet players Dimitar Paskov-Tigara, the family of Malakovi, Ni.kola Iliev, Fekata, and the most successful - Ivo Papazov (lbryama), the groups from Trakia “Parvomayska”, “Lenovska”, “Sadovska”, “Konushevska”, “Kanarite” the group from Russe “Horo”, etc. New instruments are introduced in these bands -guitar, electric organ, modem percussions. The old winds seem to have grown obsolete, being replaced by the brilliance of the new ones. The prominent wind-musicians join mixed orchestras. In North Bulgaria, though, purely wind bands still exist. Professionally trained musicians usually take part in them. They work in military wind bands and in their free time make some extra money at wedding parties and other celebrations. With their music they obey the unwriten laws which characterise the playing of the Balkan chalga, as early as its initial distribution on the Bulgarian lands from the middle of the last century to the present day. Their repertoire is completely subjected to the taste of those paying for it even when in discrepancy with the artistic taste of the performers. Nowadays, alongside with the horo dances, predominant are the hits of the Balkan ethnopop, of a music of a popular song type, based on common Balkan musical sources. What defines them refers to their overall activity, the repertoire and the manner of playing. This bring together all chalga bands and include them as well in a new wave of the modem popular instrumental folk practices.
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The text is based on the “Balkan trace” in World Music - the transformation of a local traditional music into building material of the modem global music industry. The object of the research interest is the musical collage - a sound tissue formed of differently structured sound layers - as a formal means of expression and technique for structuring a musical entity, and as a meaningful expression of the musical picture of the world during the electronic age, according to the postmodem aesthetics. Special attention is paid to basic concepts such as World Music (with an emphasis on Bulgarian research interpretation) and “musical collage”. The latter is examined from several different angles: acoustic, psychological, structural, and semantic. Emphasis is placed upon postmodernistic collaging of local elements in global popular music. One can enter the kitchen of the collage through syntactical musical analysis of the piece “Ederlezi” by Goran Bregovich. The cultural theory view on the musical collage under coricideration leads to the conclusion that the Bulgarian and the Balkan ethnic building material of global music collage has exotic character, highly appreciated in the rejecting enthnocentrism World Music.
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The Roma musical practice in Bulgaria is in most cases craft activity for the production of a specific type of cultural-amusement service. The population of the country uses it most frequently in the sphere of everyday and partly in the ritual festivity. In works of Bulgarian ethnomusicology there is information about the activities of Roma musicians in Bulgaria during the 19th century. During the 1990’s there is a boom in the so called ethnopop music. The Roma participation in it is prominent. At the level of metrorhythmics this occurs through the predominance of the dance scheme of kyuchek, while at the level of the musical performance - through the personal presence of Gipsy singers (men and women), instrumentalists , orchestras, leaders, authors of music and texts, arrangers. The participation is shown off in a demonstrative way as Romaa manifestation of the rising cultural self-awareness of the Gypsy population of the country during the period of change, as well as successful market dimensions of the ethnopop activity. Survey results show, however, that the Roma participation in producing local popular music does not meet only positive attitude on behalf of the audience in Bulgaria - the cultural approachment between the basic population and the Roma minority proceeds with difficulties.
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Popular music emerged still at the down of the civilizations and I relate to the term in its broadest sense. As a subject of specialized scholar research it has been introduced only after the mid-20th century. Drawing on the complementary categories of the popular and the elite, I am trying to describe, explain, and prognosticate the changes in the musical development from the perspectives of different, competitive cognitive models. A starting point here is the A. Toftler’s metaphor of the three civilization waves - a model I have related to in my research work over the last three decades. I interpret this model in its liberal and optimistic aspect, preferred by its author himself. In addition, I introduce four cognitive models: three of them relate to the development (DI, GIE SDS I) and one - to the cultural functionality (TIEM). I interpret them as complimentary in the whole field of contemporary musical culture. Here these models are discussed briefly and in the context of the status and the developments of popular music at the border between 20th and 2lst centuries. The extrapolation of all these models leads to a common conclusion’ which I conceptualize in the hypothesis according to which we are contemporarie of unseen in the last five centuries fundamental transition in the musical and cultural development. The history, knows only two other shifts of similar significance: the emergence and the spreading in Europe of the Christian civilization and the emergence of the industrial (civic) society. From this point of view today we can distinguish at least two types of co-existing popular musics: the one of the nationally or regionally oriented industrial society and the one of the global information society. The first type is popular among audiences having attitudes to local, national, ethnic, and religious genre values, established under the power of the tradition and the market. Usually it belongs to the affirmative cultural practices and the establishment in the industrial society. The second type is popular among the “population” of the Global village and is understandable only in the context of the attitudes to the globalization.
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This article analyzes the functions of the popular music language on The Horizont Bulgarian National Radio Channel in the years of Communism, which it identifies as deconstructivist in relation to the ideological contents in the language of journalism. The process is being related to the postmodernist deconstructivist strategies and explained with both the material nature of popular music as referring to the daily round and the nature of radio broadcasting as a “background media”, which subordinates listening to the listeners’ momentous predilection, leaving them in the domain of privacy. Subsequently, the Horizont Channel established the economics of freedom unknown to the other totalitarian media and later transferred to and adopted by the post Communist private radio stations. In this situation both the verbal and the musical language transcend their critical oppositionality to create a type of “DJ-journalism” revealing the archetypal nature of radio as related to tribal dance. Such a journalism capitalizes upon the chronotopes of disco and the media and determines the state of communications that integrates the new post-ideological generations.
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Gioseffo Zarlino, Zarlinus Clodensis (1517-1590) - clergyman, musician composer, pedagogue and most of all an impressively erudite scholar - is considered to have been the most remarkable Italian and all in all European theoretician in the sphere of music from the middle of XVI century. In spite of all this, Zarlino is not well known in Bulgaria. Reflecting the way of thinking and practice of musicians from the first half of XVI c. - based mostly on the counterpoint theory and practice of Adrian Villart , Zarlino’s teacher -the third volume from the four-part treatise of Zarlino “Le Institutioni harmoniche” (Venice, 1558) “concerning the second part of music, called practical, which is the art of counterpoint” is a source, from which theoreticians have been drawing information and inspiration for centuries, which is the art of counterpoint” is a source, from which theoreticians have been drawing information and inspiration for centuries. Even today we can learn many and diverse things from it. The study presents the life and the creative heritage of Gioseffo Zarlino - and more concretely, the third part of his four-part treatise Le Institutioni harmoniche (1558): “The Art of Counterpoint”. After translating all the 80 chapters of this volume, working on the preparation of the publication annotated by me, accompanied by a monograph on Giosseffo Zarlino, I expose his views on and approaches to the art of music.
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Reviews / Vasil Stoin through the eyes of Todor Todorov
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The idea of developing music-folkloristic thinking refers to musical folklore as a science, taken in its establishment, development and recognition as an independent scientific subject. At the same time music-folkloristic thinking is treated as a concept of wider and richer content volume than the analogous science. It comprises various, but interrelated and merging into one another content, value, psychological, ideological and other arrangements, oriented towards folklore as a cognitive object and subjectively experienced value. The folkloristic arrangement contains a committed attitude to an entire type of culture with its numerous components and relations. Expanding the concept of the folk song, treated not only as a musical-poetic, but cultural object too, it will appear in front of us in all its complex entity as a subject of folklore. Behind the song as a cultural fact is the creatively committed person, who, telling us with his/her singing about their world and about themselves, becomes self-aware and realizes himself/herself as a subject and creator of culture. Before being the object of artistic analysis -poetical and musical, the folk song excites interest and empathy as a fact of culture. Precisely like such it becomes the object of interest and attention - not specialized by a scientific or artistic feature, but motivated culturally. Characteristic for music-folkloristic thinking, talking and writing is that conception medium, which differentiates and prepares the conditions of crystallization of a strictly scientific discourse. In a wider interpretation of the science music folklore, the entire broad sphere of committed activity towards the Bulgarian folk song can be interpreted as initial, in some respects incubation period of music folklore. The idea of singing, respectively music, is implicitly contained in the concept of folk song. The high evaluation of folk song, reaching idealization and cult, also includes its musical merits. The border between music folkloristic and strict scientific thinking is not well defined, the transition from one into the other type of thinking is gentle and fluent.
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