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“Pop Music and Socialism: Gleams“ is Rosemary Statelova’s latest monograph, which offers new music-anthropological interpretations of Bulgarian pop music under socialism. Pop music under socialism is treated as a process unfolding over a period of about four decades and developing in three stages: the first is defined as an ‘early stage’ (1950s); the second as the arrival of a new phenomenon, namely that of ‘pop music with a creative face’ (1960s and the early 1970s); the third as ‘maturity’ (mid-1970s until the political upheaval of 1989), focusing on the Golden Orpheus Festival of Pop Music. The photographs, being invaluable evidence of the development of Bulgarian pop music, add expressive iconicity and documentary informativeness to the book.
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The monograph “Music for the People on the Media Front (the Soft Power of Bulgarian Folk and Popular Music under Socialism)“, published in November 2019 (University of Sofia Press) is a representative part of a collaborative research project, “The Soft Power of Popular Music in the Media (Examples from Bulgaria and the Balkans)“, funded by the Bulgarian National Science Fund and led by the author. The voluminous book by Ventsislav Dimov deals with unveiling one of the major sonic pictures of the socialist past, the media producing and distributing it, as well as its consuming audiences. ‘Media’ here means mainly radio and partially, television, while the ‘sonic pictures’ are mainly composed of folk and popular music. The volume (366 pages) comprises four chapters dealing with the theoretical and methodological prerequisites for the book; the communist party governmental narrative voicing the activity; the institutional efforts and activities to fulfil the task; and the audiences’ attitudes towards the ‘music of the people’. The work accentuates the case studies of prominent musicians and distributors of popular music through which the so-called soft power has been wielded.
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Iliya Gramatikoff’s book, completed as a doctoral thesis in 2015, is a multilayered piece of research dedicated to a fairly complex topic. At its core it addresses the Passion and this instantly raises the question of how it is to be understood – as a music genre, as a liturgical narrative, or as both a music genre and a liturgical narrative. Is the conjunction of the two options possible? This needs to be answered at once and the author gives his answer: the Passion resists any attempts at its reduction to a music genre. This resistance, which he defines as a “genre characteristic insusceptible to any reduction”, implies that the meaning of the Passion as rendered in canonical texts cannot be confined to a musical composition, which in turn cannot be a Passion in the true sense of the word unless it keeps the horizon open onto the truth of which a Passion speaks, namely of the Passions of Christ. This is why, the solution which a composer offers to the liturgical genre involves his whole personality, i.e. his professional identity, his outlook on life, and his belief. However, the Passion puts to the test not only the composer, but also the musicologist. It requires the latter to adopt an adequate approach to the composer’s solutions considered within the liturgical genre. Such an approach does exist and has a long-standing tradition – it is the exegetic approach aiming to get at all layers of meaning (literal, allegorical, tropological and anagogical) which a text or a musical work holds. The two composers, whose Passions have been successively examined in the book – Krzysztof Penderecki (with his St. Luke Passion) and Arvo Pärt (with St. John Passion) – have lived up to this task. Iliya Gramatikoff has also lived up to it through his full-bodied findings about their music. In doing so, the author raises the bar for any music researcher who would opt to work on a theme, such as the Passion or another liturgical genre.
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The author adds to the study written by Gábor Sztancs published in the previous issue of the review, that the historical self-representation of Sáros County at the beginning of the 20th century is incomplete because it does not take into account the Additives to the History of Zemplén County journal. The author fills this gap.
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