Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 9781501346309, 9781501346293, 9781501346330, 9781501346323

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

33 1/3 Global 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.

33 1/3 Japan Series Editor: Noriko Manabe Spanning a range of artists and genres-from the 1960s rock of Happy End to technopop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, the Shibuya-kei of Cornelius, classic anime series  Cowboy Bebop,  J-Pop/EDM hybrid Perfume, and vocaloid star Hatsune Miku—33 1/3 Japan is a series devoted to in-depth examination of Japanese albums of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Published Titles: Supercell’s Supercell by Keisuke Yamada Yoko Kanno’s Cowboy Bebop Soundtrack by Rose Bridges Perfume’s Game by Patrick St. Michel Cornelius’s Fantasma by Martin Roberts Joe Hisaishi’s My Neighbor Totoro: Soundtrack by Kunio Hara AKB48 by Patrick W. Galbraith and Jason G. Karlin Forthcoming Titles: Nenes’ Koza Dabasa by Henry Johnson Shonen Knife’s Happy Hour by Brooke McCorkle

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Czesław Niemen’s Niemen Enigmatic by Ewa Mazierska and Mariusz Gradowski Amália Rodrigues’s Live at the Olympia by Lilla Ellen Gray Ardit Gjebrea’s Projekt Jon by Nicholas Tochka Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi by Maria Sonevytsky Édith Piaf’s Recital 1961 by David Looseley

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

EUROPE

Carol Silverman

Series Editor: Fabian Holt

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Carol Silverman, 2021 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Silverman, Carol, author. Title: Balkanology / Carol Silverman. Description: New York City : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: 33 1/3 Europe | Summary: “Discusses the iconic 1991 album that ushered Balkan music into western popular, jazz, and world music spheres”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020033906 | ISBN 9781501346309 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501346316 (epub) | ISBN 9781501346323 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Papasov, Ivo, 1952-. Balkanology. | Wedding music–Bulgaria–History and criticism. | Folk music–Bulgaria–History and criticism. | Wedding music–Balkan peninsula–History and criticism. | Folk music–Balkan peninsula–History and criticism. Classification: LCC ML419.P364 S55 2021 | DDC 784.4/16509496–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033906 ISBN:   HB:    978-1-5013-4630-9 PB: 978-1-5013-4629-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4632-3 eBook: 978-1-5013-4631-6 Series: 33 1/3 Europe Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

Contents List of Figures  ix Acknowledgments  x 1 Introduction  1 Why Balkanology?  1 Genesis of the Book  4 Wedding Music: Style and Genre  11 2 Prelude and Golden Age: The Paradoxes of Wedding Music during Socialism  21 Romani Music in Bulgaria  21 Defining Heritage, Tradition, and Bulgarian Folk Music  25 Economic and Social Contexts of Wedding Music  29 The Stars and the Style Emerge  34 The Ivo Papazov Phenomenon  36 Balkanology’s Artists  41 The Political Crackdown in the 1980s  47 State Ambivalence  57 Stambolovo Festivals 1985–1988  61 3 Balkanology: The Album  71 Conception and Production  71 Balkanology: A Listening Guide  78 4

Music and Mafias: 1990s Postsocialism  91

5 Global Balkanology  103 Into the Twenty-First Century  103 Populism and Anti-Gypsyism  108 Into the Future  113

Contents

Notes  120 References  125 Discography  132 Index  134

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Figures 1 Ork. Trakiya, 1990. Clockwise from top left: Yuri ­Yunakov, Ivo Papazov, Salif Ali, Radi Kazakov, Maria Karafezieva, and Neshko Neshev  2 2 Wedding procession led by Ivo Papazov, clarinet, and Ali Gardzhev, accordion, in Iskra, Haskovo region, 1980  7 3

From left to right: Yuri Yunakov, Mark Levy, Ivo Papazov, Carol Silverman, Salif Ali, and Neshko Neshev, Eugene, OR, 2003  10

4  Ivo Papazov simultaneously plays clarinet and saxophone, 1980s  14 5 Salif Ali, drummer in Ork. Trakiya, 1980s. Note the young fans crowded in the tent  43 6  Fast and slow rhythmic notations for “Mladeshki Dance”  81 7

Rhythmic notation for “Kasapsko Horo”  88

8 Ivo Papazov and Yuri Yunakov, 2003  105 9 Ork. Trakiya performs at Bolyarska Sreshta in Arbinasi, July 2017. From left to right: Matyo Dobrev, Vasil Denev, Petŭr Ralchev, Ivo Papazov, Neshko Neshev, Mitko Denev, and Salif Ali  115

Acknowledgments This book owes its existence to the sustained cooperation of many musicians and their families over many decades. I would like to especially thank Ivo Papazov and Maria Karafezieva, Yuri Yunakov, Lidia Yunakova and Ahmed Yunakov, Neskho Neshev and Penka Nesheva, Salif Ali, Ivan Milev, Dinka Ruseva, Petŭr Ralchev, Mladen Malakov, Nadya Petrova, Orlin Pamukov, Nedyalko Nedyalkov, Matyo and Dobri Dobrev, Georgi Petrov, Yashko Argirov, Georgi Doichev, Georgi Zhelyazkov, Petŭr Vojnikov and Ginka Ivanova, Nikola and Ilian Iliev, Donka Koleva and Nikolai Kolev, and Kalin Kirilov. I appreciate their hospitality and how freely they shared their life histories and insights into their music. They made room for me in their crowded vans, ensured my safety, and answered my unending questions. I would also like to thank Joe Boyd for his interviews and for inviting me to write the liner notes for Balkanology. I have also benefited greatly from discussions with Bulgarian scholars Lozanka Peycheva, Ventsislav Dimov, Claire Levy, Vergilii Atanasov; Dimitrina Petrova, Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov, Sofiya Zahova, Magdalena Slavkova, Yelis Erolova, Hristo Kyuchukov, Lilyana Kovatcheva, Krassimir Kŭnev, and Radost Ivanova, as well as American scholars of Bulgarian music Timothy Rice, Donna Buchanan, and Jane Sugarman. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Mark Levy for his enduring help and support. Some material was originally published in Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (2012) by Carol Silverman and has been reproduced with permission of­

Oxford University Press, https://global.oup.com/academic/ product/romani-routes-9780195300949?lang=en&cc=us. Partial funding for this project came from the Centre for Excellence in the Humanities, Sofia University, the University of Oregon Office of Research, and the Oregon Humanities Center.

Acknowledgments xi

xii

1 Introduction Why Balkanology? From countercultural resistance to world music craze, Bulgarian “wedding music” burst through the iron curtain, invading BBC stages, jazz clubs, and world music festivals. This book is about how the 1991 album Balkanology captured the attention of global audiences precisely at the time when communism fell in Eastern Europe. The unquestioned guru of wedding music was Ivo Papazov1 (birth name Ibryam Hapazov), founder of Orkestŭr Trakiya (Orchestra from Thrace) (Figure 1). In the 1970s–1980s, Trakiya was the most famous band in the country, and patrons waited months and even years to engage them. Whenever Trakiya played, uninvited fans showed up from miles around to listen to and catch a glimpse of the stars. Seasoned musicians all over the world are still in awe of the technical abilities of the musicians in Trakiya—their complex additive rhythms, breakneck speeds, stunning improvisations, dense ornamentation, chromatic passages, and innovative modulations. Bridging folk, jazz, and rock sensibilities, Trakiya’s music has set the standard for Bulgarian music until today, and its members are revered stars at home and abroad. Balkanology also has a significant political current related to the fact that all the instrumentalists in Trakiya are Turkishspeaking Muslim Roma2 who were prohibited from playing Romani music in the 1980s. These artists resisted the socialist state’s prohibitions (even serving jail time) and fashioned a

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

Figure 1  Ork. Trakiya, 1990. Clockwise from top left: Yuri Yunakov, Ivo Papazov, Salif Ali, Radi Kazakov, Maria Karafezieva, and Neshko Neshev. Courtesy of Ivo Papazov.

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genre that became a youth movement in Bulgaria, and then a world music phenomenon. Balkanology underscores the political, economic, and social roles of music during socialism and postsocialism. This book begins in Bulgaria (see Map 1), exploring the emergence of “wedding music” despite communist restrictions, and expands into wider frames. I chronicle wedding music from its inception in the 1970s, through the fall of communism, to the present, interpreting its varying musicological, political, economic, and artistic contexts and meanings. Wedding music provides a window into the changing roles of the state and the market and the economic challenges of professional musicians during socialism and postsocialism. It also raises questions such as what is folk

Map 1 Map of Bulgaria. Credit: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/attachments/maps/BU-map.gif.

Introduction

music? What is authenticity? And what is Romani music? I place these issues in the context of changing markets and media outlets, both Eastern and Western. Wedding music thus illuminates questions of nationalism and Balkan identity through dynamic political periods. The book’s core is the album itself—how it was conceived, produced, and consumed, and how it is remembered and

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revered today. I trace the pivotal role of the album’s British producer, Joe Boyd, who took a risk on his Bulgarian hunch and shepherded Trakiya to Western audiences. I explore Balkanology’s repertoire and genres, noting what was omitted as well as what was recorded, in addition to how it was conceived. I provide a listening guide to the album, including a deep dive into modes and modulations. In addition, I delve into the artists’  life stories and professional training—how they learned to play and how they created a new type of music combining elements of folk music, jazz, and rock on a solid Bulgarian base. I then follow the music through the current postsocialist period, chronicling momentous economic, political, social, and artistic changes via the lives of the musicians.

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

Genesis of the Book

4

These pages also chronicle my forty-year relationship with wedding music and the artists who performed it. When I visited Bulgaria multiple times during the 1970s I was planning to do research on village vocal traditions, but wedding music drew me in. I did not pick this topic in advance; it simply demanded my attention because it was the most popular and controversial music of that era. Let’s turn the clock back to 1979–1980, when my husband, ethnomusicologist Mark Levy, and I were studying music at the Folk Music High School in Shiroka Luka in the Rodop Mountains. I befriended Sonya, who was the sole Romani student in the entire school. Notice the irony of the situation that there were dozens of talented Romani children in the country, but only one was admitted to the best music school;

Introduction

this points to overt structural discrimination. Sonya hid the fact that she was Romani and tried to pass as ethnic Bulgarian because of the historic prejudice that Roma confronted. But she rarely succeeded. Sonya and I started to gravitate toward each other because of our interest in Romani music. I shared tapes of old Balkan Romani music with her, and eventually she opened up to me, and invited us to her cousin’s wedding during spring break in her hometown of Septemvri. When we arrived in Septemvri we were immediately immersed in the domestic and ritual life of the sprawling poor Romani neighborhood. I documented the first of dozens of Romani weddings I have since attended. I met many musicians who were all performing the newly emerging wedding music genre. They spoke about Ibryam Hapazov and Ork. Trakiya in reverential terms, just like the music students at the high school, and they constantly listened to bootleg cassettes of the star performers. Sonya’s brother was hoping to hire Ork. Trakiya for his upcoming wedding, and they eventually engaged him through Yashko Argirov, a famous clarinet player from Brestovitsa, near Plovdiv. In May 1980, Mark and I moved to Kotel in North Bulgaria to attend the other noted Folk Music High School. The frenzy over wedding music was tangible there as well, and the students followed the new tunes and arrangements, even though playing and even listening to wedding music was forbidden (I discuss this policy in more detail in Chapter 2). Students played the prohibited music in secret, and plotted how to hear the best players live, which often meant sneaking out of school and crashing a wedding. To thwart these adventurous plans, school administrators deliberately confiscated students’ civilian clothing and only let them have uniforms in their dormitory rooms. However, some students cleverly hid their

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 6

civilian clothing so they could escape. The teachers were often covertly supportive of their students’ pursuit of wedding music because they, too, were ardent secret fans. From the students, Mark and I heard about a wedding in the village of Iskra, near Haskovo, that was not to be missed. In those days, the rumor of a wedding with Ork. Trakiya would spread like wildfire via word of mouth; fans would then plot how and when to get there to secure a view of the stars. This June wedding was doubly promising because two bands would be performing, Trakiya, led by Hapazov, and Konushenska Grupa, led by legendary Bulgarian clarinetist Nikola Iliev. We later understood that two Bulgarian families in Iskra were having weddings on the same day. Mark and I drove several hours to Iskra, along with hundreds of other fans, and asked villagers where the wedding with Ibryam Hapazov was. Asking local people where a wedding will be held is exactly what musicians do, too; numerical addresses and street names in villages are still rarely used. Because we were Americans who spoke the language, the sponsoring family invited us inside the courtyard. Bulgarians of all ethnicities were extremely generous and welcomed us to their family celebrations. In Iskra, we had a great view of the ceremony of the groom’s relatives coming to “get the bride” and veiling her; all these rituals were accompanied by Ork. Trakiya’s slow melodies (bavni melodii) performed acoustically. Then we processed on foot with the musicians (see Figure 2) to the village restaurant where the band set up its sound system; drinking, eating, and daruvane (reciprocal gift giving) began. After several hours of feasting, the guests again switched venues—this time we walked or drove to the village square (ploshtad), the central, open gathering place. The wedding

Figure 2 Wedding procession led by Ivo Papazov, clarinet, and Ali Gardzhev, accordion, in Iskra, Haskovo region, 1980. Courtesy of Ivo Papazov.

Introduction

couple went into the chitalishte (literally reading room, but more generally meaning the public administration building), where they signed official documents marrying them. They came out amidst a barrage of candy, popcorn, rice, and coins, all to ensure their prosperity and fertility. In the meantime, Ork. Trakiya had set up a huge sound system on the steps of the building, and began to play. The bride led the first horo (line dance) and then every family member, in order of age and respect, was given the privilege of leading the dance line. Meanwhile, on the other side of the square, Konushenska Grupa had set up their huge sound system, and they too began to play. They had been hired by another Bulgarian family that had also gone through all the wedding rituals I described above. Because playing in the village square on Sunday

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 8

afternoon was a required part of every wedding, the two bands played simultaneously, and cranked up their sound to try to drown out their rivals. People viewed the event as a contest between Hapazov and Iliev in terms of stamina, technique, and number of fans. Yet it was a friendly competition, and all the musicians respected each other. The two dance lines stayed on their respective sides, but it was pure cacophony in the middle! When it began to rain, bystanders grabbed umbrellas, but the dancers were undeterred, and they got soaked. After several hours, the band and the guests moved indoors to a large school and the festivities continued until the next morning. Some dances went on for over an hour without a break. In total, the musicians played for over fifteen hours! Years later, when I showed the grainy videotapes of this wedding to Ibryam and other Trakiya members, they fondly remembered the rainstorm and the competition with Konushenska Grupa. As for long hours of playing, that was the regular routine for every celebration in the early 1980s. I recount this long vignette to illustrate the passion for wedding music during socialism, especially among the youth. People travelled hundreds of miles to crash weddings to listen to live performances of the stars; and their bootleg recordings cost a month’s salary. I, too, became a fan, followed Trakiya, charted the repertoire, met the artists and their families, and documented dozens of weddings. All of this research was unofficial because wedding music was prohibited by the state for being impure, kitsch, and containing “foreign” elements. But the reaction on the ground was the opposite: the musicians who were harassed became countercultural heroes. Thus, I studied resistance to the state in artistic and economic terms. I continued to follow the fate of these musicians during the fall of socialism and the subsequent explosion of Balkan music

Introduction

on world music stages. I met Joe Boyd when he toured the United States in 1988 with Balkana, a Bulgarian folk music group he was promoting before Ork. Trakiya. Boyd and I were riding in a taxi together on the way to the Balkana sound check when he brought up with me his plan to produce Balkanology. I said I was thrilled, and then he asked me to write the liner notes! I gladly agreed, and we stayed in touch. I met the members of the band again in 1991 when Trakiya did a concert in Portland, Oregon. My husband Mark and I brought gifts and Balkan food to their motel rooms, and we took them shopping and relaxed together. I remember vividly that Ibryam wanted to visit a gun store because in Bulgaria it was illegal for civilians to own guns, and he was curious about the rules in America. Later during the tour, Yuri Yunakov, Trakiya’s saxophone player, made contact with several North Macedonian Roma in the Bronx, New York, whom I knew well. Since 1988 I had been working transnationally with Roma, both in North Macedonia and in New York. These Bronx Roma invited Yunakov to come back to America to play at a private party, and they subsequently sent him plane tickets. After Yunakov arrived in NY, he decided to stay and try to emigrate, and his wife soon followed him. Suddenly, my two separate worlds of North Macedonian Roma and Bulgarian Roma had merged in the Bronx. I helped Yunakov obtain a work permit, and in 1994 recommended him to teach at the Balkan Music and Dance Workshop, sponsored by the East European Folklife Center, where he was introduced to American audiences. In 1995, I assisted him in successfully applying for asylum and served as his translator at his hearing. He then formed the Yuri Yunakov Ensemble and asked me to join as a vocalist (I have been performing and teaching Balkan music since the early 1970s). I performed and recorded several albums with the ensemble.

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

Figure 3  From left to right: Yuri Yunakov, Mark Levy, Ivo Papazov, Carol Silverman, Salif Ali, and Neshko Neshev, Eugene, OR, 2003. Courtesy of Carol Silverman.

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I also toured with the ensemble for over ten years, often serving as its booker/agent/manager, and arranged a reunion tour in the US with members of Trakiya in 2003 (see Silverman 2000; 2009; 2019; 2020) (Figure 3). In 2005, I worked with Harold Hagopian, the director of the Traditional Crossroads label, to produce the second national reunion tour and the album Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music, with Yunakov, Papazov, Ali, and Neshev plus Kalin Kirilov (my former student in Folklore at the University of Oregon; currently Professor of Music at Towson University). I also sang several songs on the album. Travelling with musicians for many weeks provided me valuable insights into the performance process, including how arrangements and improvisations happen. One thing I noticed was that the musicians never really rehearsed! For sure, Yunakov needed

to learn some new repertoire because he had left the band in 1994, but otherwise they knew their arrangements so well that “rehearsing” them was not necessary. Due to this, their performances always had a fresh energy, not to mention that much of the music was improvised. Ork. Trakiya musicians were hosted by my mother in the Bronx, by me in my home in Oregon, and by many other American friends. These intimate gatherings cemented our relationship. I continue to undertake research in Bulgaria, and have stayed in contact with Trakiya artists as well as many other wedding musicians. During September 2018, I interviewed nine musicians (some for the second or third time) including clarinetists Ivo Papazov, Mladen Malakov and Nikola Iliev, accordionists Neshko Neshev and Petŭr Ralchev, drummers Salif Ali and Paicho Ivanov, and singers Maria Karafezieva and Nadya Petrova.

Wedding Music: Style and Genre

Introduction

What kind of music is represented on Balkanology? I employ the general generic term “wedding music” because the literal term “svatbarska muzika” was widely used in the 1970s in Bulgaria when the genre arose. However, I note that today this term is not widely used, and the genre has been incorporated into more general terms such as “narodna muzika” (folk music; which I discuss below). In the 1970s, the term “wedding music” meant precisely the new style of music described below; it was played at weddings, but it also encompassed music played at engagements, baptisms, house warmings, and soldier sendoff celebrations, in short, at major ritual events in village and urban contexts, for Bulgarians of all ethnicities. In Chapter 2, I discuss these contexts in further detail.

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 12

Although its history reaches back to urban ensembles of the late nineteenth century (that were composed mostly of Roma) and mid-twentieth century Bulgarian village bands (Peycheva 1999), wedding music as a distinct genre began to crystallize in the early 1970s when amplification was introduced to folk music in village settings. Previously, music played for weddings and other celebrations was acoustic. Older musicians recall the frenzy when everyone on stage vied to use the one new microphone. The loudness of the new electric amplification and its affinity to rock music became a symbol of modernity and the West. This was the socialist era when the West was the official enemy, but Bulgarians secretly craved Western popular culture, including bootleg blue jeans. What defined the emerging genre of wedding music in the 1970s was a combination of instrumentation, repertoire, and style. Most saliently, the style can be summarized as a constellation of virtuosic technique via dense ornamentation, rhythmic syncopations, multiple key changes, chromaticisms, fast tempi, and improvisations. Wedding music is a completely oral tradition; its artists learn and perform by ear only. Instrumentation typically consists of clarinet, saxophone, accordion, electric rhythm guitar, electric bass guitar, and drum set, plus vocalists; in the late 1980s synthesizers were added. These instruments have a greater range and more versatility than Bulgarian village instruments such as gŭdulka (vertically held fiddle), gaida (bagpipe), kaval (end-blown flute), and tambura (plucked lute). However, village instruments are sometimes added to wedding bands. For example, kaval player Matyo Dobrev was a member of Trakiya from the late 1990s. In contrast to the wildness of wedding music, the statesponsored folk music found in ensembles and schools was highly arranged by composers trained in Western classical

Introduction

music; they established large ensembles modeled on symphony orchestras, and introduced polyphony, written scores, and conductors. Only village instruments were allowed. In fact, the state prohibited Western instruments such as clarinet and accordion from official channels even through these instruments had been introduced into Bulgaria in the early twentieth century. Timothy Rice summarizes how wedding music differed from state-sponsored “folk music”: “(1) new musical instruments, (2) new recording technologies, (3) expanded repertoire, (4) growth in technique and virtuosity, (5) more modern techniques from jazz and popular music, and (6) more freedom to improvise” (1994: 242). In contrast to the rigidity of state-sponsored ensemble music, eclecticism is the preferred mode of creation in wedding music. The emphasis is on originality, guts, versatility, and the ability to improvise. Agoston-Nikolova provides a useful comparison: weddings bands have “ethnically mixed musicians, highly representative of minorities (Gypsy, Turkish) … representing a dynamic vision.” They play at “family events, fairs, pubs,” with “freedom of improvisation, unpredictability, … virtuosity.” In contrast, ensembles are composed of ethnic Bulgarians who are “state educated” and perform in “official folk concerts, radio recordings and state-sponsored festivals … representing a collective idealized vision of the nation’s past,” in a style that is “controlled, pure, disciplined ….” (2008: 10).3 Instrumental wedding music is highly structured in one sense—for example, there are set precomposed passages played in unison or thirds—and highly unstructured in another sense, via individual improvisations. Set passages alternate with improvisations on the melody instruments. Set passages are composed by musicians, sometimes based on folk melodies but often with eclectic melodic and rhythmic

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

surprises. In the middle of a pravo horo (2/4 dance) one may find a quote from an advertising jingle, a popular rock song, or phrases more reminiscent of jazz and rock than folk music. The emphasis is on originality, cleverness, and versatility. Clarinetist Ivo Papazov composed “A Musical Stroll around Bulgaria” to display his regional diversity, and Balkanology represents a stroll around the Balkans. Papazov also performs an imitation of a gaida (bagpipe) on his clarinet, removes pieces from his clarinet (down to the mouthpiece), and plays clarinet and saxophone at the same time (see Figure 4 and note 13). The

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Figure 4 Ivo Papazov simultaneously plays clarinet and saxophone, 1980s. Courtesy of Ivo Papazov.

Introduction

theatrical element is prized. Moreover, audience members, who are often musicians themselves, listen carefully for what is new and interesting; they are highly critical listeners and they relentlessly compare musicians and performances. As noted above, wedding musicians display dazzling technique via complicated rhythmic syncopations, dense ornamentation, daring key changes, chromatic passages, and extremely fast tempi. Above all, ability to improvise is valued by both performers and audience. Each melody instrument in turn departs from the composed phrases and shows its virtuosity in original ways. One journalist wrote: “Rhythms are frantic and unbridled showing a rare virtuosity as if playing were a question of life or death” (Gadjev 1987). Timothy Rice quotes the phrase s hus (with gusto) to illustrate how performers differentiate wedding music from folk music which they found prosto (simple) (1996: 193). Indeed, musicians contrast the svobodno svirene (free playing) of wedding music with the shkoluvano svirane (schooled playing) of folk music. In fact, in this genre, everyone values improvisation as the apex of competence; indeed, they judge musicianship through improvisational artistry; if you can’t improvise, you are not a real musician. Moreover, an improvisatory attitude extends beyond music to its context—for example, there are usually no rehearsals and no notation or set lists; rather, orality and extemporaneity are valorized. Papazov remarked: “We don’t rehearse and we don’t have set arrangements. I love to improvise; I can take a tiny melody and make it into a rich improvisation, like a jazz musician, but in real jazz you have rules of harmony. We have more freedom. Our accompanists follow us and occasionally we surprise them.”4 Scholars agree that older Bulgarian village music is structured by “kolyano chains,” that is, by stringing together

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a series of known melodic phrases; in addition, short solos are inserted (Kirilov 2015; Buchanan 2006; Rice 1994; 2004). Wedding music moved away from this structure. Kirilov comments that: Village-style improvisations and soloing techniques are comprised of pre-composed motives that are varied (melodic variations) in short groups of 2–4 measures long. The improvisation in wedding style is accomplished on a larger scale. Wedding musicians improvise in structures of eight to sixteen measures and the repetition of motives is displaced by rapid scales, syncopations, register transfers, and metric dissonances, as well as compound melodies.

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

(2015: 12)

16

Thus, improvisations in wedding music are longer, more complex and less standardized than in village music. In addition, in the composed sections, musicians do play set phrases (that they themselves may have composed) in unison or in parallel thirds, but there is more variation in the length and order of these phrases. As mentioned, the density and frequency of ornamentation in Bulgarian wedding music is much greater than in older village music (ibid.: 47). Bulgarian musicologist Nikolai Kaufman rightly compares the spirit of wedding music to the spirit of the horo, the traditional dance event (often held after church on Sundays in the village square as well as at weddings), in terms of the nuanced communication between performers and dancers. As opposed to ensemble music that is formal and arranged, wedding music responds to cues and requests from dancers and sponsors. Kaufman wrote: “The most important feature of this music is improvisation … Different from folk orchestras composed of traditional instruments which strictly play pieces

Introduction

of composed multi-part music, the groups … play more freely, often without knowing how long a piece will take, how it will be built, who will solo—how it was at the horo” (1987: 79). Indeed, wedding music shares several characteristics with the horo: it is village based; open ended in terms of length (some pieces are four to five hours long); it thrives on dancer interaction; and it is located in the free market, outside of state control (see below). The repertoire of wedding music can be divided into two main categories: Bulgarian music and Romani music. Bulgarian music is characterized by slow songs and melodies, and dance music, all represented on the album Balkanology. Dance music in Bulgaria features duple meter plus additive meters in combinations of twos and threes. The most common dance meters are pravo horo (2/4) and rŭchenitsa (7/8 = 2-2-3); other dance meters include paidushko (5/16 = 2–3), krivo horo or kopanitsa (11/16 = 2-2-3-2-2), and variations of 3-2-2 (in southwest Bulgaria). Tunes are either traditional or composed by the most famous wedding musicians; many composed melodies have become standardized wedding repertoire. Slow melodies are often based on traditional songs and are performed around the banquet table, where audience members attentively listen to the sad lyrics. Musicians and audience members alike judge mastery in slow songs by the soloist’s ornamental and interpretive abilities. In general, wedding music repertoire has a Thracian emphasis due to the fact that the most famous bands are from Thrace. Speed is much more important and the composed sections are more elaborate and more highly arranged in the Bulgarian repertoire than in the Romani repertoire. As wedding bands became more virtuosic, they composed opening concert pieces (otkrivane) for listening

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to when wedding guests were seated at the banquet table. These dramatic compilations combined various meters and showcased speed. Kirilov (2015) analyzes several of Trakiya’s opening pieces. He points out that these concert pieces feature melodic and harmonic “megameasures” and “megameters” whereby several measures are grouped together and downbeats are frequently omitted (Kirilov 2015: 41–7, 127–46). Kirilov further notes that Trakiya’s formulaic otkrivane became a model for other bands. The Bulgarian vocal repertoire of wedding music consists of songs from the local folk corpus plus songs composed by singers and instrumentalists. The vocal style emphasizes rhythmic vibrato and extensive ornamentation, imitating the melodic instruments, and showcasing virtuosic technique. The style is based on eastern Thracian models and was developed by Nedyalka Keranova. Many musicians assert she was of Romani descent, from an Eastern Orthodox group locally known as sivi gŭlŭbi (grey doves). Keranova was a leading wedding singer until her death in the 1996, and her vocal style is widely imitated (Bakalov 1992: 229–38). Maria Karafezieva, featured on Balkanology, has a similar style. The second category of wedding music repertoire is kyuchek, a Romani and Turkish genre comprising both instrumental music and songs; Balkanology’s first track is a kyuchek. Note that kyuchek also refers to the improvised solo dance associated with this music that is characterized by hand movements, contractions of the abdomen and pelvis, shoulder shakes, movement of isolated body parts (such as hips and head), and small footwork patterns. Men as well as women perform it but it is overwhelmingly associated with women. Kyuchek is clearly an heir to the dances of the Ottoman çengis, female professional dancers (the term kyuchek comes from köçek,

Introduction

meaning Ottoman Turkish male professional dancer), but in Romani communities its subtlety and restraint distinguish it from contemporary belly dancing. Kyucheks use Turkish-derived modal scales (makams) which employ either westernized pitches or microtones. There is no one typical scale or typical makam for Bulgarian Romani music, and indeed the term “the Gypsy scale”5 is a misnomer. A variety of scales are used, including major, minor, other modes, and Turkish makams. Often the second and sixth degree of the scale/makam has a microtonal element. Although Trakiya musicians conform performatively to the conventions of makams they are not usually familiar with specific terms. Papazov remarked: “when we were young, we didn’t know the names of makams, but now we know some names.” However, musicians often use the term makamliisko to refer to beautiful, soulful playing of either Romani or Bulgarian music (Peycheva 1994: 71–2). Kyucheks typically have composed sections plus solo sections which are distinguished by taksim or mane,6 a highly improvised free-rhythm and/or metric exploration of the scale/makam, often using stock motives and figures, played over a metric ostinato. In the mane, musicians display their improvisatory virtuosity. Kyucheks are associated with characteristic meters, such as 2/4, 4/4, 7/8, and 9/8. The 9/8 meter is now associated with Turkish-speaking Roma (Seeman 2019).7 9/8 can be played fast and light or slow and syncopated as in the rhythm known as kaba zurna (low-pitched double reed wind instrument), whose name suggests it was a zurna style that was adopted by the clarinet. 7/8 is another important rhythm, especially in the Pirin region of southwest Bulgaria, where it takes a number of forms. The melodies for kyucheks are sometimes drawn from older Romani tunes but are more often composed by wedding

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musicians. They are inspired by an eclectic array of sources: folk and popular music from neighboring Balkan regions, film scores from the West, cartoon music, Middle Eastern music, and Indian film music. Kyuchek titles in Bulgaria during the 1980s included Ivo Papazov’s Pinko, based on the musical theme from the Pink Panther cartoon. As mentioned above, among Romani musicians there is a cross-fertilization of musical styles, with a premium on innovation.

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2 Prelude and Golden Age: The Paradoxes of Wedding Music during Socialism How did wedding music arise and why was it prohibited by the socialist government? Despite harassment and arrests of artists, wedding music became the most coveted music in Bulgaria in the 1970s–1980s. Why did it emerge as a countercultural phenomenon, and how did it adapt to the paradoxes of socialism? In order to address these questions, we need to analyze the economic and political contexts of wedding music and also tackle the question of how folk music has been defined in Bulgaria. Noting that all the instrumentalists on the album are Roma, we also need to chronicle the musical role of Roma in Bulgaria. Who, then, are Roma?

Romani Music in Bulgaria Linguistic evidence shows that Roma are a diasporic ethnic group that migrated from northwest India to the Balkans by the fourteenth century and to Western Europe a few decades later; the Romani language is related to Sanskrit. For centuries,

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 22

Roma have been indispensable suppliers of diverse services to non-Roma, such as music, entertainment, fortune-telling, metal working, horse dealing, wood working, and agricultural work. Many of these trades required nomadism or seasonal travel. Initial curiosity about Roma by Europeans quickly gave way to discrimination, a legacy that has continued until today (Petrova 2003) (see Chapter 5). Roma were viewed as intruders probably because of their dark skin, their nonEuropean physical features, their foreign customs, and their associations with magic and invading Turks. Stereotypes about Roma abound in Europe, encompassing the romantic (musical, beautiful, creative, artistic) along with the criminal. In Romania, Roma were slaves from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Despite their small numbers, Roma inspired fear and mistrust and were expelled from virtually every Western European territory. Bounties were paid for their capture and repressive measures included confiscation of property and children, forced labor, prison sentences, whipping, branding, etc. Assimilation was attempted in the eighteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian Empire by forcibly removing children from their parents and outlawing nomadism, traditional occupations, and Romani language, music, and dress; similar legislation was enacted in Spain after 1499 (Petrova 2003). In the Balkans, the policies of the Ottoman Empire towards Roma were, in general, more lenient than policies in Western Europe (Marushiakova and Popov 2000). Perhaps the most tragic period in Romani history was World War II when over 500,000 European Roma were murdered. The post-war communist regimes in Eastern Europe defined Roma as a social problem. They were targeted for integration into the planned economy, forced to give up their traditional occupations, and

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assigned to the lowest-skilled and lowest-paid state jobs (e.g. street cleaning). Discriminatory practices included forced sterilization (Czechoslovakia) and tracking of children into schools for the disabled (Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia). In Bulgaria, nomadic Roma were forcibly settled, settled Roma were evicted, and aspects of their culture, such as Romani music, language, and practice of Islam, were prohibited (see below). In terms of music, Balkan Roma have been professionals for centuries, playing for non-Romani peasants and city dwellers of many classes for remuneration in cafes and taverns and at events such as weddings, baptisms, circumcisions, fairs, and village dances. This professional niche, primarily male and instrumental, requires Roma to know expertly the co-territorial repertoire and interact with it in a creative manner. A nomadic way of life, often forced upon Roma due to harassment, gave them opportunity to enlarge their repertoires and become multi-musical as well as multilingual. In addition, large groups of sedentary Roma in major Balkan cities performed urban folk, classical, and popular music. Balkan Romani musicians predominated in specific musical niches. For centuries, Roma have had a virtual monopoly of professional ensembles consisting of one or two zurnas plus one or two tŭpani (double-headed cylindrical drums). These ensembles have played for many ethnic groups in southern Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, North Macedonia, the Macedonian province of Greece, the Pirin region of southwest Bulgaria, and parts of Balkan Thrace. In fact, the grandfathers and fathers of Trakiya musicians from Kŭrdzhali in southern Thrace were all zurna or tŭpan players. At large public events such as fairs, zurna/tŭpan ensembles were engaged by dancers or picnicking families or for wrestling matches. Among some

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Roma, zurna/tŭpan music is essential for ritual moments such as the application of henna to the bride’s hair, hands, and feet, male circumcision, and the slaughter of the lamb on Herdelezi (Gergyovden, St. George’s Day). Today in Bulgaria, these ensembles are still in demand in the Pirin region (but no longer in Thrace) because of their ritual and dance functions and their symbolic association with Romani identity (Peycheva and Dimov 2002). From Ottoman times there has been a trafficking of musical styles facilitated by Balkan Roma; improvisation and innovation are specifically valued (Peycheva 1999). Dimov similarly comments that the presence of Roma is “the clearest example of the polyethnic characteristic of Balkan music, and its negotiation, translation and integration” (1995: 14). Peycheva also discusses the “polylingualism” of Gypsy musicians in text and style (1999). Innovation can be partially traced to the motivation of generating new material to sell to patrons, but it can’t be solely reduced to economic imperative. Note that professional Balkan Romani musicians regularly serve patrons from many ethnic groups, and thus their repertoires tend to be large and varied. While the economic patron–client relationship is often the framework within which Roma perform, the artistic imperative is the creative engine behind the exchange of services (Silverman, forthcoming). Musicians value innovation for its artistry; they listen carefully to and evaluate each other, detecting what precisely is new and worthwhile in technique, melody, harmony, improvisation, genre, text, and form. But innovation isn’t enough to win admiration—novelty must be accompanied by superior technique and soulful passion. Innovation is accomplished in myriad ways: sometimes via looking to genres across regional borders (e.g. using Romanian, Turkish, or other Balkan styles), sometimes via looking towards

distant sources (e.g. Spanish or Indian styles), and sometimes looking to jazz, rock, and popular music styles. There is neither one worldwide nor one pan-European Romani music. Rather, Roma constitute a rich mosaic of groups that distinguish among themselves musically. Although Bulgaria Romani music is distinguished by the genre kyuchek, many Roma have also played Bulgarian music. In the early twentieth century, Roma played eclectic repertoires in urban ensembles that developed into contemporary wedding bands. Over and over again in Eastern Europe we hear of the virtuosic performances of Roma that move people to tears, of the seemingly endless variations in melody, of the capturing of emotion in music. A Bulgarian proverb attests that “svatba bez tsigan ne struva”: a wedding without a Gypsy isn’t worth anything. And yet even in the realm of historical music policy, Roma faced prejudice and discrimination.

Defining Heritage, Tradition, and Bulgarian Folk Music

Prelude and Golden Age

The terms heritage, tradition, and folk had great weight in nineteenth-century Balkan nation-building projects; indeed, they were used to culturally define the nation as a community composed of homogeneous “folk,” thereby excluding Roma as well as other minorities. As folk music became a politicized symbol of the Bulgarian nation, its definitional borders were carefully patrolled, and Romani music was placed clearly outside these borders. Romani music, then, has never been performed in state-sponsored ensembles, festivals, or music schools under the rubric folk. Why, then, did Romani music become so controversial?

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It is no accident that the discipline of folklore arose during the age of romantic nationalism and became a tool for nation building. According to Herder, the architect of “romantic nationalism,” every nation was an organic entity with its own native cultural institutions and pure spirit that are best reflected in the folklore of the peasants. Language, religion, customs, and music were central elements of the folk spirit, and they were assumed to be congruent with a singular community. In the Balkans, folklore emerged at the nexus of defining and valorizing peasant culture; thus, collecting, cataloging, and classifying folk music became a central nationalist project of the late nineteenth century and extended well through the twentieth century. The preoccupation with language/dialects, rural life, and regional variation surfaced in music, especially in collections of folk music, narodna muzika. Note that the word narodno comes from the Slavic narod, meaning synonymously people, nation, and folk. Buchanan points out that under socialism narodno took on the further meaning of “’peoples’ in the sense of an undifferentiated mass of workers laboring towards a common ideological goal” (2006: 34). Buchanan further comments that narodna muzika emerged as simultaneously inclusive (of all things Bulgarian) and exclusive (of all things non-Bulgarian) (ibid.: 36); this could be termed ethnonationalism in music. Moreover, the term “authentic folk music” meant “pure Bulgarian” village music, excluding minorities. Most Bulgarian Roma neither owned land nor practiced the majority religion, Eastern Orthodoxy. Many practiced Islam, which was conflated with Ottoman domination and Turkish culture. Bulgarians (and other Balkan peoples) view their prenationhood past as a time of foreign (Eastern) domination (Buchanan 2006: 37). The Ottoman period is contrasted

Prelude and Golden Age

with the late nineteenth-century fight for “freedom” for the nation/state. Until 1989, Bulgarian scholarly works as well as common parlance depicted the Ottoman era with phrases such as “Turkish slavery” or “five hundred years under the Turkish yoke.” Today, most of the populace still assumes this is factual. However, both Western and Turkish historians as well as post-1989 Balkan historians agree that, at least in the early centuries, the Ottoman Empire was tolerant. The biggest bone of contention is whether the Turks forcibly converted the Bulgarians to Islam; while most Bulgarians believe conversion was forced “by fire and sword,” most scholars agree conversions were voluntary in response to various economic, legal, and religious pressures (ibid.: 295–301). Until recently, historians and folklorists depicted Bulgarian folklore as a refuge from Turkish domination; scholars claimed the peasants clung to their language and customs in an effort to maintain their Bulgarian identity. Music was specifically described as a rallying point around which the idea of nationalism grew. A central task of scholars of the socialist state was to prove that Bulgarian culture was pure, untainted by years of Turkish domination. Later, I will discuss the explicit socialist policies of “Bulgarizing” Roma and other Muslim minorities, but here I emphasize that music was a prime area to display the supposed purity of folk culture, untainted by foreign influence (Silverman 1989). In almost every scholarly work until 1989, it is claimed that Turkish music left hardly a trace among the local Bulgarian populace. This claim is clearly absurd, considering not only the history of Bulgaria but also its location as a crossroads between the Middle East and Europe. Historian M. Todorova points out that the dominant view of the Ottoman past wrongly characterizes it as a “religiously, socially, institutionally, and even racially alien imposition … ” (1997: 162–4).

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During the socialist period in Bulgaria, village music of the Slavs was reaffirmed as authentic folk music, to the exclusion of urban music and the music of minorities, whether they lived in villages or towns. Rice (1994; 1996; 2004) and Buchanan (1996; 2006) have thoroughly explored socialist ideology whereby “authentic folk music” was narrowly defined as “village” music played on “traditional” instruments and was valorized as the soul of the nation. The music of all minorities (Roma, Turks, Pomaks [Bulgarian-speaking Muslims], Gagauz [Eastern Orthodox Turkish speakers], Vlachs [Romanian speakers of northeastern Bulgaria], Armenians, Jews) were totally excluded from the public realm. This ideology was enshrined in radio and television media, folk music ensembles, and folk festivals (Silverman 1989). In these venues, no Romani music was permitted although Roma as individual artists performed Bulgarian music. Furthermore, very few Romani students were admitted to state-sponsored folk music high schools (recall my vignette about Sonya in Chapter 1) or the Plovdiv Academy of Music and Dance that were the training ground for ensembles. Students received constant indoctrination about the purity, the uniqueness, and the specificity of Bulgarian folk music, as if it were an isolated island in the Balkans. In fact, in addition to the derogatory comments about Romani music (specifically wedding music), students regularly heard similar comments about the musics of neighboring countries such as Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia; in the 1980s, students were prohibited from listening to these musics, with severe consequences such as fines (however, they did defy these rules; see below). Still today, the music curriculum rarely includes the music of Bulgarian’s minorities or its neighbors. Moreover, typical Romani instruments such as zurna were (and continue to be) excluded from the music curriculum.

Economic and Social Contexts of Wedding Music

Prelude and Golden Age

Bulgarian folk music in the 1970s revealed an ironic paradox: all official channels disseminated either arranged ensemble music or “authentic” village music, but family celebrations featured bands that were developing a new kind of hybrid wedding music that had no official outlet. Most Bulgarians disliked the former categories of music and adored the latter. While authentic music seemed outdated to them, ensemble music was viewed as an imposed state-sponsored project; in contrast, they spent large sums of money on wedding music. During the socialist period, wedding music was inextricably  tied to large opulent life-cycle events that were the pride of Bulgarians of all ethnicities (Silverman 1992). Weddings were a status symbol: villagers saved for years to invite hundreds of guests for a three-day event. Despite the totalitarian restrictions, this period was the apex of community celebration and display. Ignoring government warnings about “bourgeois conspicuous consumerism,” villagers insisted on abundant food and drink, expensive gifts, and good-quality music. Wedding music was central to the rituals, the banquets, and the dancing that occurred for many hours. Unmetered slow songs and slow instrumental tunes accompanied the rituals and the meals served at long banquet tables, and metric songs and instrumentals encouraged guests to dance (Silverman 1992). Thus, many Romani wedding musicians had steady professional work in that era. From a performer point of view, weddings were, and still are, the true test of versatility and stamina. They are grueling (often musicians play for eight to ten hours a day, for three days), and musicians view them as the apex of professionalism.

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Papazov recalls: “Playing at a wedding is the best education in the world” (Televiziya Shumen 2017). “You play for four to five hours straight; you alternate songs, dances, improvisations. If you are talented you can make a lot of money. I don’t play with notes [notation]—I play with banknotes [money, tips]” (Ot Yabŭlkovo do NyuKasŭl 2011). In comparing weddings to concerts, Papazov narrated “In truth, a wedding is equal to a dozen concerts. There a person can create … A great deal of music is introduced into a wedding, and in a concert, you lack this thrill.” Saxophonist Yuri Yunakov concurred: “You can’t compare a wedding with any other performance. At weddings people have gathered for joy, they know each other. On the concert stage it is more like an examination.” Musicians note that Thracian audiences are very informed listeners and that you can’t just impress them with technique, you have to play naturally and motivate them to dance! Accordionist Petŭr Ralchev recalled: “The music developed at that time precisely because of large weddings—two days and nights—a horo [dance] could be five hours long! The sponsors in Thrace really wanted a good event. We played well so we would be invited to play at other weddings.” Ironically, during socialism, despite low-paying jobs, Bulgarians could save money for their celebrations: there were few luxury items available to purchase and basic needs (rent, food, transportation) were subsidized by the state, and, thus, cheap. In fact, there was conspicuous consumption during socialism. Papazov recalls: “People had a lot of money in those days. Everyone worked. There were huge weddings. They cost a great deal of money: 30,000 leva spent for a banquet, plus 5,000–6,000 for music, plus thousands for tips. I played every day” (Ot Yabŭlkovo do NyuKasŭl 2011). Hiring a famous band with a sound system enhanced a family’s status in the village;

Prelude and Golden Age

the bigger the speakers and the louder the sound, the higher the status. Every band had a “sound man,” who provided, transported, and monitored the system, and received a fee similar to the musicians. As effects such as reverb and delay were introduced, an intentional slightly overloaded texture became desirable. Analyzing the economic framework of wedding music helps us understand state interventions. Because of the phenomenal popularity of some bands, the market for them became grossly inflated, and the socialist state became alarmed at capitalist “conspicuous consumption.” When a family hired a famous band like Trakiya they displayed financial prosperity to neighbors and kin. At the high end of the scale, Trakiya charged approximately 2,000 leva or $1,000 in 1984, not counting tips, for a two-day wedding. This came to about 300 leva a piece. If 200 leva was an average monthly salary for a factory worker in the mid-1980s, then the stars earned in two days what most Bulgarians earned in six weeks. Remember, however, that the majority of wedding musicians were not stars8 and that a more typical salary for a two-day event was 40–50 leva. While nowhere equivalent to a star’s fee, this sum was still roughly equivalent to a week’s salary in a factory. It is not surprising that in some Romani neighborhoods almost every male played an instrument. In fact, among Roma and non-Roma alike, wedding music became a viable economic niche. Hiring music for family events remained in the realm of the free market, even during socialism. A family sponsor would approach the band leader and they would bargain. Performers were contacted at specific locations and times, such as musicians’ meeting places (Peycheva 1999: 236–7), which also functioned as places to socialize, trade music from Turkey, Yugoslavia, and Greece, and discuss fees, styles, and

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sources for buying instruments. Romani clarinetist Mladen Malakov narrated: “Before telephones, if clients couldn’t locate me at the meeting place, they came to my home! People came and waited—they slept in their cars in front of my house; or my wife looked in my notebook and told them where I was playing so they could find me!” Another reliable source of income comes from tips, i.e. from requests for particular songs. This money is called parsa (collection) or bakshish (tips). Patrons often line up at weddings to tell the master of ceremonies which songs and dances they and their families request. They pay by sticking bills on a musician’s forehead or in his instrument, by handing them to the singer, or by throwing them onto the stage, sometimes in an ostentatious manner. Tips are also given when a dancer wants a particular piece of music to continue, or when someone is particularly moved by the music. Tips can generate up to 100 percent more than the contracted fee, and they, too, are divided (Peycheva 1999: 238; Silverman forthcoming). Wedding musicians tell many stories about tipping conflicts; one tells of a guitar player who used gum on the bottom of his shoe to gather fallen bills only for himself! In the 1980s, most musicians had state-sponsored jobs in addition to wedding work. They often played in professional folk music ensembles, for culture centers or in restaurants. Papazov remembers playing at the age of fifteen at the Moskva restaurant in Kŭrdzahli with his cousin Neshko Neshev; he recalls wearing a fake mustache to appear older! Later Neshev played for the Kŭrdzahli Cultural Center. Musicians preferred weekday jobs so their weekends would be free for weddings. The salary for restaurant and ensemble work was approximately 150–200 leva ($75–100) a month in the 1980s, relatively low compared to wedding work. Having regular

Prelude and Golden Age

state work, however, entitled a musician to a pension, medical benefits, and vacation packages. These amenities were denied to full-time wedding musicians, who were also denied the right to join the musician’s union (Buchanan 1996: 207; Rice 1994: 247–50). Moreover, in ideological terms, undertaking wage labor made you into a “worker,” thereby affirming your place as a productive member of society. Still, many wedding musicians resisted wage labor and played only at weddings and concerts. They were permitted to do so, but they were very heavily taxed (Rice 1994: 247). The state, concerned about “conspicuous consumption,” began more vigorously to regulate the earnings of musicians. From 1985, a commission, comprised of governmentdecorated musicians and professors, tested musicians and assigned each band a category based on level of expertise and mastery of “pure” Bulgarian music. The category dictated how much it could charge. Each band also had to submit a repertory list that was approved by the commission. Wedding musicians were extremely upset over the imposition of the category (and taxation) system. Papazov complained: “We had to pay high taxes on our wedding income. In the 1980s, we were examined in a test by three professors who knew nothing about music.” His wife, Bulgarian singer Maria Karafezieva, continued: “At one category test Professor Manol Todorov told me, ‘can’t you sing more authentically? You shouldn’t put in such modern styling!’ OK, I said, and I imitated his mother Atanaska Todorova, who sang like a cat! We both started laughing.”  The category system  was enforced only selectively. Almost immediately after it was implemented, musicians began to circumvent the system by charging the official fee but requiring more money under the table. During the 1980s, wedding music thus stubbornly clung to the free market domain.

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The Stars and the Style Emerge

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The wedding style featured on Balkanology emerged in the 1970s when Papazov and Neshko Neshev began experimenting with folk music. As cousins growing up in the Turkish Romani neighborhood in Kŭrdzhali, they shared musical sensibilities, and they covertly shared bootleg cassettes of Western jazz and rock music. At that time, all forms of Western popular music were prohibited as “capitalist corruptions.” Papazov stated: “We listened to jazz on illegal cassettes of Charlie Parker and Benny Goodman.” However, they have never claimed that they play Western jazz; in contrast, they use the term “Bulgarian jazz.” They harnessed improvisational style of jazz and the power, volume, driving rhythm, instrumentation, and electrification of rock and popular music. The precursors to this new style were older Thracian folk musicians who broke out of the mold of folk music in the 1960s. The Pŭrvomayska Grupa (the First of May Group, named after the town commemorating the workers’ holiday), the Sadovska Grupa, and the Lenovska Grupa were already using clarinet, saxophone, accordion, trumpet, acoustic bass, acoustic guitar, and drum set, and inserting freer improvisations. Trakiya members cite as their models for Bulgarian music Stoicho Kuzmov, Stefan Filipov, and Atanas Milev (respectively Bulgarian clarinet, trumpet, and accordion players; the latter was Ivan Milev’s father) in the Pŭrvomayska Grupa, and Bayram (Biser) Kaev. Interestingly, Romani musicians such as Kaev and Ramadan Lolov (from western Bulgaria) only played Bulgarian music; similarly, Romani clarinetist Mladen Malakov (from Kotel, North Bulgaria) recalls that his father only played Bulgarian music. This is evidence of how Roma were and are often well known for Bulgarian

music. Papazov, as well as Nikola Iliev and Mladen Malakov, also admire conservatory-trained professor and clarinetist Petko Radev for his rich tone quality. Papazov, Yunakov, Neshev, and Ali all learned Turkish and Romani music from their male relatives. They also cite as models the Turkish Romani clarinetist Halil Dzhamgyoz from Kŭrdzhali (Peycheva 1999: 136–7).9 Ivo specifically recalls Kŭrdzhali clarinetist Kirisha: He was my neighbor. I was very young—in 1962 there was a panair [gathering] and the cooks were distracted when they heard Kirisha play. They forgot their skara [grilled meat] and the tent caught fire! I learned from Kirisha informally, no lessons, just by listening; and I also learned from the radio. I also listened to my grandfather Sali who played zurna and my father Mehmet Hapaz who played zurna and then switched to clarinet. Hapaz in Turkish means a furrow—like for planting tobacco; he was born in the tobacco fields.

Prelude and Golden Age

Firstly, it is important to note that the precursors to wedding music included ethnic Bulgarians as well as Roma. In fact, bands were and are often mixed. Secondly, the majority of well-known musicians were from Thrace, as I mentioned above. Thirdly, virtually all instrumentalists were male.10 When women performed, they were singers, usually spouses or other relatives of musicians. Also note that the musical background of the early wedding musicians varied considerably, from a few conservatory graduates who could read music (e.g. ethnic Bulgarians such Nikola Iliev, Petŭr Ralchev, Georgi Yanev, and Ivan Milev) to the majority who play by ear. Romani musicians tend to play by ear and acquire skills informally, similar to how most ethnic Bulgarians

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learned before the 1960s. Ethnic Bulgarians are more likely to have attended the folk music schools that emphasize musical literacy. The wedding music tradition, however, is strictly oral—notation is never used.

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The Ivo Papazov Phenomenon

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Ork. Trakiya emerged as the premier band in the 1970s due to Papazov’s vision and talent. Ivo Papazov was born Ibryam Hapazov11 in Kŭrdzhali in 1952 of Turkish Romani ancestry, and founded Ork. Trakiya with Neshev in 1974. In the 1980s, he was the highest-paid wedding musician in the country and was in such demand that people waited months to engage him. People even got married on midweek evenings rather than the usual Sunday to accommodate his busy schedule. He narrated: “Some people came to see me about moving their wedding earlier, but I already had engagements. I offered them other musicians—but they wouldn’t hear of a replacement. Only later I found out that the bride was quite pregnant and she had aborted the child so that we, only we, could play for her” (Sŭrnev 1988: 23). The family that hired Papazov achieved high social status not only for their monetary expenditure, but also for being the guaranteed focus of attention. Whenever Trakiya played at a village event, uninvited people showed up from miles around to dance in the public parts of the event or merely to crowd outside the tent or banquet hall to listen to the music and catch a glimpse of the stars. In Chapter 1, I told how at a 1980 wedding in Iskra, a village near Haskovo, approximately 200 uninvited fans showed up, some from several hundred

miles away, to hear Ivo play (see Figure 2). The music went on continuously for five hours and resumed after dinner for another four hours at an indoor location. Admired both for his technical and his creative talents, Papazov is known for his masterful improvisations, creativity, stamina, daringly fast tempi, forays into jazz, numerous compositions, and charisma. “A virtuoso in the instinctive meaning of the word, improviser of the highest class, he quite freely led the horo into jazz, built on a Bulgarian musical foundation—something, which elsewhere we didn’t find done with such mastery and strength … He has set the tone for a large musical movement with hundreds of thousands of followers” (Kaufman 1987: 79). When a journalist asked Yunakov why no one in the orchestra looks at the audience, he replied, “There’s no time. Have you ever seen how a hunted wild rabbit runs? It runs zig-zag, stops, returns, does 8s 16s … That’s how Ivo plays. And we chase him like hounds with our tongues hanging out” (Sŭrnev 1988: 25). Bagpipe player Tanyo Marinov compared Papazov to Beethoven because he ushered in a new music style that influenced decades of subsequent music performance. In the 1980s, Papazov’s popularity was enormous: The concert hall literally exploded when Ivo Papazov, the uncontested king, got on stage. It was the apotheosis. I compared it in spirit to Alan Stivell, Joan Baez, … the [jazz saxophone player of the bee-bop era] commentary after listening to an Ivo Papazov cassette: ‘A man can’t play like that.’ I also thought of the beginning of the century in the slums of New Orleans when jazz was beginning. (Gadjev 1987)

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modern bards I respect deeply. I thought about Art Pepper’s

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Numerous fans testified to his super-star status: I have 100 cassettes of Ivo Papazov. When he plays I feel weak in the knees. His compositions are unending. For at least 40– 50 years there will be no one who can surpass him … He is a magician! A master! A phenomenon in folk music that we won’t see repeated soon … When Ivo Papazov plays, I stop breathing. I can’t explain why. Can you explain love?

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(Sŭrnev 1988: 23)

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Papazov played music from a young age: at the age of nine, he switched from accordion to clarinet. Legends circulate about Ivo and the early emergence of his talent. His mother, for example, supposedly tied his umbilical cord with a thread from his father’s clarinet. Papazov narrated: “when a male baby is born, they put a clarinet in the cradle with him.” As explained above, Papazov comes from several generations of zurna players; he remarked that “all our grandfathers were zurna players.” He recalled that his elder male relatives were some of the first musicians to switch to clarinet; before World War II one of them “traded a cow for a clarinet on a trip to Greece. That’s how the clarinet was introduced to my family.” Clarinets were valued over zurnas because of their newness, versatility, greater range, ease of playing in different keys, and chromatic possibilities. For a period of time zurnas and clarinets were combined: Ivo showed me a photograph of his father playing clarinet at a wedding in the 1950s with a zurna player and a tŭpan player. Today Ivo plays a Boehm Bb instrument made by Selmer. In his early years, before amplification was introduced, Papazov played acoustically. Conditions were very challenging for musicians. Papazov narrates: “I remember how we travelled to weddings—no cars, no roads. I was eleven or twelve years

old, carrying the tŭpan. A bus would let us off in a town and then we would walk—kilometers and kilometers in the cold, the rain. At the end of an event there would be drunk guests … ” Childhood leisure was rare. Papazov recalls: “On the way home from a banquet, it was snowing and Neshko and I saw a hill. So we stopped and used his accordion case as a sled. We hardly played as children, so we really enjoyed that!” One legend relates that when Papazov was in his teens, he went to a local restaurant and was invited to play outdoors when the resident orchestra took a break. Even though it was raining, the diners came outside, wrapping themselves in tablecloths, and for a half hour they didn’t budge. Years after that they were still asking, “Isn’t that boy coming to play again?” (Sŭrnev 1988: 23). Some have attested to his magical powers: fans have lifted their children to touch Ivo “for good luck.” Another story tells of five boys who showed up late for their induction into the army, but were willing to take the consequences because Ivo had played for their soldier sendoff celebration. When asked by the commanding officer why they were negligent, they answered, “You haven’t heard how Ivo Papazov plays!” (ibid.). In the 1983 film Sŭnuvam Muzika, Papazov stated: In a dream, my mother gave me my clarinet and I started to play; I recorded it. The next morning my mother asked— what happened? I said nothing at all—I didn’t remember indeed, I had recorded music! … You don’t learn music. It comes from God … The soul of a musician never rests … sometimes I play nine hours day.

He further claimed, “I can eat the same dish twenty times, but I can’t play the same thing the same way twice” (Sŭrnev 1988:

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anything. She said you got up and recorded music. And yes,

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25). Papazov’s wife Maria Karafezieva remarked in 2018 that “his life is music.” In 2005, Papazov embellished: “Wedding music existed for many years but I modernized it with a new style, modern chords, modern accompaniment, a contemporary musicality with more improvisation. And the young generation liked it; from them we received our popularity.” When pressed to explain his style, Papazov answered: “I play in Papazov style. I play in Balkan style, I play in the style of ethnojazz. I play our jazz … I really get angry when people say they can’t categorize me …” He recalled: “Neshko and I changed the style. I just can’t stay in one place. I have to develop. The old ways didn’t please us.” Romani clarinetist Mladen Malakov recalled: “Ivo was very interesting for all us musicians. He gave us what we needed; he opened the way; he gave us a great deal of music—solo ideas, arrangements. He changed the music for us. His sound and technique are amazing.” Similarly, Romani keyboardist Vasil Denev stated: “He created a musical revolution in Bulgaria.” Although Papazov now identifies as Roma, as a child he thought he was Turkish. He narrated: I was raised thinking I was Turkish. To this day, my sister argues with me that we are Turkish even though she is very dark and I am one of the few light-skinned people in my family. But I Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

knew I was Romani deep down inside—we just didn’t face

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it—it was an insult. On our passports, it said “Tsgani” but we said we were Turks. My grandparents were basket makers, sieve makers; they sold these items, they showed me how to make baskets. I realized I was Romani from language, history, mannerisms, culture. I knew it inside, but to accept it is another thing. Some members of the older generation, such as my grandfather, spoke Romani; in my dialect of

Turkish there are Romani words … My people are Roma but they won’t admit it. Being called Gypsy was insulting, so they switched to Turkish language and identity.

This practice of Roma identifying as Turks was and still is quite widespread in the southern Balkans. According to historians, these Roma adopted the Turkish language during the Ottoman period in their effort to move up in the social and economic hierarchy; they eventually lost the Romani language (Marushiakova and Popov 1997; 2000).

Balkanology’s Artists Accordionist Neshko Neshev, born Nedzhyatin Ibryamov in 1954, grew up with Papazov and helped found Trakiya. He started playing at the age of ten: I had a great desire for music—I took my accordion to school and played during snack. My father Ibryam Mustafov played clarinet, Bulgarian, and Turkish music, and my grandfather played tŭpan. From a young age, I went with my father to panairi [gatherings]. We put on quite a show. At the age of ten I played my accordion over my head.

I learned that my friend and his parents took the professors out to lunch. Through connections [vrŭzki] he got in, but I was not admitted. They said I could get into a school in

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In 1978, when Neshev was twenty-four years of age, he wanted to audition for the Plovdiv music school but accordion was not permitted, so he had to switch to clarinet; he took clarinet lessons for a year and auditioned with forty others for three slots. He recalled:

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Sofia or Kotel but my father would not let me travel so far away. My father said—never mind—I will teach you folk music. I also learned classical music and notation from

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private teachers.

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From the age of sixteen, Neshev played for the Kŭrdzhali Turkish Theater and later for the town’s Cultural Center. Neshko is also a prolific composer and arranger. In 1982, he composed a suite based on the music of Bulgarians who had lived along the Aegean, titled Belomorkso (The White Sea, meaning the Aegean). He narrated: “The communists wouldn’t let me use that name—they said that is Greece! So I had to call it Mominsko (girl’s dance); after communism fell, we could change it to Belomorsko.” Because Neshko had a steady government job, and did not really like wedding work, he did not play with Trakiya regularly until 1986. When Papazov was jailed (see below), Neshev was in Finland with the Kŭrdzhali ensemble. Thus, through the 1970s and early 1980s, Papazov recruited other excellent accordionists such as Romani star Ali Gardzhev (who was the first husband of singer Maria Karafezieva) and the brilliant Bulgarian accordionist Petŭr Ralchev, who also played with Ork. Orfei for many years. In the 1970s, Papazov performed with Paicho Ivanov, a talented self-taught Romani drummer from Plovidiv, Thrace. Salif Ali (whose Bulgarian name was either Aleksandŭr Mihailov or Stefan Angelov) joined Trakiya as drummer in 1983 and plays on Balkanology; he was born in Kŭrdzhali in 1961 of Turkish Romani ancestry. His father played tŭpan, his grandfather played clarinet, and he learned to play by ear. Ali is known for his high energy, wild temperament, and brilliant solo improvisations (see Figure 5). He, too, recalls having to get an official “category” after being examined by a drum teacher. He narrated: “Before joining Trakiya, I only had played Turkish music, but I quickly

Figure 5  Salif Ali, drummer in Ork. Trakiya, 1980s. Note the young fans crowded in the tent. Courtesy of Salif Ali.

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learned Bulgarian music. I was playing with other bands, but then I agreed to work only with Ivo; he took my driver’s license as a down payment so I wouldn’t play with others!” In the early years, Papazov recruited Turkish Romani guitarist Gyurai Kamzamalov. According to Kalin Kirilov, the weddingstyle accompanists (guitarists, accordionists, bassists, and later synthesizer players) developed new ways of harmonizing music, following the unwritten rule of “do not play the same thing twice” (2015: 113); he posits that the reason this happened was because “they valued freedom of expression” and had “a lack of training in Western harmony” (ibid.: 113–14), thus they had few constraints. Gyurai was renowned for his “rhythmic precision and harmonic rhythm” (ibid.: 115), and Bulgarian accompanists today often praise “Gyurai style” (ibid.: 125).

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In the mid-1980s, Gyurai was replaced by his brother, guitarist Aidŭn (Bulgarian name Andrei). Radi Kazakov, an arranger and composer also of Turkish ancestry, joined Trakiya on bass guitar, and plays with Aidŭn on Balkanology. According to Kirilov, “Gradually, wedding style guitarists developed an innovative accompaniment technique, ‘bass and rhythm,’ in which bass notes were played on downbeats and chords were strummed on off beats … Both bass and chord were played with down strokes which also required a demanding righthand technique” (2015: 114). Several harmonic advantages emerged when two people paying bass and guitar replaced a single guitar: “jazz chords, elaborated bass lines, an additional lower octave, … fuller chords in the guitar, more syncopations and transparent harmonic textures” (ibid.: 140). On the other hand, bass and guitar harmonies are hard to synchronize. Kirilov posits that Trakiya never incorporated standard jazz harmonies for several reasons: jazz was strictly forbidden; audiences wanted familiar danceable tunes where they could follow the meter and the melody; the short phrasing of melodies did not lend themselves to jazz progressions; and finally that “harmony always had a supporting role. In Papazov’s own words … ‘soloists run and accompanists chase them’” (ibid.: 139). Nevertheless, by the late 1980s, the door opened to include more jazz-like harmonies such as on Balkanology. Papazov asked saxophonist Yuri Yunakov (Muslim name Husein Huseinov) to join Trakiya in 1985, after he heard him perform with Ivan Milev’s band Mladost (meaning “youth”) at the Stambolovo Festival (see below). Yunakov was born in 1958 in the Romani/Turkish-speaking neighborhood of Haskovo, Thrace, and, like Papazov, considered himself a Bulgarian Turk until quite recently. “We never said we were Roma, we didn’t identify as Roma. Even today, they [his relatives] don’t identify

He listened, he drank … and he said to me, ‘I want you in my band.’ … At first I refused—I was scared of his music. I hardly played Bulgarian music before that … I needed a great deal

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as Roma because they don’t know the Romani language.” However, Yunakov’s father did speak Romani. In his youth, Yunakov was a boxer and won several championships, but realized that “you couldn’t make a living from boxing. You couldn’t support your family. All the best sportsmen from Bulgaria had emigrated. There was always discrimination against Roma.” He also recalls a bank robbery in Haskovo: “I was playing in a restaurant and they made me stop playing in the middle, they took me as a suspect. I was a boxer, Romani. We were in jail all night. My wife was pregnant; she asked them, “why are you holding my husband?’ but they lied and said, ‘we don’t have anybody here.’  The true culprit was the son of the Secretary General of the Communist party in Haskovo. That is the kind of corruption we suffered.” Yunakov recounted his musical education: “I’ll tell you my life history in short form: all my male relatives are musicians. If a male child was born, he had to become a musician.” “The neighborhood was my school,” Yuri insists, meaning that informal music instruction was the rule. As a young child, he learned to play the tŭpan to accompany his father and older brother at weddings, and then switched to clarinet. While his own community preferred Turkish music, being professional necessitated knowing multiple repertoires, including Bulgarian. Yuri’s older brother was his model because of his extensive ties to Bulgarian as well as Turkish music. Yuri mastered Bulgarian music and the saxophone under the auspices of the legendary accordionist Ivan Milev, a famous ethnic Bulgarian accordionist, arranger, and band leader. In 1982, Yuri was playing in a restaurant when Milev walked in.

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of time to master his repertoire—maybe a month and a half … Ivan was up at seven or eight in the morning and we would play for twelve or thirteen hours. People were still sleeping but Ivan was ready to play. It was very gratifying … I found strength in myself.

When Papazov subsequently invited Yunakov to join Trakiya, he was scared, but he accepted: I didn’t refuse. I was ready, prepared. At that time, every musician’s dream was to play with Ivo Papazov. We played together for ten years … I spent more time with Ivo Papazov than with my wife! … Everyone wanted us to play at their celebrations—weddings, engagements … One day we would be at one end of Bulgaria, the next day at the other end, sometimes two weddings in one day, or even three. It was very hard, but we needed the money. [Below and in Silverman 2009, I narrate Yunakov’s story during postsocialism.]

Finally, I turn to Trakiya’s singer Maria Karafezieva, an ethnic Bulgarian born in the village of Bŭdishte near Stara Zagora, Thrace. As one of the founders of wedding vocal style, she was first married to Ali Gardzhev, an accordionist in Trakiya; after they divorced, she married Papazov. She is self-taught. I learned from no one. I became a singer with only two songs,

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but I can learn a song after hearing it only once. I started

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singing on stage when I was seventeen. There were no music schools, and even if there were, my parents would have never allowed me to move out to attend them; they wanted me to become a dentist …In ninth grade, my school sent me to a competition and Filip Kutev heard me; he wanted me for his choir in Sofia, but my step-father said no, and that was that … But I decided to become a folk singer. Later, a man recognized

me from the competition and asked me to replace a singer who was ill. I figured that my parents would never find out, so I secretly went. I did the concert with two songs, and got encores—I didn’t know any other songs. But then I started learning and started writing my own songs—texts and melodies; I also have published poetry …. My birth father died when I was only one and I have a lot of sadness in my songs [note that her two sons with Gardzhev both died]. I don’t perform for applause; I perform to convey my emotions.

In Chapter 4, I will continue the story of these artists during postsocialism; now I turn to the prohibitions against wedding music in the 1980s.

The Political Crackdown in the 1980s Despite (or perhaps because of ) its popularity, wedding music became a target of state prohibitions in the 1980s. I have mentioned that it was excluded from official governmentsponsored media; it was also denigrated and condescendingly labeled by scholars as “clichéd” or “kitsch.” Professor Manol Todorov wrote: The harmonic language is modest and when it is complicated it is unconvincing … Often they master clichés that are is not carefully chosen, they do not perform the best folk songs. Very often pieces of doubtful Bulgarian ancestry are preformed, songs made up ‘especially’ for weddings. These pieces, devoid of artistic value, are quickly disseminated. (1985: 31)

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imitative and chaotic … The repertoire [of the singers]

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology 48

K. Georgiev referred to wedding music as stateless, impetuous, and out of control, like “cosmopolitan water” where “Bulgarian music is only a glaze-like covering.” He further laments that no one has told wedding musicians which influences are good and which are bad (1986: 90). Professor Nikolai Kaufman wrote: “Recently it has been pointed out that these wedding bands are the illegitimate children of the music profession. The basis of this attitude was that the bands were not successful in performing Bulgarian and foreign music and lacked professional ability in harmony, construction of form, and maintaining pure Bulgarian style” (1987: 78–9). The most common criticism leveled against wedding music was that it incorporated foreign elements and did not retain the “purity” of Bulgarian folk music. Earlier in this chapter, I outlined the roots of this preoccupation with purity. Wedding music was, ironically, considered simultaneously too Western (like jazz and rock) and too Eastern (like Romani, Turkish, and Middle Eastern music). Manol Todorov espoused this position to me in 1985: “No one is playing pure folk material. We must keep Bulgarian music Bulgarian. Foreign elements— Spanish, Indian, Turkish—don’t belong. You wouldn’t throw foreign words in the middle of a sentence. A Spanish motif doesn’t belong in Bulgarian folk music.” In print,  Todorov reiterated: “We heard harmonic stamps, clichéd in rhythmic treatments, which are foreign to the melodic tenor of Bulgarian folk music. In essence, the basic task should be the war against the foreign and clichéd in melody, harmony, and rhythm, and the search for contemporary musical thought resting on the great richness of Bulgarian national musical folklore” (1985: 31). This rhetoric about musical purity is directly related to the 1980s state policy of monoethnism and the concomitant

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regulation of the display of Muslim ethnicity. This included name changing for all Muslims and prohibitions against Muslim clothing (such as wide women’s pantaloons), circumcision, the speaking of Turkish and Romani languages, the distribution of Muslim literature, and the banning of the zurna and Romani and Turkish music. School administrators strip-searched male students, bus drivers refused to pick up women in Muslim garb, and police officers imposed fines for speaking Romani and Turkish in public. Many cultural practices did not disappear but rather were driven underground or into the private sphere, which became a refuge from state regulation. Forced name changes started as early as the 1970s with Pomaks (Bulgarian-speaking Muslims), followed in the 1980s by Roma and Turks. Roma rarely resisted overtly, rather, they resisted covertly, such as using prohibited names and playing their music in private. Some Turks and Pomaks, on the other hand, overtly resisted, arming themselves and losing their lives in the process. In spite of international outrage, the climax of this process occurred in the summer of 1989 when 370,000 Muslims departed Bulgaria for Turkey. Although the government claimed it was a voluntary move (dubbing it Golyamata Ekskursiya: The Great Excursion), it was, de facto, an expulsion. Like all Muslim Roma and Turks, Trakiya instrumentalists were forced to change their names. Yuri Yunakov stated: “I had to change my Turkish name, Husein Huseinov, to become a boxer. My trainer told me, ‘If you want to succeed as a boxer, you have to make your name Bulgarian.’ And my father was so angry at me for that, he wouldn’t let me into the house for years.” Neshev had to change his name when he married a Bulgarian woman. Salif Ali became Stefan Angelov for Balkanology, and Aidŭn Kamzamalov became Andrei. Papazov bitterly recalls:

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My mother’s mother was Pomak from the Rodops so we witnessed their name changes in the 1970s. The police were on my trail for a long time, but I was constantly traveling. Finally, they caught up with me and said,  “we have orders to take you to headquarters. If you won’t go voluntarily, we’ll handcuff you.” So … my name was changed from Ibryam Hapazov to Ivo Papazov.

Wedding music became a primary target; its Romani and Turkish manifestations (i.e. kyuchek) were banned entirely, and the jazz, rock, and non-Bulgarian elements in the Bulgarian repertoire were cleansed. Papazov remembers these difficult years with bitterness: We played in spite of the fact that many composers did not like our style. At that time there were people who were in charge of the style, the order, the framework of the music. They didn’t like our style because we crossed the boundaries. We had more freedom, more improvisation. They didn’t want us to experiment with authentic music—my music was prohibited in folk music schools so the students wouldn’t forget authentic music. On the contrary, we used the authentic, but combined with the modern.

He describes the challenges of these years:

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We started to create a new style into which we mixed

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Romani elements. Even though it was forbidden, we put it in. And for that reason, we were not recognized for so many years. We mixed styles and we saw that it enriched Bulgarian folklore. There is nothing at all wrong with mixing two folklore styles into one. And there was an incredible resonance between the styles, Turkish, Romani and Bulgarian. It was very beautiful; there were more possibilities

for improvisation. The people loved precisely this, but the government officials in charge of culture started to follow us around, to harass us, to prohibit us from playing. This was the reason they didn’t let us appear on radio, even though we really wanted to record our pieces. They chased us; they fined us.

Salif Ali narrated: “In Karlovo we were cited and our license plates were confiscated. They cut off my pony tail, and we had to pay huge fines and change our names. So many times we ran away from the stage when the police arrived.” Yunakov similarly recalls: In the early days, we didn’t add many new musical elements because we were afraid of the authorities. Those were very difficult years. Our orchestra was the most well known in all of Bulgaria. We were so well known that there were ministers who weren’t as well known as we were. Every kid knew us! But the most significant part of this story is that Romani and Turkish music was forbidden. I was in prison for fifteen days twice … This was a shameful thing, all because of music! We could stir the poorest and richest with our music. But unfortunately, Bulgarian politicians mixed music with politics. According to me, music has nothing to do with politics; I think music remains music. Our politicians made music political … Image yourself in a big field, in a tent where we hold our weddings, and you see fifteen police cars running, because he had been in prison already and he didn’t want to go back. They arrested the sponsor of the wedding also, and, if we were in a restaurant, the owner too … But in spite of this, we played Romani and Turkish music anyway. Jailing us was the most shameful thing for our country and

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coming. We run away. Imagine Ivo Papazov with his weight,

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everyone learned about it via newspaper and radio. They put us, the most famous, in jail, so other musicians would see. They made examples of us so others would be afraid.

By the mid-1980s, wedding musicians faced a coordinated program of harassment, fines, and imprisonment. Trakiya members were especially targeted as examples for other musicians. Ivo stated, “In sum, they wanted to slap the hand of Romani and Turkish folklore to show that, look, the greatest artists are in jail—the rest of you, be careful. They wanted to warn people not to make weddings like that. It was a horrible time.” Trakiya members’ license plates were confiscated and they were fined, beaten, and jailed; in 1982, in prison their heads were shaved and they were forced to do menial work. Papazov recalled what had transpired in jail: Thank God we were saved—we survived … I had … to break cement. By the fifteenth day everyone was my friend and they all gave me Marlboros to smoke. Some of my friends from the army saved us, otherwise we would have served longer or been sent to a labor camp, and when you are sent to a camp, you never return. A police officer warned me that they would send me to a camp to get rid of me—only me— the others were being released. I got in touch with someone I knew from the army who loved music, and he saved me.

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Actually, he came at 3:00 a.m. the very morning they were

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supposed to send me to a camp, and he arranged for my release.

Ivo vividly remembers that he was charged with “small instances of hooliganism” because no official law existed about kyucheks: “There was no evidence—they had nothing to charge me with! … There was no law about music I had broken! They

charged me with political propaganda, that I didn’t respect their laws, … as if I were a terrorist!” Regardless of ethnicity and religion, a musician was guilty for performing wedding music; for example, Ivo’s Bulgarian wife Maria Karafezieva was also incarcerated. Ivo recalled: “Maria was inside too—she was arrested but they couldn’t charge her because she only sang Bulgarian songs. They had to let her go. She yelled at them: ‘We get Roma to listen to Bulgarian music.’” Karafezieva elaborated: “I have a mouth to set things straight! The investigator said to me: ‘Dear, didn’t you care what music the Gypsies and Turks were listening to?’ I said ‘for thirty years I have sung to these people—they love Bulgarian music and now you are ruining everything!’ You cannot prohibit music; the more you control it, the more they want it.” Ivo explained how musicians tried to avoid the prohibitions, but ultimately faced them. If they couldn’t play in the official media, they concentrated on weddings: So we started to play illegally. We played at weddings because these are private and nobody could tell you what to play. People would record us at weddings and sell these tapes, and we became very famous. We were approached for weddings because people wanted to hear this music live. We wanted to work in restaurants but they wouldn’t let us. We still played Romani weddings even though they prohibited us from playing Romani music. It is absurd not us; they wouldn’t let us play that type of music, but it is impossible to omit this type of music … And after we were in jail we weren’t allowed to play at festivals. They followed us everywhere so we had to stop playing weddings for a while. I didn’t want to be arrested a second time.

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to play kyucheks at a Romani wedding. So they hounded

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Along with musicians, wedding sponsors were also arrested; all were enraged that the government intruded in the domestic sphere to ruin the events for which they had prepared for years. Papazov remembers how patrons protested in front of the Ministry for Internal Affairs in Haskovo: “My patrons protested while I was in jail. Our incarcerations ruined their weddings, their celebrations. You know, when Bulgarians celebrate how many people gather; the sponsors prepare food and drink. You know how much money they had already spent preparing! People came from Plovdiv to protest because I cancelled so many weddings …” In 1983, Anri Kulev directed a short avant-garde documentary film about Papazov, Sŭnuvam Muzika (I Dream of Music). Neshev recalled that when the film come out, Trakiya members and Kulev were questioned by the police, who demanded to know why there were scenes of Romani weddings in the film. Police asked them why they had ties to “the traitor” Milcho Leviev (Bulgarian jazz pianist and fan of Papazov, who had migrated to the United States) who helped produce the film. The film was banned after being shown in only three cities. Musicians and sponsors developed creative tactics for avoiding incarceration; for example, at village events, family members kept watch (often from the roof ) for approaching police officers. An obvious tactic was to hide when the police approached. If it was too late to hide, musicians would morph a kyuchek into a traditional Bulgarian pravo horo (dance in 2/4). Yunakov admitted that, despite lookouts, running away was sometimes the only alternative: “As soon as the police approached, most of us started running. It was humorous to see Ivo, as heavy as he is, running into the forest behind the

stage. The worst thing was to run from the police. That was the highest insult. You were supposed to stay and face the consequences.” Here, Yunakov alludes to the complicated issue of resistance, suggesting that the bravest response would have been to continue playing kyucheks and face the harsh consequences. But resistance is never simple: musicians, though brave, were survivors—they did not seek to become heroes because of lofty anti-government principles. They defied the state because of economic rather than moral imperatives. Music was their profession, and they made a living by serving their patrons who requested kyucheks. At the same time, moral outrage accompanied economic motives. Musicians did not shy away from critiquing the absurdity of the policy and its racist message. Resistance to prohibitions was also found among young musician fans. Ripe breeding grounds for wedding musicians were the folk music high schools and the Plovdiv Music Academy. Although playing wedding music was strictly forbidden at the schools, students would regularly sneak out on weekends to play or to listen to the famous musicians at weddings (see Chapter 1). After speaking with students at the Shiroka Lŭka music school in 1985, I made the following journal entry: All the students talk about is wedding music. They are “Who is the accordionist with Ivo now?” They live for this music but they are not allowed to listen to it or perform it. Playing weddings is strictly prohibited. The administration recently issued uniforms and confiscated all of their “civilian” clothing so they can’t sneak off and pass unrecognized.

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infatuated with it, and they test us to see what we know:

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Similarly, musician Nikolai Kolev recalled: We students at Shiroka Lŭka were forbidden to play wedding music even in our dormitory rooms. We could be dropped from the school if we were found at weddings. In fact, a friend of mine was kicked out of the Plovdiv Academy because he went to Varna to play in a restaurant. In spite of this, my friends and I would slip out at night and somehow get to weddings to hear Ivo or Nikola Iliev, and then sneak back in, or sleep on a bench somewhere. We were crazy for the new music. The atmosphere … was very enriching— not just the classes, but outside of class. We played and listened to wedding music all the time even though it was

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prohibited.

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Many students spoke about being threatened about not playing wedding music by their music teachers, of ignoring them, of sneaking out to a wedding, and of seeing their teachers at these weddings! Resistance was located in many sites, even the most official. As described above, the teachers at the schools lectured their students about the evils of wedding music but sometimes broke rules to patronize it. Papazov recalls that some of his most ardent fans were police officers, and he even played at their private events. He claims that when he was arrested, the judge loved his music and thus he received a soft sentence (Cartwright 2006). In 1985, I attended the baptism of Romani kaval player Matyo Dobrev’s son at his home in Straldzha, Thrace. One of the guests of honor was a local police officer who danced kyuchek with abandon. Similarly, when I told folklore scholars that I was studying Roma, they responded with the official line, “they don’t exist,” but there was always an ironic smile.

These examples amplify Herzfeld’s point that “cultural intimacy”12 with the state is highly nuanced. Herzfeld commented on my last example above by pointing out, “for a brief instant we see the official representatives of state ideology as human beings capable of wincing at the absurdity of what they must nevertheless proclaim” (2000: 226). He further explained that, despite the external formality of states, they can be viewed in social terms as “intimate apparatuses.” The state embodies “potentially disreputable but familiar cultural matter” which is “the very substance of what holds people together … Some of that substance even includes resistance to the state itself” (ibid.: 224). On both sides, the official and the unofficial, there were cracks in dogma. Police officers arrested musicians but secretly loved kyuchek; wedding musicians not only resisted but also accommodated to the state. In the cracks in official ideology, then, wedding music thrived.

State Ambivalence

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Resistance is neither singular nor pure; as Ortner (1995) points out, it is always paired with collaboration, or more precisely, resistance often involved selective accommodation to the state. Moreover, the state was not monolithic. Below, I discuss cracks within the official sphere and its relationship to black musical markets. In the 1980s, life was filled with many ambivalences: although it was illegal, most Bulgarians procured Western currency on the black market with inflated rates; although it was illegal, most Bulgarians obtained Western goods; and although it was illegal, most Bulgarians listened to kyucheks. Verdery explicates how the socialist states permitted the unofficial sphere to operate so rebellion would not erupt

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(1996). The government, then, simultaneously prohibited wedding music, accommodated to it, sold its products, and tried to control it from within. In the mid-1980s, for example, the state recording company Balkanton released several versions of wedding music that were sanitized of foreign melodies, jazz, and kyucheks. Manol Todorov wrote the following for the liner notes for Papazov’s state-sponsored Balkanton record (Ivo Papazov, 1989, Balkanton BHA 11330): “All this is based upon the sound instrumental tradition of Bulgarian folklore, without the introduction of foreign elements, motifs, or manner of performance.” Todorov told me that he instructed Ivo not to play anything foreign at the recording session or else the album wouldn’t be pressed. On these albums, wedding music was not only censored of foreign influences but also arranged by state composers. In the process of “arrangement,” much of the wild, spontaneous, improvisatory style was lost. An ensemble-type orchestra was added as back up to the band, further distancing the music from its typical format. Musicians greatly resented these arrangements, claiming they detracted from the music and merely filled the pockets of arrangers with money. One musician complained, “We got paid very little for our record. But the composer who did the arrangement got paid much more. He only added a few violins and contrabass and got his name on the record as ‘arranged by …’.” Neither wedding musicians nor their fans accepted these Balkanton releases as representative. In the late 1980s, the state made accommodations to the surging interest in wedding music—in 1987, Trakiya was allowed to play on television without a backup orchestra, and the viewer turnout was enormous. Fans were glued to their home television sets or crowded around televisions in hotel

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lobbies. In 2005, I viewed the 1987 show13 with Ivo, Neshko, Yuri, and Salif and asked them if someone in the government spoke to them about omitting kyucheks. Ivo answered: “They didn’t need to speak to me. I had just been in jail for playing kyucheks. A few years earlier they made me change my name. It was absurd to think of playing kyucheks. They would have hung me.” This brings up the issue of self-censorship. Musicians developed the ability to sense when they could push the limits of the state and when they had to tow the party line. Economics, not lofty moral principles, were the main motive guiding musicians. They reasoned that official versions would enhance the value of their unofficial live performances. In addition, they did not want to incite the government by refusing to cooperate. James Scott’s work on “everyday protest” (1990) suggests that analyzing power requires examining its effects on the weak. The hegemony of the state often does not depend on brainwashing but on how public discourse triggers shifts in consciousness. Both wedding musicians and the state negotiated with each other, and both sides may have perceived “the advantage of avoiding open confrontation” (Sivaramakrishnan 2005: 350). In addition, musicians did not command full agency nor did the socialist state command total hegemony. “On the contrary, at times social structures, roles, statuses … modify agency and its consequences. … Actors may engage in everyday acts of resistance or desist from them under structural pressures …” (Sivaramakrishnan 2005: 351). Wedding musicians, then, strategically alternated between accommodation and resistance to the state. Moreover, the state itself was not monolithic, and, indeed, “different levels of the state may work at cross-purposes” (ibid.). The state was ambivalent about

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wedding music, a phenomenon that was fast becoming a mass movement. Policy was contradictory, and, at times, the state even cashed in on the popularity of wedding music. This again illustrates Herzfeld’s concept of “cultural intimacy” whereby the state holds ambivalent views of transgressive cultural practices. Moreover, examining the state’s contradictory policy helps us understand Verdery’s (1996) point about socialism needing (and thus tolerating) black and grey (unofficial) markets, as I illustrate below. When wedding music was first becoming popular, fans would record at events and then copy cassette tapes and sell them at exorbitant rates on the black market. In the 1980s, in an effort to undercut this market, the state established studios for selling wedding music and other recordings made outside the auspices of Balkanton. At a Stereo Zapis Studio (tape recording studio) patrons could buy cassettes of rock, funk, disco, “authentic” folk music, and wedding music (the largest seller). The studios were, in effect, grey market sites where official prohibitions were relaxed. When kyucheks were banned from official recordings, they were still found in studios; in fact, they were the best sellers among Roma. Similarly, when zurna music was banned, it was found in studios. Although a printed notice posted in one studio read “This studio is for copying tapes of Bulgarian music and music from other socialist countries,” I regularly observed music from Italy, Greece, and Serbia. With the studios, the state simultaneously maintained its official folk music policy and also catered to public taste. More important, the studios were a means for the government to gain access to the inflated market of wedding music. The price of a cassette was very high: 15 leva for a sixty-minute tape. Although this was equivalent to over a day’s wages, the demand was very high. Fans were willing to pay dearly for the music they loved

but couldn’t find on official Balkanton recordings that cost a fraction of the studio tapes (about 2.5 leva).14 Given its popularity, it was perhaps inevitable that the state would take a more direct hand in wedding music. State sponsorship came in the form of the Stambolovo festivals, involving both promotion and regulation of wedding music. Within a few years, scholars began lauding the talent of wedding musicians, while, simultaneously, state policy dictated what could be played at the festivals.

Stambolovo Festivals 1985–1988 To understand the Stambolovo festivals, consider the “mass hysteria” among young people that must have alarmed the government. Approximately 20,000 people came to the first and second Stambolovo festivals: And who were the fans? Not those who went to Koprivshtitsa ’86 [the national festival of authentic folk music], but rather young people 18–30 years old. With tape recorders on their shoulders … they reserved their places early in the morning, slept there, ate there, and were delighted there. They shouted and clapped … The fans were divided into groups, like football. The greatest majority were admirers of Ivo Papazov … I am not exaggerating if I note that this is the (Kaufman 1987: 78–9) The folk music orchestras are loved and sought after by the people. The events in which they take part, weddings and soldier send-off celebrations, are developing into

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most listened to Bulgarian music, with the most fans.

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nation-wide holidays … The followers of this music arrived … from all over the country with cassette recorders, cameras, and video cameras (over 12,000 people, predominantly young) and listened with feeling for six to seven hours a day in spite of having to stand outside.

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(M. Todorov 1985: 30)

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By 1985 the state realized that the popularity of wedding music was an unstoppable grassroots phenomenon. While “authentic” folklore was supported by official folk festivals and “arranged” folklore was supported by the schools and the professional ensembles, wedding music was supported by neither, deriving its support from hundreds of thousands of ordinary villagers. As Gadjev wrote, this was a phenomenon which traveled from low culture to high culture (1987: 10). Precisely this mass youth appeal prompted the government to become interested in wedding music. Wedding music arose at a time when the youth seemed to be turning away from folk music; they were attracted neither by the aesthetic of arranged folk music offered by the professional ensembles nor by the aesthetic of “authentic” folk music offered by amateur ensembles. While the former was too structured and packaged, the latter was irrelevant to modern life. Numerous articles were written in the popular press by folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and cultural planners debating the merits and demerits of arranged folk music (T. Todorov 1986). It is not surprising that the youth were attracted to wedding music, a genre that thrived on technology, creativity, and dynamism. Combining daring technique and improvisation with an irreverence for traditional categories, wedding music epitomized modernity for Bulgarian youth. With the amplification of rock music and the participatory quality of folk music, wedding music

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was simultaneously traditional and modern. In addition, its unofficial status and its countercultural quality promoted its success. The first official government effort to organize wedding music came from Manol Todorov (who had previously criticized wedding music). In 1985, I heard him tell his conservatory class: “The festivals for folk music have their task to preserve pure authentic folklore, but this new festival has another purpose: to organize and see what these wedding bands do. Until now they have been drifting around on their own. It’s time we embraced them.” Thus in 1985, in the village of Stambolovo, near Haskovo, Thrace, Pŭrvata Natsionalna Sreshta na Instrumentalnite Grupi za Bŭlgarska Narodna Muzika (The First National Gathering of Instrumental Groups for Bulgarian Folk Music) was held. The festival was held on a Tuesday and a Wednesday because wedding bands are always engaged on weekends. There were so many cars that some had to park in the next village; the audience was overwhelmingly young and the excitement was palpable. Note that the label “festival” was not applied to Stambolovo to make sure it wasn’t mistaken for a folk festival (see Buchanan 2006: 170–3). What was problematic for the state and for scholars was the lack of an existing category for wedding music. Recall that the category “authentic” was reserved for a select group of village folklore items sanctioned by the state, played on village instruments that the state defined as authentic, excluding anything played on clarinets, accordions, saxophones, etc. Instead of adopting a broad processual definition of folk music that would include contemporary forms, most scholars preferred to uphold older definitions of authentic folklore and place wedding music outside of it. Thus, wedding music was “neo-folklore” (Gadjev 1987) but not

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folklore, or it was stylistically “founded in folk music” (T. Todorov 1986: 7) but not folk music itself. Interestingly, the label “wedding music” was omitted in the title of the Stambolovo gathering. According to Timothy Rice, “… the organizers tried to diffuse the oppositional character of wedding music by eliminating its name and merging it with the state-controlled category [folk music]” (1994: 251). Stambolovo was created by the state to police the borders of wedding music—not only to cleanse it of kyucheks, but  also to make sure that the Bulgarian repertoire was “pure.”  The term tsigania (literally, Gypsy-ness) was used in a disparaging way to mean unruly, wild, aggressive elements in Bulgarian music. Todor Bakalov’s three-volume portrait of wedding musicians (1992, 1993, 1998) belabors this point in multiple interviews. Bakalov’s own opinions are clear: “I’ve been wondering why … good instrumentalists use arpeggios, chromaticisms, triads … This is a kind of pollution of folk music … Our folk music is so beautiful that it doesn’t need effects …” (1992: 90). Peycheva, on the other hand, sees the question of tsigania as a problem for Bulgarians, not Roma: “One can discern a complex about lost music and lost national aesthetic identity …”  This nostalgia for “timeless pure Bulgarian folk music” comes precisely at a time when there is also nostalgia for “a ‘healthy hand’ of cultural engineering, of control from above …” (Peycheva 1999: 163). Stambolovo precisely embodied this control from above. The state would make wedding music conform to the revered category folk music; the state would save wedding music from its internal pollution, which was metaphorically, ideologically, and physically located among Roma and Turks. Like folk festivals, the Stambolovo festival had a jury and prizes. No band, however, won first place in 1985 because,

according to Manol Todorov, “no one played pure Bulgarian material.” Kyucheks were prohibited, but even in the Bulgarian material, judges condemned the foreign elements from the West and East. Directly after the competition, Todorov held a meeting with band leaders where he lectured them about how they had corrupted Bulgarian music. Papazov was conspicuously absent as a performer; having recently been jailed, he was not allowed to perform. The festival was so successful that another was held in 1986, at which Trakiya15 and Mladost shared first prize. After that, both bands were not allowed to compete, but they performed in gala concerts. In the fall of 1986, after Stambolovo, a concert of five bands, including Trakiya, was organized in one of Sofia’s largest concert halls. Fans vied to obtain tickets, and black-market prices sky-rocketed. One journalist commented: Since the Sofia intellectual is too lazy to budge as far as the village of Stambolovo, the festivals had to come to Sofia … A groundswell of spectators descended on the ticket offices. The concert, although sheltered within a hall, which is contrary to the very nature of the music and the musicians’ vitality, rapidly became a triumph of Dionysian delirium. The music itself … has always been virulently criticized by purists … But it was no less Bulgarian for that: frantic rhythms and a rare virtuosity as if playing were a question of life and death.

More concerts were organized around the country, with tremendous response. In the city of Yambol, Thrace, there was only one poster advertising a 1988 event featuring four bands, and yet two hours before the concert pedestrians couldn’t get through the streets because of the crowds. Fans included

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(Gadjev 1987)

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many students from the folk music school over two hours away. A journalist commented: Ivo literally had to step over his fans. They all wanted autographs … and they were all … young people from fourteen to twenty years. I’ve never seen such young and passionate fans of folk music … The evening before, a rock group had a concert in the same place and had only filled half the hall … The audience in the hall, which had just heard three groups, was on the verge of exhaustion. They yawned, they stretched, they moved about in their seats. I was thinking that it was terrible to have to perform last. But when the Trakiya orchestra was announced, the hall was regenerated … People jumped, slapped, whistled, shouted …

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(Sŭrnev 1988: 25)

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The third Stambolovo festival was held in 1988 and attracted thirty-nine bands and 100,000 fans; at the time, approximately 2,500 bands existed (Bakalov 1992: 7). In a concession to popular taste, the government recorded the event live and immediately sold tapes to the audience for 12–15 leva; later the double cassette Stambolovo ’88 (BHA  12367/8) was released. These live recordings again show the ambivalent attitude of the state: simultaneously it acquiesced to the demand for unarranged wedding music (while cashing in on inflated record prices) and it dictated to musicians that foreign elements were prohibited (Buchanan 2006). By 1988, the government was trying not only to purify wedding music of foreign elements but also to regionalize it. Timothy Rice, who was privy to the 1988 jury’s discussions, writes, “By nationalizing the festival as a display of regional difference, the organizers symbolically reversed the homogenizing effect of wedding music” (1994: 252). In the

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regional competitions that preceded the festival, traditional instruments (such as gaida, kaval and gŭdulka) were favored over higher quality Thracian bands without them (ibid.: 254). Yet the festival audience still responded best to wild solo improvisations on clarinet, saxophone, and accordion. The performance format for each band required several regional pieces followed by improvisations. Yet, according to Rice, in 1988, several Romani/Turkish bands dispensed with the regional requirements and played wild, aggressive improvisations from the beginning (1994: 253). Similarly, Buchanan reports that audience members dared to dance kyuchek, that is, until the police intervened (1996: 224; 2007: 240). Rice relates how the jury, composed of state-sanctioned music administrators, performers, and composers associated the aggressiveness of some of the music with the potential ethnic threat from Roma and Turks: “The jury, when it acted to ban aggressive groups or failed to give them prizes, made a connection between the ethnic tensions in the region and the frenetic playing style of these Turkish Gypsy musicians” (Rice 1994: 254). It is clear that, from the state’s point of view, wedding music was just as much about ethnicity as it was about music. Fans, on the other hand, had their own aesthetic criteria. Interestingly, in November 1988 the audience booed Trakiya when it incorporated too many eclectic jazz influences in its performances at a series of three concerts featuring twentytwo Stambolovo laureates. Fans shouted: “Where is folk music? We want folk music!” (Bakalov 1992: 211; Buchanan 1996: 223– 4). This was similar to the hostile reaction that Ivo received at the 1988 Stambolovo gala concert when he played in a more avant-garde jazz style. Trakiya was moving in the direction of jazz, a path that would soon excite international audiences

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but alienate some Bulgarian fans; this direction is evident in Balkanology. After ignoring wedding music for over a decade, scholars who could no longer discern a monolithic government position began writing about it. Lyubomir Kavaldzhiev bravely titled his article Te Sa Profesorite (They Are Professors) and lauded wedding stars as competent and knowledgeable performers and teachers, while, ironically, the judges (who can’t play) decided the prizes. He stated that some judges criticize Papazov for his “foreign intonations” but it would be impossible to create “folk jazz without different intonations, rhythms and varieties of timbre” (1988; see Buchanan 2006: 175). Even Manol Todorov admitted, “We would be too hasty to deny them a place in contemporary socialist life just because of a few weaknesses” (1985: 31). T. Todorov described the mastery of the performers, the variety of the repertoire, and the democratization of their art (1986). Nikolai Kaufman asserted that “there is no second class music … True virtuosi of their instruments, the musicians … defended their genre with dignity” (1987: 79). Similarly, D. Kaufman lauded the technique and inventiveness of the musicians, especially their interaction with dancers; she especially praised Papazov’s musical dialog with Ivan Milev at the close of the 1986 festival, where they traded phrases and musical jokes (Bakalov 1998: 217–18). Along with government sponsorship of wedding music, then, came acceptance, even praise of it as a youth phenomenon. “Most significant,” according to the president of the jury for the third Stambolovo festival, “was that the audience was predominantly young people. For them, Bulgarian folk music and songs have become an organic necessity for moral/ aesthetic improvement and for patriotism” (Kidikov 1988). When wedding music became “official” and regulated, it began

to be lauded for saving the youth from hating folklore, and later started to be seen as a tool of patriotism (see Chapter 5). This is rather ironic considering the earlier charges about corruption and foreign melodies. Instead, scholars wrote, “… in considering the future of traditional Bulgarian folk music, we have to take account of these groups. They have created a style which successfully combats foreign invasion …” (T. Todorov 1986: 7). In the liner notes for Stambolovo ‘88 (BHA 12367/8), Manol Todorov wrote: “These instrumental groups … prove that folklore is not a sentimental museum piece but a weapon against the aggression of denationalizing musical influences … These are ensembles … with patriotic activities, [that are] widely popular among thousands of mostly young people who don’t want to listen to foreign music but rather to their native musical language, Bulgarian folk music.” Wedding musicians remember Stambolovo with fondness. Papazov narrated: “This is where wedding music thrived. People from seven to seventy loved our music. Stambolovo didn’t pay us well, but we cultivated clients.” Performers recall the large crowds, the government sponsorship, and especially the comradery among colleagues. Into this late 1980s scene of prohibitions, government regulation, and mass adoration, Joe Boyd arrived; as a British producer, Boyd cultivated the idea of recording a Trakiya album for Western audiences. I now turn to how the Balkanology album was produced. Prelude and Golden Age 69

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3 Balkanology: The Album Conception and Production The international path of wedding music was paved by the British rock impresario Joe Boyd (born in New Jersey) who produced the rock bands Pink Floyd and Fairport Convention and founded Hannibal Records in 1980. Before he produced Balkanology, Boyd was already involved with the first Bulgarian music genre that attracted attention in the West in the 1980s: vocal polyphonic arrangements of Bulgarian folk songs, sung by large women’s choirs. The album Le Mystère des Voix Bulgare (The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices) sold well in Britain, and a buzz arose about Bulgarian music. The 1980s were also precisely the era when “world music” became a viable marketing category, and in fact Joe Boyd was one of the key people in Britain who coined the term. Boyd visited Bulgaria for the first time in 1986, attending the Koprivshtitsa folk festival which featured “authentic” village music (but not wedding music). He was immediately taken with the immense amount of talent there, and later reflected: “At night in the campsites, huge circles would be formed near a gaida [bagpipe] player and a bonfire and people would dance wildly, shouting to be heard above the wail of the piper. It was one of the most extraordinary weekends of my life” (Boyd 2003). Boyd recorded the vocal

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group Trio Bŭlgarka and the instrumental trio Trakiyska Troika and arranged tours for them in Western Europe and the US. In 1987, he released The Music of Bulgaria: Balkana (HNCD 1335) and in 1988 The Forest is Crying by Trio Bŭlgarka (HNBL 1342). In all these endeavors he was guided by Rumyama Tsintsarska, Director of Folk Music at the Bulgarian National Radio. Boyd was first exposed to Bulgarian wedding music in 1987 by his mother’s friend who played a cassette featuring kaval (end-blown flute) player Teodosi Spassov with Ork. Orfei (Orpheus), directed by violinist Georgi Yanev.16 When Boyd heard it, he thought that it was so fast that it must be playing at the wrong speed! So when he was in Bulgaria recording the Trio Bŭlgarka during summer 1987, he specifically asked Tsintsarska to arrange a meeting with Teodosi Spassov. According to Boyd, she hemmed and hawed and “clearly was not wild about” this kind of wedding music, and answered “maybe.”  Instead she took Boyd to a concert of the Plovdiv Folk  Jazz Band, a group that played tame jazz/folk fusions under the direction of Dimitŭr Trifonov.17 Boyd listened intently but was not impressed: “But when a pot-bellied clarinetist named Ivo took a solo, it was stunning. I needed to talk to this guy alone. I grabbed him and my translator and took him into a side room. ‘Is this your band?’ Ivo rolled his eyes and said no—my band is much better! We have a wedding this weekend, please come!” That weekend Boyd rented a car and drove with his translator to the village of Yabŭlkovo (near Dimitrovgrad) for a Romani wedding with Trakiya. He was stunned by the tent, the crowded tables, piled high with meatballs, salad, and beer; the young bride with many leva [Bulgarian money] pinned to her gown; the piles of shirts

to be given as presents. The music was cranked up—it was unbelievable! Salif was playing like a madman, a Bulgarian Billy Cobham! I decided then and there I wanted to record them and bring them to the US!18

Papazov similarly recounts this event: Joe Boyd came to a wedding where we were playing; there were 300 people under a tent. He sat there and listened to our band—we didn’t pay attention to him at all. Finally, he introduced himself: “I’m Joe Boyd and I’ve worked with Pink Floyd, would you like to do something together?” I didn’t know who Pink Floyd was! He said he’d like to do a record and tours with us. Later, Tsintsarska confirmed that the album would be distributed around the world. I didn’t believe her, but we agreed!

Balkanology: The Album

Back in the capital city of Sofia, Boyd told Tsintsarska about his plan to record Trakiya—again, she was not enthusiastic. She had been very supportive of his recording Trio Bŭlgarka and Trakiyska Troika, but wedding music was frowned upon in official circles, and its artists were deemed “not ideal citizens” according to Boyd. Boyd himself admitted that at that time he was ignorant about ethnic divisions and had no idea of the political complexity of recording Trakiya. He had heard about the name changes of Muslims, but did not pursue the details. Perhaps his ignorance worked to his favor, as Tsintsarska finally agreed to help him. Early in 1988, Boyd returned to Sofia to record Orpheus Ascending, Ivo Papazov and his Bulgarian Wedding Band (Hannibal HNCD 1346) in the National Radio’s Studio, and Tsintsarska was the co-producer. My guess is that she was given the OK by the government because the Stambolovo festivals were a huge success.

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Boyd chose the album title in reference to the Greek mythological legend that the talented musician Orpheus was born in Thrace. The album features a good selection of Bulgarian folk music meters and genres, and does not shy away from wild improvisations. But it does not include any Romani or Turkish kyucheks. Boyd omitted this genre because he was reluctant to alienate the state representatives who had helped him with the recording. He told me: “Maybe I was listening to Tsintsarska too much; after all, Bulgarian Radio was paying for the recording! … But I didn’t want to get the band in trouble. I heard about their arrests but didn’t understand why.” Papazov, too, admitted that “Of course we were afraid to play kyucheks— we had been locked up.” Boyd’s album notes are vague about ethnicity: “Bulgaria is sensitive to questions of racial or national origin, so accurate information is hard to come by, but Ivo and his group seems to be at least partly gypsy and much of their music is related as much to gypsy styles as to Bulgarian traditions” (1989). Despite the fact that Orpheus Ascending was an international hit, Trakiya members were denied visas to tour in the West for over a year. In contrast, Trio Bŭlgarka easily obtained its visas. Boyd recalled, “The visas for Trakiya were never really denied, but they weren’t granted. The officers kept asking for more documents.” Papazov bitterly remembers: Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

My career in music changed in 1987 when Joe Boyd came

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to Bulgaria. He had heard of us. He was Pink Floyd’s first manager. He went around with us … to Romani weddings. He listened to our music. Then he proposed a tour to us. The government hassled him for a year with contract problems but he made a CD of us in Bulgaria. He was ready, the contract was sent to us, but the government wouldn’t let us

go, and they dragged it out for a year. It was a huge mockery in 1988 when I was supposed to leave the country. I had to go from bureau to bureau, to Todor Zhivkov’s [the prime minister] adviser, and … to the administrative division for minorities. Three times a day I had to go for interviews. I said, “I want to travel, I don’t want to emigrate.” They said: “You are this, you are that—a Turkish Rom—America will easily assimilate you.” Joe Boyd had the tickets and everything ready but at the last moment they wouldn’t let us go. Actually, I had the right to apply for political asylum because of mistreatment. If it hadn’t been for my two kids I might have thought about emigrating. I can live anywhere … How many years did those guys from Internal Security follow me around? Now they all emigrated to America and I still live in Bulgaria!

Balkanology: The Album

It is clear that the state did not want Roma representing Bulgaria abroad. Indeed, many Bulgarians agreed with the sentiment, “we can’t have a Gypsy or a Turk represent us internationally.” Most Bulgarians felt more comfortable with the international success of groups like Trio Bŭlgarka, Balkana, and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgare that played clearly sanctioned “folk music,” even if it was highly arranged (Buchanan 1996: 220–6). Visa problems continued into 1989 for members of Trakiya. In fact, Trakiya was sent by state officials to perform in Russia while they were waiting for their visas for the West. Neshko Neshev recalls: “When it came time to do the tour, my colleagues could not get visas; only I received a visa because I had already been to the west—Finland and Italy [with government-sponsored Kŭrdzhali groups]. So we couldn’t go. Joe told us that over one million people had heard the

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album already!” Neshko, however, had to navigate one unusual challenge in obtaining his visa. His wife Penka recalls: It was September 1989 and we lived on the ninth floor of an apartment house in Kŭrdzhali. We came home and there was a man’s leather purse near our door. I saw the handle of a pistol sticking out of the purse. I immediately called the internal police and told them … and they filled out a report. If we had taken it inside, we would have been charged with possessing a weapon and Neshko would have never been

Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

able to go to America.

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Neshko clarified: “The pistol was planted there by corrupt high people to prevent us from travelling!” Trakiya members finally received their visas for their first tour to the West in September 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9. The musicians heard about the fall of Bulgarian communism on November 10 from abroad, where they were awash in media adoration. Papazov recalls: “We started our tour in September 1989 in London at Ronnie’s Club, where the Beatles started. The first shock was the opulence of London and the second was New York—because at the time there was nothing in the stores in Bulgaria.” New York Times music critic Jon Pareles effusively praised the band (1989). The highlight of the New York tour was Trakiya’s appearance on David Sanborn’s legendary jazz TV show Night Music in late 1989, along with legendary stars.19 Boyd wrote: Ivo Papazov has been at the heart of two of my proudest moments in the music industry. The first was in New York City … when I persuaded my friend John Head to invite Ivo and his band onto the David Sanborn Night Music show which he produced for NBC television. Other guests that

evening included … Pops Staples with a galaxy of top New York jazzmen as the house band. All were stunned when the Bulgarians sound checked; it sounded like an express train in 9/8 time. In the show’s finale, Staples … and Nona Hendryx sang “Take me to the River” and when Ivo took the solo, the roof came off the studio. I felt ten feet tall. (2008)

Balkanology: The Album

In fact, the jazz scene as well as the world music scene became equally enamored of Trakiya. Boyd persisted in his advocacy of Trakiya, and was already planning the next album, Balkanology. In 1988, in a taxi in New York City on the way to hear Balkana, Boyd and I discussed whether including kyucheks on a second album would hurt Trakiya’s chances of receiving visas. I stressed how important kyucheks were in its repertoire and that omitting them would misrepresent the band’s artistry. He asked me to write the liner notes for Balkanology. However, plans were delayed because of Boyd’s financial difficulties at Hannibal; the company was declining and was sold in 1991 to Rykodisc. In winter 1991, Boyd toured Trakiya in Western Europe and thought hard about a new album. Fortuitously, WDR (Westdeutsche Rundfunk) in Cologne, Germany, offered its studio for recording if it retained the right to the first broadcast (Ryko would still own the master). Boyd said: “I seized this opportunity like a drowning man. I paid the musicians $500 each as an advance and told them to warm up for the new album while performing in the Netherlands. I also told them I needed shorter tracks than on Orpheus Ascending—tenminute tracks were just too long for radio shows.” Papazov similarly recalled: “After the first album, we toured successfully; things were going well; the album was selling, and Joe Boyd offered a second album.”  Trakiya headed for the studio.

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Ivo Papazov’s Balkanology

Balkanology: A Listening Guide

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Boyd suggested the album’s name, Balkanology (HNCD 1363); his idea was inspired by jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker’s 1966 album Ornithology; Parker’s nickname was “Bird.” Papazov suggested the concept and structure of the album: a musical tour through the Balkans. Boyd loved the idea because he sought “an album different from Orpheus Ascending.” The band members contributed to the choice of repertoire, including varied Bulgarian regional styles as well as Turkish/Romani, Romanian, Macedonian, and Greek material. All these styles and genres were present within Bulgaria due to its multiethnic history. Papazov remarked: “It wasn’t hard for us—we were already performing this material.” The album represents a combination of concert selections and danceable selections. As Trakiya became more famous, they did more concert work, and their repertoire began to encompass pieces for listening. Some dance tunes on the album, for example, build to a speed that cannot be danced to. In the following pages, I provide a guide to listening to Balkanology by examining each track on the album. Among the instrumentals, I delve into tracks 1, 4, and 7 because they feature the most common meters/styles of wedding music; as the longest tracks, they evince the development of a piece over eight to nine minutes. All compositions are credited to Papazov, except track 11, which is credited to Neshev; however, I discuss varied sources below. Note that many of the track titles are somewhat misleading. Papazov told me that he picked the titles, some arbitrarily, and some to avoid political issues. He said “they don’t mean anything.” In general, wedding musicians do not refer to tunes by title; if they want to identify a piece among themselves, they sing/play the opening phrase.

Balkanology: The Album

1. “Mladeshki Dance.”  The title means young people’s dance but it is a Turkish/Romani kyuchek in 4/4. Whereas on Orpheus Ascending, Joe Boyd was afraid to include any Romani/ Turkish material due to government restrictions, by 1991, communism had securely fallen and the prohibitions against kyuchek had faded; thus Boyd decided to open Balkanology with a kyuchek tour de force. However, his old fears of state repression surfaced when he adamantly would not title the track kyuchek; however, Boyd consented to let me use the term kyuchek in the liner notes. Note that the marketing for Boyd’s three American tours of Trakiya in 1989, 1990, and 1992 did not emphasize a Romani connection. Remember that this occurred before the craze for “Gypsy Music” in the West peaked. This first tune is a very well-known Turkish melody known as Uşşâk Oyun Havası (in Turkish, this means dance music in the mode [makam] uşşâk), attributed to the Romani clarinet virtuoso and composer Şükrü Tunar, 1907–1962 (see Seeman 2019: 200–2).20 In this recording, Papazov omits the higher second melody of Tunar’s composition. The Turkish makam uşşâk is comparable to the Western natural minor scale (A-BC-D-E-F-G), but with the second degree theoretically lowered one koma (1/9 of a whole tone). According to musician Adam Good, however, in practice (as in this recording), the second degree is lowered even more. Good observes: “Ivo performs this movement … giving us the feeling for uşşâk. In his improvisation after the main melody, Papazov aims right for the dominant of uşşâk (D), which is a classic move and gives a sense of tension needing resolution, with which he takes his time.” After that, the uşşâk melodies jump up to the high octave. Note that the dominant in uşşâk is the fourth degree of the mode.

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Also note that Yunakov on saxophone and Kazakov on bass are playing microtonally with the clarinet, following the mode. Even Neshev on accordion has found a way to play in unison, despite the microtonal limitations of the accordion. Trakiya musicians do not generally know the rich terminology of Turkish music theory but they know their way around the various makams; in other words, they have a practical, performative knowledge of makams without necessarily knowing their names. However, they do use the term hicaz. Hicaz is a makam commonly used the southern Balkans (with many variants) which features an augmented second between the second degree (half step above the tonic) and the third degree (major third above the tonic). The first part starts in unison, featuring a sequence of four descending melodic lines; the second phrase features a call and response beginning at 0:40, with Papazov calling and Neshev and Yunakov responding. Then there is a recap of the first phrase, where Papazov introduces many melodic and ornamental variations, producing a heterophonic texture characteristic of this genre. His Turkish clarinet style is marked not only by the use of microtones but also by the smooth movement from one note to another. In Turkish/Romani clarinet style there is very little articulation (tonguing) between the notes, which distinguishes it from Bulgarian playing that has much more tonguing. At 1:24 Papazov begins his mane (improvisation) which explores the range and timbre of the clarinet. Papazov changes the placement of the microphone to capture different tonal effects. The improvisation begins in free-rhythm and builds towards very high pitches in the mode, which is very difficult to execute. At 2:40 Papazov switches his improvisation to the metric pattern, and then at 3:06 the band returns to the first phrase.

Figure 6  Fast and slow rhythmic notations for “Mladeshki Dance.”

Balkanology: The Album

In the second part of track 1, the rhythm changes (see the rhythmic patterns of both parts in Figure 6), and Papazov enters with a free-rhythmic improvisatory solo that invokes a zurna (double reed wind instrument) in several passages. He then switches his improvisation to the metric pattern at 4:40, introduces the main melodic phrase at 4:50, and then returns to improvisation at 5:27. As a whole, this track captures the typical from of kyuchek that alternates between composed melodies and improvisatory passages. 2. “Hristianova Kopanitsa.” Papazov named this tune after his son Hristo. This western Thracian dance is in 11/16: 2-2-32-2. Fast, additive metric patterns are characteristic of Bulgaria; this track is almost too fast to dance to. Its standard structure features composed phrases, often in unison or in thirds, that alternate with improvised solos. The opening melody is in the makam hicaz, but the solos often modulate to other modes and tonal centers. 3. “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” (A love story). This type of slow free-rhythm Thracian song requires huge interpretive and technical abilities by both the singer and instrumentalists. After each verse, Papazov, Neshev, and Yunakov instrumentally interpret the song melody. In the 1970s, Maria Karafezieva (as well as Nedyalka Keranova) played a major role in developing

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wedding vocal style, characterized by metric vibrato and repeated “hammered” ornaments, often in long sequences. These slow songs are usually sung around the banquet table and elicit emotional responses from audiences due to their melancholy texts. “Ganka na mama dumashe, da znaesh mamo, kakva me mŭka na sŭrtse, che az sŭm bolna legnala” (Ganka said to her mother—you should know what kind of sadness is in my heart, that I lie sick). The song goes on to explain that Ganka was sick for three years and neither got better nor died; her lover Nikola fell in love with another woman, a relative, and did not marry Ganka. The track does not include all the verses due to the time constraints of the recording. In the end, Nikola is sorry that he didn’t marry Ganka. Karafezieva explained to me that she composed the text and melody; she explained: “I am Ganka. I was married to Ali Gardzhev [Romani accordionist who played with Ivo for several years]; we had two children together, but Ali made a love connection with my brother’s wife … I sang out all my sorrows. My songs are all about my family and friends.”  This song was used in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), although it was not included on the film’s soundtrack album. Karafezieva stated that she gave Boyd permission to license the song to producer/director Sacha Baron Cohen, but she was bitter that she only received $800 in royalties, while the film grossed millions of dollars. 4. “Ivo’s Rŭchenitsa.” The rŭchenitsa in 7/16, 2-2-3 is one of the most common pan-Bulgarian meters. On this track we can hear the main stylistic elements of the Bulgarian wedding music genre: large melodic range, complex syncopation, extremely fast speed, chromaticism, modulations to different keys/

Balkanology: The Album

modes, and dense ornamentation. Melodic ornamentation evinces liberal use of the mordent (single trill to the note above or below) and dropping to lower notes (often the fifth degree in the lower octave); note also that ornaments are played in the meter. The drums, bass, and guitar provide rhythmic syncopations and many dramatic stops. Papazov begins the track with a free-rhythm improvisation exploring the full range of the clarinet; he borrows techniques from kaval (end-blown wooden flute) such as finger vibrato on held notes. The solo begins in D major and modulates gradually to A hicaz by 1:10. The rŭchenitsa follows, starting with a short drum solo. The form is AA, BB, AA, BB, bridge, clarinet solo, CC, bridge, call and response, saxophone solo, CC, accordion solo, CC, drum solo, AA, BB, coda. The A and B melodies are in A hicaz. The A section has 4+4 measure phrasing; the B section has 6+8+8 measures (totaling twentytwo measures); these extended phrases are very characteristic of wedding music. The bridge (most) at 2:33 is a fast unison scalar pattern typical of Trakiya transitions, that leads into the clarinet improvisation at 2:40. Starting in A major in the meter, Papazov’s improvisation modulates first to E hicaz at 3:14, displaying his virtuosic highly ornamented technique, including scalar runs. At 3:44 he modulates to D hicaz, and at 3:58 he switches to a free-rhythm improvisation which is not characteristic of traditional dance meters. At 4:49 he returns to the meter and modulates to C major; at 5:30 he modulates to A minor with a raised fourth degree and plays a recognizable four-measure phrase. By playing a known phrase, Papzaov is sending a signal to the other musicians that he is ending his solo, and they should prepare for the next section. At 5:41 all the melody instruments enter with phrase C, which is a quote from another Ork. Trakiya rŭchenitsa. At 5:57 a

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call and response begins with Papazov calling in two measures and Yunakov and Neshev responding in two measures. This formula is not present in traditional Bulgarian music but is reminiscent of “trading fours” in jazz. At 6:09 the saxophone improvisation begins (in phrases of four measures, via several modulations), followed by phrase C at 7:07. The accordion improvisation begins at 7:24 (with many modulations and daring rhythmic syncopations), and phrase C is reintroduced at 8:47. The drum solo begins at 8:58 and at 9:09 phrases AA BB are reintroduced. The rŭchenitsa ends with coda. All these modulations evoke changes in emotion and build up the energy of the piece. Trakiya’s arrangements such as this are, thus, a combination of highly choreographed sections and wild improvisatory sections. Musicians must be at a high technical level to execute both difficult and rapid composed phrases and chromatic passages as well as perform new and interesting improvisations. They are required to know not only the order of the composed phrases and chromatic transitions, but also how to get into and out of improvisations. The harmony section is challenged to follow multiple and rapid modulations during improvisations that are not set in advance (although some are formulaic). Note that all the modulations I have described above are generalizations—even more complicated harmonic changes are happening. This type of collaboration takes time to develop; and in performance it requires extremely careful listening by each and every musician. 5. “Song for Baba Nedelya” (Song for Grandmother Nedelya). Karafezieva stated that she composed the melody (in 2/4) and lyrics of this song and Papazov composed the instrumental break (in 6/8). Songs alternating with improvisations, such as on this track, are a common musical structure of weddings.

Balkanology: The Album

The song and the instrumental break are both in eight measure phrases (4+4) in the key of C minor; Papazov’s solo improvisation is (generally) in C minor. “Deto se horo igrae, sred selo nasred megdana, dor devet gaidi svireha, dor tri tŭpana biyaha” (There, where the dance is held, in the middle of the village, in the square, nine bagpipes were playing and three drums were beating). The opening verse sets the traditional scene: people of all ages used to gather in the village square to dance after church on Sunday (for those who were East Orthodox) and on other ritual occasions. Music was provided by male musicians, and women sang. The song goes on to tell the story of Nedelya, a beautiful young bride who can outsing a bagpipe. Singing contests are a common motif in folk songs; women compete (metaphorically) against doves, nightingales, etc. The song congratulates Sivo, Nedelya’s rich husband, for having such a beautiful and talented wife. Maria explained that she composed these lyrics about her grandmother named Nedelya who married Sivo, a rich landowner. Nedelya was the daughter of a priest; he would only agree to a prosperous match, and Sivo’s 500 hectares made him the largest landowner in the village of Bŭdeshte, near Stara Zagora, where Karafezieva was born. 6. “Ergenski Dance” (Bachelor’s dance). This Macedonian piece opens with a free-rhythm improvisation in hicaz makam accompanied only by tŭpan. Papazov imitates a zurna (double reed wind instrument) and the band achieves a drone-like quality of a pair of zurnas in some sections. The 7/8 meter (3-22) is very characteristic of southwest Bulgaria. 7. “Mominsko Horo” (Unmarried girl’s dance). The longest track on the album (almost nine minutes), this pravo horo (straight dance) is typical of family celebrations, where dancing goes on for many hours and musicians may play for four to

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five hours without taking a break. Although the meter is 2/4, each beat is divided into three parts, making the rhythm more like 6/8 (3+3). The form is AA BB AA BB CC DD EE, clarinet solo, saxophone solo, accordion solo, AA BB CC DD. The piece opens with characteristic composed phrases A through E, often played in thirds. A, B, and C are in A minor with many rhythmic stops. The A melody is ten measures long (5+5). Unlike Western European music that tends to have four or eight measures, Thracian traditional music (including many songs) often contain ten measure phrases. Phrase B is eleven measures long (5+6), also typical of Thracian village music. Phrases C, D, and E are eight measures (4+4); phrases D and E are in C major, the relative major of A minor. At 1:44 Papazov begins his solo improvisation in A major, using four-measure phrases. At 2:09 he switches to chromatic scalar patterns showcasing the wide range of the instrument; this free-stream does not have regular phrases, but it is metric, and is very characteristic of wedding style. At 2:28 he modulates to A hicaz and returns to four-measure phrases; at 2:39 there is another chromatic stream which modulates to G major; at 2:51 he begins a long section improvising in four-measure phrases with varied patterns. At 3:05 he modulates to G harmonic minor with a raised fourth degree, and at 3:26 to C hicaz, where he drops the four-measure pattern; at 3:43 he modulates to D minor and imitates the ascending melodic slides of kaval (endblown flute) technique. Note that this G scale, with augmented seconds between the third and fourth degrees and sixth and seventh degrees, was mistakenly termed “the Gypsy scale” in Central Europe, and is actually one of many modes used in the Balkans (see note 5). At 3:53 in Papazov’s solo improvisation, he begins an imitation of a gaida (bagpipe) in D major in two measure

Balkanology: The Album

phases that are typical of gaida playing. Most gaida imitations are in a major key (as a sonic symbol), even though the bagpipe can play other scales. At 4:19 he modulates to D hicaz and drops the bagpipe imitation in favor of streaming chromatic passages; at 4:29 he modulates to E hicaz. Papazov begins four-measure phrases in E major at 3:37; these, too, turn into streaming chromatic passages; at 4:48 he modulates to E hicaz. Papazov’s improvisations follow the basic principle of distinct phrases alternating with streaming metric chromatic passages embedded in daring modulations. The pacing of this long improvisation underlines the style and structure of wedding music whereby variation, innovation, and technique are prized and performers build up energy by exploring a variety of textures and keys. At 5:00 Papazov begins an eight-measure recognizable phrase; he is joined by Neshev on accordion, and then Yunakov’s saxophone solo begins at 5:12, exploring the range of the instrument, with several modulations. Neshev’s accordion solo begins at 6:47, showcasing numerous modulations and syncopations. The ending section at 8:02 recaps the beginning AA BB CC. This horo is still performed today by many wedding bands, often retaining its exact structure. 8. “Tsiganska Ballada” (Gypsy ballad). This is a piece in Romanian Romani style in 2-2-3 meter. Trakiya performs this genre in North Bulgaria, which borders Romania. Neshev opens with an improvised free-rhythm solo accompanied by guitar and bass that imitate a Romanian cymbalom (struck zither). The solo, in a minor key, sometimes features a raised fourth degree, characteristic of Romanian music. Papazov’s solo at 2:45 imitates a Romanian panpipe. 9. “Veseli Zborni” (Merry medley). Karafezieva strings together two songs in 2/4 buenek rhythm (buenek is a women’s

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line dance), as she would at a wedding. These songs are traditional, meaning that no one knows their composers, and they are transmitted orally. The first is about Maria who sings nimbly; her voice is heard by a shepherd and a forest worker. “Marinchitse gizdava devoiko, lekom peesh, daleko se chuva” (Little Maria, all dressed up, you sing lightly and can be heard from far away). The second is about Mara who is sitting and sewing when a young man comes to flirt. “Sednala e Mara, Marulyo Mavrudo, skrivom da se shiva, ochi sokolovi, pera paunovi” (Mara is sitting, sewing in secret, dear Mara, falcon’s eyes, peacock’s feathers). 10. “Proleten Dance” (Spring dance). This Greek-style track is drawn from the Karakachani, (formerly) nomadic Greekspeaking shepherds who live in North Bulgaria and northern Thrace. Trakiya was sometimes hired for their weddings and thus became acquainted with Greek music. Papazov plays a free-rhythm solo over a metric pattern that approximates the Greek dance tsamiko in 6/4. 11. “Kasapsko Horo” (Butcher’s dance). This title refers to dances associated with occupational guilds in the Ottoman Empire, such as for butchers. Papazov and Neshev play fast melodies in 2/4 characteristic of the Graovo, Shope region, near Sofia in central western Bulgaria. The rhythmic pattern is notated in Figure 7. Neshev switches to a small hand-held synthesizer that provides a bright timbre. Neshev was one of the first Bulgarian musicians to introduce a synthesizer into folk

Figure 7  Rhythmic notation for “Kasapsko Horo.”

music. By the late 1990s, synthesizers, with their huge range of abilities, were ubiquitous in wedding music and they often replaced bass and electric guitar. Today wedding bands usually have two synthesizers, one used as a melody instrument and one used for rhythmic chords. Current synthesizers have pitch benders and programs with sophisticated sampling of all folk instruments, as well as endless rhythmic possibilities. After Balkanology was released, there was a flurry of acclaim and international touring, including a 1993 trip to Australia. However, the early 1990s were a hard time for Boyd—Ryko did not support his Bulgarian projects and he stopped managing Trakiya. To this day, he says, “Papazov is one of the greats. The band’s musicianship is extraordinary. At its height it was a blissful experience!”  After 1992, Boyd could no longer shepherd Trakiya to global stages and the band all but disappeared internationally. According to Garth Cartwright: “Hannibal ran into problems and Papazov vanished for more than a decade. When researching my book Princes Amongst Men in Bulgaria, I asked after Papazov and while he was remembered fondly, the musicians I talked to had no idea of his whereabouts and suggested he was long retired” (2008). However, the band re-emerged in the mid-2000s, despite the problems of postsocialism.

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4 Music and Mafias: 1990s Postsocialism I now turn to the challenges that Trakiya and other Bulgarian wedding musicians faced in the 1990s vis-à-vis emerging capitalist markets and changing state policies. When socialism collapsed, the new Bulgarian state became weaker, and private forces took over, including mafias. For Roma, professional music was always about business and the free market, but during the advent of capitalism, it quickly became about big business, accompanied by structural exclusions. How did Romani musicians negotiate this complicated terrain? Ironically, in the 1990s, while wedding music garnered effusive praise internationally, at home in Bulgaria it faced severe economic neglect. As I discussed earlier, Trakiya members learned about the fall of communism while they were  successfully touring abroad. Back in Bulgaria, there were new freedoms but the economy suffered greatly. Socialist musical restrictions related to purity were totally removed, allowing the performance of kyucheks along with jazz, rock, and foreign musics. The Bulgarian public, meanwhile, abandoned folk and wedding music and instead enthusiastically embraced Serbian, Macedonian, and Greek musics, and especially pop/folk fusion, termed chalga, which became all the rage in restaurants and taverns. Although I cannot devote due attention to chalga in this book, I note that challenges of wedding musicians during

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postsocialism must be understood in tandem with the meteoritic rise of chalga in the 1990s.21 Chalga arose as a fusion of pan-Balkan folk styles with pop, Romani, and Turkish music. Stylistic influences include rock and pop music, Turkish arabesk (i.e. use of Arabic melodic ornamentation, string orchestras, and instrumental fillers), songs from the Pirin region in 7/8, and newly composed folk music from Serbia. Chalga usually uses either standard 2/4 pop meters, slow 7/8 in Pirin style, or kyuchek in 2/4 or 4/4; very rarely are other additive meters employed. The synthesizer is the main instrument, and lipsynched songs are the rule. Chalga may have raised the visibility of kyuchek, but it is configured as markedly in contrast to Bulgarian folk music. Large portions of the Bulgarian populace listen to chalga but many upper-class, educated Bulgarians conceal their affinity with it because of its controversial status. Due to its low-class connotations and reputation as “uncivilized,” the genre, featuring eroticized and exoticized scantily clad women with bodily enhancements, is absent from state and elite media. Nevertheless, chalga was (and is) widely disseminated via commercial CDs, radio programs, concerts, videos, cable television stations, and the internet. Many Romani musicians and wedding singers followed the lure of chalga due to the money that could be made during an era with few options. The euphoria of the transition to democracy was shortlived—economic crisis gripped Bulgaria in the early 1990s, negatively affecting work, healthcare, education, and sociability. State enterprises closed and private companies struggled to operate, but they were poorly managed and heavily taxed. There were shortages of goods and thousands of people emigrated; the trend of outmigration continues

today. Corruption flourished in everyday transactions and also in the restitution of land and property. A tiny class of  “new rich” emerged, flaunting their cars and jewelry (and frequenting chalga clubs), while the middle class sunk closer to poverty, and rates of unemployment rose. Discrimination against Roma increased, violent crimes began to be committed against them, and their rates of unemployment reached 90 percent. According to Petrova: Shortages, queues, confusion, and despair became the defining aspects of daily life in the early 1990s. When the dust settled, the winners of the transition were mostly members of the former communist elite joined by newcomers who had managed to take advantage of the massive abuse of power, theft, fraud, fake bankruptcies, racketeering, and mafia account-settling that sprouted in the vacuum created by the absence of established legal rules and authority. (Petrova 2019)

Music and Mafias

At first, wedding musicians embraced capitalism boldly, as most of them had experience in the free-market realm and had never relied on the state for security. Some bands released cassettes on newly formed private labels such as Payner. Ensemble musicians, on the other hand, suffered as the bread-and-butter government support for the arts diminished (Buchanan 2006: 426–78). Stereo Zapis Studios closed and Balkanton curtailed its production. Everyone, including state ensembles, looked for private sponsorship, either local or foreign. The Stambolovo festivals continued in 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996, financed mostly by private sponsors, but attendance dwindled because people had less disposable cash.22 Wedding musicians, however, remember Stambolovo

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with fondness and regret its cessation. When a journalist asked Papazov in 2004 what bothered him most about the current state of wedding music, he answered: “That there are no longer gatherings of folk bands in Stambolovo … Although abroad this is the most venerated festival, they can’t find the finances. New talent was discovered there. People felt at ease there” (Filipova 2004: 17). Papazov stressed that it was a place for wedding musicians to socialize. The sponsors treated musicians well, not only offering prizes but hosting them with food and drink. In 1996, Papazov, cognizant of the financial woes of the festival, refused to accept any money for his performance. Note that, despite democracy, only Bulgarian music was permitted at the festival, illustrating the lasting power of the old socialist categories. Nevertheless, Papazov premiered his kyuchek composition “Celeste,” named after a popular TV series, at the 1996 festival; his fans loved the composition but the folklorists disapproved. In 1993, a gala concert marked the sixtieth birthday of the greatly admired, classically trained clarinetist Petko Radev, who played at the La Scala opera house, in Italy. Broadcast by Bulgarian National Television, the celebration featured Trakiya as well as other bands; in the finale, soloists (including Yashko Argirov, Osman Zhekov, and Ivan Mihaylov/Gagarin) strutted their improvisations.23 In April 1994, Payner sponsored a twelve-hour “megaconcert” in Sofia, but it was very poorly attended. In September 1994, Payner sponsored Trakiya Folk, a juried festival of wedding music with large prizes. Bands were invited to compete in two mutually exclusive categories: Thracian and Balkan, the latter meaning Romani, Turkish, Greek, and Serbian (Buchanan 2007: 235). Payner produced cassettes and videotapes of the festival and attendance was

good. But Bulgarians were too worried about their declining incomes to be active wedding music fans.24 In addition, chalga competed for listeners. In fact, in 1999, Payner changed the direction of Trakiya Folk toward chalga. Payner soon became a chalga empire consisting of hotels, clubs, products, albums, and concerts, with sexy female vocalists as its public face. In the 1990s, weddings were a far cry from the three-day events of the 1980s; Bulgarians could no longer afford lavish affairs with live music. A typical wedding lasted one afternoon or one evening, often with a DJ rather than live music; and weddings were bargained by the hour rather than the day. Moreover, musicians were rarely hired for transporting the bride from her home to the groom’s home, which used to be an important musical moment. All of this is still true today. In 1994, Papazov remarked: “Now the businessmen rule Bulgaria, then [before 1989] the communists ruled … Now there is no work for musicians in Bulgaria … ” (Dimitrova et al. 1994: 23). When a journalist asked him, “Has the great boom of wedding music passed?” he answered: Of course, such are the times. In the old days when I would play, twenty to thirty sheep would be slaughtered, 1,000– 1,500 people were invited under three to four huge tents … Another 1,000 came to listen. But today times are such that a person can’t relax. To make a wedding you need at least 50,000–60,000 leva [$9,000–$10,000], plus money for music. Look at the times—gasoline is 15–20 leva [$8–$10 per liter]. Sofia residents come and beg me [to play for weddings] but anything to eat. Categorically, I refuse them. (ibid.: 26)

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I can’t take the soul of a person—tomorrow he won’t have

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In the 1990s, the only families that would sponsor relatively large weddings tended to be Roma and Turks, not because they were wealthier, but because these groups regarded live music and dance as a necessary part of celebratory life. In 1994, an industrious Romani man told me: We find a way to earn money, we manage. Bulgarians sit and complain. We still have big weddings, circumcisions, soldier send-off celebrations. Bulgarians don’t do this any more—they invite just a few friends and family and use a disc jockey—that’s it. Only Roma are having big events. We work and spend. Bulgarians are stingy. We spend money on

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our families.

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In 1994, I attended a Turkish-Romani wedding in the village of Tsaratsovo, near Plovdiv, as a guest of Trakiya, which at that time included Yuri Yunakov’s son Ahmed on saxophone (Yunakov was living in the United States). There were about two hundred guests and the repertoire included Bulgarian, Romani, and Turkish music; as dawn approached, kyucheks dominated. Trakiya played from 9:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m.; Maria Karafezieva sang Bulgarian songs, and a Turkish singer was also hired. Afterwards, teenagers danced to disco and rock music until dawn. Trakiya bargained for 1,000 leva per hour plus they collected 8,000 leva in tips. Thus, each performer received about $35 at a time when the average monthly salary for a factory worker was $80. Trakiya was, then, well paid. Papazov claimed he received 40,000 leva ($750) for one concert (Dimitrova et al. 1994: 22). Other wedding musicians earned less and tried to supplement wedding work with other non-musical jobs. In comparison to the 1980s, musicians played shorter gigs and suffered from more unengaged days; they had to play more events to make a decent income, adding stress and

driving time. Even famous musicians could no longer earn enough to support their families. Yet, comparatively speaking, wedding musicians were lucky because at least they had some work, mostly clustered in the summer months. Many Bulgarians and most Roma had no work at all. A new genre of personal experience narrative arose illustrating this insecure period: the mafia crime story. For example, Georgi Yanev, leader of Ork. Orfei recounted that he and his band members were driving their van home from a wedding when a car passed them, swerving close to make them stop. Men emerged with guns and stockings over their heads and took all of their money. Similarly, singer Dinka Ruseva’s musician husband was robbed but bluffed the thieves by pretending he was reaching for a gun; another time Ruseva’s son pretended his clarinet was a gun. Obviously, thieves were targeting wedding musicians. In 1996, Papazov was robbed at gunpoint inside his home in Bogomilovo, Stara Zagora, despite his numerous guard dogs and watchmen: Some men came to bargain for a wedding and bluffed their way in. They put me up against the wall and said “give us your money.”  Maria came down with coffee and they put her up against the wall with a gun … So Maria gave them her gold and our money. It was a mafia job—no one was caught.

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Singers reported to me that they were tied up by mafia bosses and forced to perform in back rooms of clubs. Indeed, the mafia emerged as a force in Bulgaria in the 1990s and had its finger in music, especially chalga. Musicians were also very concerned about copyright and exploitative schemes practiced by record companies. For example, at the 1994 Trakiya Folk festival, Payner required

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participating bands to be taped for a cassette release. Some bands, such as Ork. Orfei, refused to sign because they wanted to produce their own cassettes. According to accordionist Petŭr Ralchev, “weaker groups were glad for the exposure.” Producing an independent cassette required Orfei to overcome huge obstacles in financing, marketing, and distribution. Orfei’s leader Georgi Yanev struggled to set up his own high-quality recording studio in Plovdiv, though it was eventually successful. For years, he produced his band’s recordings, but in 2006 Orfei signed up with Payner (who they are still with). In contrast, Trakiya stayed independent but had little work in Bulgaria. Musicians also worried about the widespread practice of pirating. Theoretically, a company like Payner would pay a royalty fee for every album it sold; musicians, however, complained that companies deliberately underreported the number. Petŭr Ralchev asserted: “The companies lie and say they sold 50,000 when they really sold 300,000. It’s a big business.” In addition, in the 1990s, every city boasted a huge open-air market for pirated copies of albums, and Bulgaria was cited as one of the worst offending countries (Buchanan 2007: 245). Even today, many copyright problems remain. Many wedding musicians are nostalgic for the socialist period. According to Papazov, “I had more work back then. People were happier and had a lot of money. I don’t think anything good has come of the new democratic Bulgaria. Now it is a place of corruption and everyone is fighting to get into the ruling party” (Cartwright 2006: 38). Nostalgia can be seen not only as the longing for socialism, but also as a critique of capitalism and a desire for order and security. The free market is not really “free”: whatever sells the most receives the most media playtime; and in the 1990s, chalga, not wedding music, was the best-selling genre.

Music and Mafias

More recently, wedding musicians have reconfigured themselves as champions of Bulgarian folk music (they mean the Bulgarian genres of wedding music). In some senses they are correct, if we conceive of folk music outside the narrow authentic socialist box, and if we see wedding music as opposed to chalga. When I asked Papazov what is Bulgarian about his style, he answered, “The foundation of wedding music is Bulgarian.” He remarked that, today, when few people are interested in Bulgarian music, “we wedding musicians play it. Ironically, I have preserved Bulgarian music … We played pure Bulgarian folklore in spite of the fact that it wasn’t really pure, but it was Bulgarian and it was beautifully embellished!” Many wedding musicians now complain of the ironic situation where ethnic Bulgarian patrons request kyucheks, while Roma prefer Bulgarian music. Papazov remarks: “Recently I’ve played for several Bulgarian weddings, on purpose … they pay well. I opened with a Bulgarian horo and from then on it was all kyucheks” (Dimitrova et al. 1994: 26). He (as well as Yunakov and Neshev) proclaimed that Bulgarians should be ashamed that Roma are preserving their heritage: “Now we Roma are touring around playing Bulgarian music, while, in Bulgaria, Bulgarians are playing Romani music.” Here, Papazov and Yunakov are alluding to the popularity of chalga among Bulgarians, and the fact that wedding singers are turning to chalga. Wedding musicians blame chalga for the decline in popularity of wedding music; they assert that chalga is more pop than folk and that it is technically inferior to wedding music. Papazov exclaimed “Our music is not pop!” But aside from stylistic differences between wedding music and chalga, their respective positions vis-à-vis the state and capitalism boldly contrast. In the socialist period, the competitors of

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wedding music were the ensembles that were the purveyors of  “authentic folk music”; the latter were supported by the state but, for the most part, rejected by the populace. Wedding music received some of its cachet by being countercultural, that is, oppositional to the state. More specifically it represented capitalism in the midst of socialism. Now the competitor to wedding music is chalga, supported by unbridled capitalism. The state is weak and wedding music has lost its anti-state oppositional positioning; it is emerging, however, as a force of nationalism (see below). Some wedding musicians have made compromises in the postsocialist period; one is strategically incorporating chalga singers, and another involves forgiving (but not forgetting) past detractors. Papazov recalled the 1980s criticism penned by Nikolai Kaufman but admitted, “now I’m going to play for his gala eightieth birthday. We will play some pieces he wrote for Maria and me!” He elaborated: “I make compromises … The other night … we were at Manol Todorov’s sixtieth birthday celebration. Isn’t that a gesture? For when one makes gestures, one makes money” (Dimitrova et al. 1994: 26). Petŭr Ralchev, however, bitterly criticized a televised birthday interview with Manol Todorov where Todorov claimed that he promoted wedding music. To the contrary, Ralchev remembered all the times Todorov called wedding music kitsch and impure. Similarly, Claire Levy, quoting music scholar Gencho Gaitandzhiev, notes the irony of the title “father of the wedding orchestras” given to Manol Todorov (Levy 2009: 4–5). By the 1990s, many of the hundreds of weddings bands no longer existed, but a solid group of bands from the 1970s and 1980s have survived, including Trakiya, Biseri (Pearls), Kanarite (Canaries), Orfei, Konushenska Grupa (Group from Konush), Slavey (Nightingale), Trŭstenik, and Brestovitsa. There are also

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newer wedding bands that command solid reputations, such as Ork. Plovdiv, Ork. Tangra, and Folk Palitra (Folk Palette). Some musicians have sought international projects,25 and some experimented with chalga. In 1994, Orfei’s singer Pepa Yaneva told me that she would never sing chalga, but a year later Orfei albums included chalga; obviously, the market required it. In fact, Georgi and Pepa Yanev groomed their daughter Tsvetelina to be a chalga star; in 2009, she made her successful debut with Payner. Kanarite is perhaps the most prolific wedding band, producing numerous albums and clips since 2006 with Payner. Under Atanas Stoev’s direction, they have moved away from chalga toward Bulgarian folk music. By 2000, Kanarite’s song lyrics veered away from materialism, sex, and capitalism—and instead embraced love, family, friends, and village life. They cleverly convert chalga to something more ethnically Bulgarian and less Romani by inviting chalga singers to record Bulgarian folk songs with them as guests. Some chalga singers are, in fact, graduates of folk music schools. Kanarite position themselves in opposition to the values of chalga (money, alcohol, and sex) but they manage to recuperate the association of chalga with success, modernity, and technology. In recent performances, they display symbols of stable marriage, Eastern Orthodox values, and patriotism. Especially at a time when anti-Romani and anti-Muslim sentiments are being openly expressed by various political parties, Kanarite have tapped into a nationalistic musical vein. The musical trajectory of Trakiya, on the other hand, is starkly different. Trakiya is perhaps the least commercially recorded band and has never dabbled in chalga. After Balkanology was released in 1991, the band did not make another recording until 2003. Papazov claims that he was waiting and hoping that Boyd would record another project, but he never did

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(Cartwright 2006: 37). Papazov was also suspicious of the reputations of the new Bulgarian companies, some of which, as discussed above, had mafia ties. In the 1990s, Trakiya’s personnel changed. As mentioned previously, Yuri Yunakov emigrated to the US in 1994 and the brilliant Romani kaval (end-blown flute) player Matyo Dobrev joined the band. The guitar and bass players were replaced by keyboardist Vasil Denev, adding the possibility of varied textures. Denev was trained in the state schools on gŭdulka (vertically held bowed instrument) and is also an arranger. Other Trakiya members developed their own paths in the 1990s: for example, Yunakov formed his own wedding band in New York. The Yuri Yunakov Ensemble toured widely in the United States, but Yunakov also invited Neshev and Ali to perform with his ensemble in Australia in 1998, and in 1999 they joined his ensemble for the North American Gypsy Caravan Tour (Silverman 2009; 2014). Back in Bulgaria, however, Trakiya was practically ignored by the media until 2003.

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5 Global Balkanology Into the Twenty-First Century Attention to Trakiya reemerged in 2003 with the release of Fairground/Panair (Kuker Music KM/R 07), produced in Bulgaria and distributed in Germany. The album showcases Papazov’s newer style which is more arranged, more polished, more textured, more technically ambitious, and more varied than his earlier albums. Because Fairground was made for Western jazz audiences, it features several concertized compositions that are not danceable. Added to Trakiya’s line-up are Bulgarian Turkish musician Ateshhan Yuseinov on guitar, Stoyan Yankulov on percussion, jazz pianist Vasil Parmakov, and two bass players. The repertoire includes standard slow songs and dance songs by Maria Karafezieva, Bulgarian dances, and several kyucheks. The solo improvisations by Papazov and Neshev are longer, wilder, and much more inflected with a jazz sensibility than earlier recordings. Note that the album’s visuals solidly evoke Bulgarian folklore by showing band members plus six dancers in folk costumes. I believe this image reflects the general repositioning of wedding music during the postsocialist period as closer to folk, in opposition to chalga. The album received triumphant reviews, and in 2005, Papazov won the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Radio 3 audience award in the category of World Music. Papazov was especially pleased because this award is determined by the BBC public, not by a jury: “Other prizes are decided by

two or three people … but my prize depended on the entire nation—on the voice of the audience, whether it is Bulgarian or English. For me, that is a real prize!” In an emotional ceremony, Joe Boyd delivered the statue to Papazov. According to Boyd, “The BBC rang and asked if I wanted to present him with the award … Of course, I leapt at the opportunity. Unfortunately, they refused to pay for his band to … play at the ceremony. I persuaded them to let him play his clarinet on stage and that brought the house down” (Cartwright 2006: 38–9). Boyd elaborated that Ivo came on stage holding just his clarinet. When I presented him with the statue, he gave it back to me to hold and walked to the center of the stage, where he proceeded to dazzle the audience for five minutes with the virtuosity and depth of emotion in his music in an unaccompanied tour de force. Promoters and agents rushed the backstage with offers for tours and festivals, but it would be two years before Ivo was back in London for reasons too complicated to explain!

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(2008)

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As a result of the BBC award, Trakiya captured the limelight once again. Articles appeared about Papazov with titles such as “The King Returns” (Cartwright 2006), and Trakiya performed at the international festival WOMAD in England in 2006. American audiences warmly received members of Trakiya during their 2003 and 2005 reunion tours with Yuri Yunakov (see Figure 8), and Traditional Crossroads produced a reunion album, Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music (2005). In 2008, the British label World Village released Tantsŭt na Sokola (Dance of the Falcon), recorded in Bulgaria by Mesechina Muzika, featuring Papazov as soloist accompanied by several

Figure 8  Ivo Papazov and Yuri Yunakov, 2003. Courtesy of Ivo Papazov.

Global Balkanology

jazz and classical musicians. It delves into the Romani/Turkish repertoire with “Kaba Zurna”, a slow 9/8 kyuchek, “Kalaidzhiisko Nadigravane” (Coppersmith’s dance), several Turkish melodies, as well as some tracks with symphonic accompaniment. Papazov’s liner notes invoke his ancestors and teachers, as well as the specific ritual contexts of these melodies; Joe Boyd also wrote a moving tribute. What is perhaps most striking about the last fifteen years is the official attention and adoration Papazov is finally receiving in Bulgaria. Special concerts have been organized for Trakiya in Sofia; Ivo was made an honorary citizen of Stara Zagora in the fall of 2005; and he was inducted into the “Alley of the Stars” in Sofia. In 2004, Trakiya played for NATO leaders and, in 2005, for a meeting of the presidents of Balkan

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nations. In fact, Papazov narrated how this concert brought up unpleasant memories: It was very prestigious but I couldn’t perform in front of a row of officers guarding the room. To this day, I am afraid of the police, of guards. I remember in the old days in Kŭrdzhali the whole neighborhood would clear out as soon as the police arrived. We were all scared. Everyone would go inside and wait. The police would let their dogs run and those dogs could kill you. My heart starts beating fast when I see those uniforms. So at the meeting, I took Georgi Pŭrvanov [the Bulgarian president] aside and asked him if he could dispense with the officers. So he asked them to wait outside. The fear of communist police is inside me—I can’t get rid

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of it.

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Papazov cannot help but notice the irony of receiving all these government accolades after years of being harassed followed by years of being ignored. He emphatically stated: “Only in 2005 did I start playing for large audiences again in Bulgaria. At one of these concerts, I told them bitterly, ‘Now? Now you give me these honors? Now—when I’m getting old? Why not in my younger years when I was at the top of my fame.’” Similarly, Yuri Yunakov commented: “How do we feel about the press attention? Where was the press in the 1980s and 1990s? Not one Bulgarian paper wrote about us even though we were household names. Where was the press then?” In the last fifteen years, there are indications that wedding music is making a significant comeback; it is attracting larger audiences in Bulgaria and is being marketed as a folk genre. The mega-company Payner signed several wedding bands, and, in 2007, it launched a new 24-hour television cable

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channel, Planeta Folk, which now has over twenty thousand subscribers. Cable channels Folklore TV and Tyankov TV also feature wedding music. However, wedding bands still have to deal with media companies that exploit them or simply don’t deliver. Payner is notorious for charging bands high fees to make video clips for its channels. Payner and other channels such as Folklore TV recently charged approximately $1,000–$1,200 to shoot three clips of three minutes each; this promotion sometimes precludes the bands from recording for other companies. Wedding musicians constantly complain about these companies, but they depend on them for exposure. Trakiya, however, doesn’t need exposure because of its historic reputation. Indeed, Salif Ali remarked: “we don’t record clips—we don’t need advertisements.” Television folk music programming is now aimed not only towards viewers at home but also those who have migrated abroad and are interested in their culture and traditions. Planeta Folk programs feature the history and folklore of various regions and sometimes Eastern Orthodox liturgical music; the travelogue series “Pictures of Bulgaria” is accompanied by wedding bands.26 In clips, songs predominate while instrumental improvisations are rather short and tame; this locates wedding music in the realm of folk, rather than chalga or Romani music. No instrumental kyucheks are played. Virtually all wedding music is depicted with a professional ensemble in costume performing choreographed dances, often staged outdoors in a village. These visual cues squarely define wedding music as rural and folk. Recently, Payner recruited several of its chalga stars into wedding band performances. In these clips, chalga singers wear revealing but not overtly sexual clothing and sway to

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the music rather than dancing in sexually explicit ways, as they do in chalga videos. This illustrates the trend of assimilating the allure of chalga into a wholesome folk image of wedding music, and simultaneously accomplishes the ideological work of nationalism. The creation of Planeta Folk in 2007 by Payner, a company that had previously promoted chalga almost exclusively, was a sign that wedding music audiences are growing. The Bulgarian public is getting fatigued by the superficial glitz and the artificial formulas of chalga. Simultaneously, wedding music is becoming an ideological symbol of heritage and patriotism in a period where the definition of Bulgarian identity seems precarious. Chalga is criticized as too Romani, too Eastern, but simultaneously too Western, too much like Europop. Ironically, wedding music received the very same criticism in the socialist period, but now it is hailed as quintessential folk music. Nationalist parties such as Ataka (Attack) rail against chalga as corrupting the historical core values of Bulgaria; they encourage patriotic Bulgarians to support folk music.

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Populism and Anti-Gypsyism

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In the last decade, alarming trends of populism and xenophobia have arisen in Bulgaria, manifesting in anti-Romani rhetoric, harassment, and evictions. The U.S. Department of State’s 2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Bulgaria summarized: Human rights organizations reported a persistent level of racial discrimination against Roma. The media often described

Roma and other minority groups using discriminatory, denigrating, and abusive language, highlighting instances in which Romani persons had committed a crime. Nationalist parties … routinely resorted to strong anti-Romani, antiTurkish, and anti-Semitic slogans and rhetoric. According to an Open Society Institute study released in June, Roma were the target in 81 percent of incidents of hate speech.

Global Balkanology

Roma face widespread discrimination and the situation is getting worse, especially regarding hate speech and physical violence. The UN Committee against Torture reported that “the rate of physical abuse against persons belonging to the Roma community is allegedly double the rate of abuse against ethnic Bulgarians” (U.S. Department of State 2017: 2). Since 2011, there were violent protests and mob attacks against Roma in many Bulgarian cities.27 The 2017 Bulgarian Helsinki Committee Report (which itself is under attack by xenophobes) detailed the rise in anti-Roma hate speech, especially by elected government officials: “Blatantly antidemocratic formations landed in the government, having entered politics through the use of antiRoma … rhetoric” (6). V. Simeonov, President of the National Front for the Salvation of Bulgaria, part of the governing coalition, was appointed Chair of the National Council for Cooperation on Ethnic and Integration Issues, the only state institution working on the integration of minorities in Bulgaria. His party, however, systematically incites hatred and discrimination against Roma. In 2014, in the National Assembly, he described the Roma as “ferocious humanoids” and Roma mothers as “women with the instinct of street bitches.”  The report outlines how election events organized by  several parties stereotyped and incited hatred for the

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Turkish and Romani minorities (5–7). Ultra-nationalism has become acceptable in government. The European Commission 2018 Civil Society Monitoring Report concurred that the “Deterioration is obvious in the fields of governance … and antigypsyism (with a significant rise in anti-Roma rhetoric, publications and even actions) … The evaluated period marked a significant rise in anti-Roma rhetoric (including by high-level politicians), racist publications, and conflicts” (7). In 2017, the case of  “Mitko,” a seventeen-yearold Romani boy from a village near Pazardzhik, went viral. He was attacked and brutally beaten when he insisted that he and his neighbor were equal. The attacker filmed the beating and posted it on Facebook. An international campaign ensued with the slogan “I stand with Mitko.”  The attacker was eventually sentenced to eleven months of imprisonment, suspended for a probationary period of three years. Aspects of structural discrimination against Roma include numerous forced evictions of Roma from their homes, illtreatment and physical abuse by police, school segregation, discrimination in labor, housing, and health, segregation in maternity hospital wards, and the statistic that 72 percent of Roma live in poverty. The Helsinki Committee stated that “in 2017, … the forced evictions of Roma continued to be … part of the deterioration resulting from racist instigation originating from or finding support among the extreme nationalists who participate in the government” (41). Rositsa Kratunkova reported that “the growing inequality in the country correlates with the growing mystification of its causes, which are attributed to the Roma ethnic group. The latter is simultaneously seen as privileged and thus part of the elite and also as a ‘parasitizing microbe’ on the hardworking Bulgarian people” (Kratunkova 2018a).

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The current governing party, GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria), is supported by three populist parties, including the Bulgarian National Movement, whose head, Krasimir Karakachanov, is simultaneously deputy prime minister, minister for defense, and minister for public security. He presented his “concept for the integration of the unsocialised Gypsy (Roma) ethnicity” defining Roma as “asocial Gypsies” (a term used by the Nazis), and calling for limits on the number of children some Roma women can have, the introduction of compulsory “labor education schools” for Roma children, and forced work programs. It depicts Roma as “non-native Europeans” left over from the Ottoman empire and proposes “reservations” for Roma based on the model used for Native Americans or Indigenous Australians, claiming that they could become “tourist attractions.” In 2019, following violence between Bulgarian Roma and non-Roma, Karakachanov declared: “The truth is that we need to undertake a complete program for a solution to the Gypsy problem.” Jonathan Lee of the European Roma Rights Center added: “This is a European Union member state where violent race mobs are the norm, police violence is sudden and unpredictable, punitive demolitions of people’s homes are the appropriate government response, random murders of Romany citizens only a fleeting headline, and the rights and dignity of Romany citizens are routinely denied on a daily basis” (all quotes from Chaudhary 2019). In this pernicious political atmosphere, it is not surprising that some Romani musicians do not publicly proclaim their ethnicity. Although they are better off than most Roma, they are still Roma, thus vulnerable. In terms of state arts education policy, neither Romani music nor the music of other minorities is integrated into the curricula of folk music

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schools at high school or college levels. Neither zurna nor kyucheks are taught, and few Romani children study at folk music schools. On the other hand, scholars do study the culture, music, and history of Roma and other ethnic groups.28 At folk festivals such as Koprivshtitsa, wedding music, Romani, and Turkish music are still absent from the official program. But in the unofficial sphere of festivals, such as after-hours parties, Romani music is still audible. Just as during socialism, Roma wedding musicians show up at folk festivals to play offstage for tips from Bulgarians of various ethnicities. Ditchev calls the Bulgarian situation “monoculturalism as prevailing culture.” He points out that while there are numerous ethnographic villages devoted to Bulgarian folklore, there are none devoted to Romani, Pomak, or Turkish culture. “When travelling around the country, one discovers that what is thought and presented as folklore is without exception ethnically Bulgarian” (2004). Multicultural support comes only from NGOs, labeled “project culture” by Ditchev. “Any time you hear that a minority culture is being supported … it means that there is project money behind it, with the backing of a Western donor. Take the initiative to write an all-Balkan history textbook, take trans-border cooperation, take the deliberate enrolling of Bulgarian and Roma kids together in school …” (ibid.).29 Although the plight of Bulgarian Roma has received much attention from international organizations, in the realm of culture, Roma receive little support. Another recent example are the exclusionary projects of the city of Plovidv as 2019 European Cultural Capital. Although over 30,000 poor Roma live in Stolipinovo, a segregated ghetto, they were not included in numerous well-funded public activities (Kratunkova 2018b).

Into the Future Today, wedding music is undergoing a resurgence of popularity, but musicians hold ambivalent attitudes about the future. Although Papazov claimed that “it is sad to me that no one pays attention to wedding music,” he also pointed out that wedding music still has many fans: In 2004 in Plovdiv we celebrated the [thirtieth] anniversary of Nikola Iliev and the Konushenska band. There was an audience of 6,000 people … Wedding bands continue to exist and to have their fans. … Twenty-eight bands appeared … The audience booed the lip-synched performers but viewers stood up when we played live. That made Professor Radev repeat with teary eyes: “We won’t perish, we won’t perish. If, from time to time, we, the elite of wedding music don’t gather to play some kind of concert, the young generation will forget us. And for the rich music companies, it is unpleasant for us to appear in public because the people will realize they are being cheated with these lip-synchings.” (Filipova 2004:17)

Global Balkanology

In 2018, Mladen Malakov opined:  “ There is a great difference between then and now. Then people were warmer—they loved the music and they respected us more. Today, Bulgarian folk music has been left behind. Everything is about chalga and kyuchek. We need people to develop folk music. Today only four to five groups continue good folk music.” Neshko Neshev elaborated: “Young people do not go the folk music concerts. It’s all chalga, and tickets to chalga concerts cost a lot. Chalga stars get thousands of leva per concert while we are underpaid.” Bulgarian clarinetist Nikola Iliev similarly stated:

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“There is no money for culture now.” But Salif Ali countered “folk music will never die.” In 2018, Papazov remarked: Now there is a “revival”—there are many orchestras, but not like the old days. They constantly want me but I stay home. Today people have no money for weddings. They use DJs, and rarely live music. There are fewer guests. In the old days, twenty-three sheep would be killed for a thousand guests for a twenty-four-hour wedding. People would even eat in shifts. Today there are fifty to sixty guests. The economy is terrible.

Papazov explained that his pension will be $500 a month when he retires while Maria Karafezieva now receives $50. She narrated: The Concert Bureau archives burned down and there is no way to prove my thirty years of musical work! I would need to open a legal case to prove I worked … But Yanka Rupkina [a famous folk singer] got her pension. Do you know how? She doused herself with gasoline in front of parliament and threatened to set herself on fire; then she got her pension

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but it was only $700 a month!

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The current “revitalization” of wedding music encompasses public events such as sŭbori (saint’s days celebrations), anniversaries, holiday shows, and concerts plus private birthdays, graduation parties, and weddings. According to musicians, weddings today can sometimes generate 2,000 leva ($1,130) for bands, but sometimes as little as 400 leva ($220). Romani weddings may generate as much as 4,000 leva ($2,250). Sŭbori typically pay much less. They are commonly

held in spring and fall, are sponsored by villages, often with support from private local companies. If a village is wealthy, such as Belozem, near Plovidiv, a sŭbor may involve several bands for two to three days. The term sŭbor is also applied to festivals such as the Natsionalen Strandzhansko Trakiiski Sŭbor Bozhura (National Strandzha Thracian Gathering in Bozhura) where Trakiya played in 2007.30 Trakiya also performed at the Bolyarska Sreshta in Arbinasi in July 2017 (see Figure 9) and for thousands at the Sofia World Concert of the Stars of Bulgarian Folk Music on St. George’s Day in May 2005. The town of Pŭrvomai has organized an annual festival of wedding music since the late 1990s that attracts many fans. For the last few years, it has been four days long with four bands per day. In 2017, this Praznik na Trakiiskata Narodna Muzika i Pesen, Pŭrvomai (Holiday of Thracian Folk Music and Song) honored the sixtieth birthdays of Mladen Malakov

Global Balkanology

Figure 9 Ork. Trakiya performs at Bolyarska Sreshta in Arbinasi, July 2017. From left to right: Matyo Dobrev, Vasil Denev, Petŭr Ralchev, Ivo Papazov, Neshko Neshev, Mitko Denev, and Salif Ali. Courtesy of Salif Ali.

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(Biseri) and Yashko Argirov (Brestovitsa). In September 2019, Trakiya was honored for its forty-fifth anniversary. The mayor of Pŭrvomai gave Papazov a medal and extolled him by explaining that Bulgarian music is celebrated all over the world due to Trakiya.31 The village of Dŭlbok Izvor has also sponsored a festival since 2000, titled the National Gathering of Folk Music Orchestras. Bulgarian accordionist Ivan Milev, who was born there, was honored recently. In 2014, Dŭlbok Izvor sponsored a celebration with Trakiya in honor of Bajram Kaev (one of Papazov’s models). In addition, Petŭr Ralchev was recently honored with a concert in Plovidiv, and Neshko Neshev was honored with a sixtieth anniversary concert in 2014, where Kanarite and many other wedding musicians performed in his honor. Ensembles have also recently tentatively reached out to wedding musicians. When Dimitŭr Hristov became director of the Bulgarian Radio Folk Orchestra, he initiated a series of concerts in Sofia, titled “Classics of Bulgarian Wedding Music.” Since 2013, wedding band guests have included Neshko Neshev, Petŭr Ralchev, Mladen Malakov, Orlin Pamukov, Matyo Dobrev, Ork. Kanarite, and several singers. Hristov said: “It is one of our most successful projects … We have had amazing soloists taking part …” (Bulgarian National Radio 2018). Hristov’s arrangements combine the ensemble aesthetic featuring fixed passages in harmonic arrangements with passages of improvisation. Some wedding musicians who can read music, such as Petŭr Ralchev, use notation, while others, such as Mladen Malakov, learn the arrangements by ear. Social media has become a dynamic contemporary context for wedding music activity. Many bands have Facebook pages and YouTube channels where they post clips and announcements of events. Several fans curate YouTube sites,

Global Balkanology

such as “Loveca 1948” who posts archival videos. Trakiya members Papazov, Neshev, Ali, Denev, Kamzamalov, and Yunakov (see Michael Yuri) all have Facebook pages. Papazov’s sons monitor his site, with infrequent postings, whereas Ali posts regularly. The sites Virtuozite na Bŭlgarskata Narodna Muzika (Virtuosos of Bulgarian Folk Music, https://www.facebook. com/groups/332794816736088/) and Trakiya Folk (https:// www.facebook.com/Тракия-Фолк-492604157757684) chronicle recent events plus post vintage clips. In 2016, sisters Maria and Neli Stoyanovi, who are very knowledgeable fans of wedding music, created the Facebook page Hora Obichashti Trakiiskata Narodna Muzika (People Who Love Thracian Folk Music, https://www.facebook.com/Trakiiskanarodnamuzika/). They post videos, archival photographs, and announce events.32 Whenever Trakiya plays, hordes of fans still gather to hear and pay respect to them; fans who post on Facebook and YouTube effusively admire them, with labels such as “legends, stars, founders, greats, geniuses.” Papazov, Neshev, and Ali remain in Bulgaria while Yunakov lives in the United States where he is an active wedding musician. Kazakov lives in Belgium, and Kamzamalov is very ill. Of the newer members, Denev still plays synthesizer with Trakiya; his son Mitko also often plays with the band on a second synthesizer; kaval player Matyo Dobrev died in April 2019. Neshev continues his career as a soloist and arranger in Kŭrdzhali; his solo album Shareno Horo (Colorful Dance) was released by Gega in 2008. He frequently collaborates with Turkish musicians on various projects, such as Labyrinth: Balkan Messages (2010) featuring violinist Nedim Nalbantoğlu. Indeed, project work in Western Europe has sustained a number of enterprising musicians, such as Petŭr Ralchev and Nedyalko Nedyalkov (Silverman

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2015). Salif Ali, on the other hand, has been in continuous local demand as a soloist. In addition to his occasional Trakiya performances, he played for several years with Ork. Folk Palitra, and more recently performs as a guest with many wedding bands.33 The children of Trakiya musicians have, for the most part, not become wedding musicians. Neshev’s son is a classical clarinetist living in Belgium. Yunakov’s younger son is a successful rap singer in Sofia, named Dee; and his older son, Ahmed (Mecho) is a well-known saxophonist in the wedding style. Papazov’s sons are educated in business; he stated: “I didn’t want my two sons to become musicians—it’s a hard life—two musicians in the family are enough, but now I am sorry!” Nikola Iliev’s older son Ilian is a successful classical clarinetist in New York. Other musicians have trained their sons for weddings. Mladen Malakov stated: “Of course, my sons have to become musicians!” And, indeed, his younger son Angel, born in 1980, has emerged as a talented clarinetist in both Bulgarian and Romani wedding style. Perhaps the most profound legacy of Trakiya, in addition to the innovative style it created, is its vast repertoire of music that is still played. Although bands today introduce new repertoire, they still perform a large part of Trakiya’s old repertoire—the same melodies with the same order of phrases; improvisations, however, are always different.34 Papazov remarked in 2018: “Wedding music is the same today—it hasn’t changed. Whatever I created is still played—the same melodies, songs, breaks, where the solos happen, where the modulations happen. This is the root, the foundation. Then it was new, now it is classical. Yes, there are new pieces but the style is the same.” Neshev concurred: “Our style has stayed the same—everyone still plays our repertoire.” Petŭr Ralchev further remarked about

the younger generation of musicians: “Just like we learned Pŭrvomaisko Horo [a standard of the 1970s], they have to learn our repertoire. However, when those pieces were recorded, no authors were listed; we are the first generation where we are the known authors.” The forty-five year trajectory of Trakiya has been a dialogue with contradictory impulses. In the 1970s, Papzaov defined a daring style that incorporated Eastern and Western elements in a new improvisatory genre. The socialist government defined wedding music as “corrupt and kitsch,” lacking the “purity and authenticity” of Bulgarian folk music. By prohibiting the genre from official media and from public settings, it ironically promoted its success in unofficial media and helped it become a mass underground counter-cultural phenomenon. After 1989, and the end of socialism, wedding music declined for several years at home while it was hailed in the West. The album Balkanology propelled wedding music onto international stages and extolled Trakiya members as masters of technique, speed, and creative variation. The popularity of wedding music today, just as in socialist times, is still informed by a highly politicized environment where the meaning of Bulgarian identity is still debated.

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Notes 1 Papazov is the correct spelling which I use throughout this book; note that the album Balkanology uses the spelling Papazov. 2 I deliberately do not use the term “Gypsy” because it is a shortened form of Egyptian (Roma are not from Egypt), and also an ethnic slur, meaning to swindle. I also eschew the Bulgarian term tsigan which usually has negative connotations; in the Byzantine era, atsinganoi meant a heretic. See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the history of Roma. 3 See Buchanan 1996 and 2006 and Rice 1994 and 1996 for a thorough discussion of wedding, ensemble, and village music styles. 4 All quotes that do not have citations are taken from my interviews. 5 “The Gypsy scale” is defined in Central Europe as a scalar pattern with augmented seconds between the third and fourth degrees and sixth and seventh degrees. This scale is not common in the Balkans. 6 The word mane refers to Turkish and Greek vocal genre amanes, a free-rhythm vocal improvisation using makams where the singer vocalizes on the word aman, a pan-Balkan expression of emotion. 7 According to Seeman, the 9/8 Roman oyun havası rhythm became emblematic of Romani communities through marketing strategies of Turkish companies (2019).

8 In the 1980s, hundreds of lesser-known bands of doubtful ability existed. They contributed to the mass phenomenon by disseminating the core repertoire, often provided by Ork. Trakiya. 9 See Dzhamgyoz in 1992 (with Mladen Malakov looking on): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RD70ctcIqs (accessed January 17, 2020). 10 This is beginning to change. Ethnic Bulgarian bagpiper Maria Stoyanova was perhaps the first female wedding musician. Romani keyboardist Iskra Asenova, as well as gudulka players Darinka Tsekova (Romani) and Violeta Petkova and Hristina Beleva (ethnic Bulgarians) are breaking the male instrumental mold; Donna Buchanan is researching this phenomenon. 11 Papazov is known as Ibryam by most fans; other wedding musicians are also known by their first names or nicknames (sometimes based on their village or town). 12 Herzfeld defines cultural intimacy as: “the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality …” (2004: 3). Herzfeld explores the contradictions of how people negotiate identity in the nation-state. “Creative dissent” is part of “how they can be fiercely patriotic and just as fiercely rebellious at the same time” (ibid.: 91).

Notes

13 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsL0uz8z4qU&t=107s (accessed January 17, 2020). Note how Papazov takes apart his clarinet, imitates gaida, plays svirka (flute) with nose, clarinet and saxophone simultaneously; then all switch instruments. Singer Slavka Kalcheva replaced Karafezieva, who was pregnant.

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14 The state-employed proprietors of the studios often traveled to events to record, sometimes plugging into the speakers and paying the musicians a modest state-set fee. Their salary was figured by percentage; in 1985 it was 50 percent of intake. In one Sliven studio the average monthly intake was 1,000 leva ($500). The proprietor, a Romani drummer who gave up wedding work because studio work was easier, boasted that his intake was occasionally 2,000 leva. 15 See Trakiya’s 1986 performance with accordionists Petŭr Ralchev and Yordan Tonev, saxophonist Kŭncho Hranenikov, guitarist Gyurai Kamzamalov, drummer Salif Ari, and singer Maria Karfezieva. This televised clip also captures the expansive crowds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT8CsAzPqzs&list =RDRYPJVtT0TdA&index=15 (accessed May 29, 2020). 16 It might have been similar to this 1987 recording: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fLXBNJOq3w (accessed January 2, 2020). 17 See their 1984 album (BHA 11859): https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=DcHSZgNAP-k (accessed July 15, 2020). 18 See a similar 1988 Romani wedding with Ork. Trakiya with accordionist Slavko Lambov, guitarist Gyurai Kamzamalov, and gŭdulka player Dimitŭr Lavchev: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=XnlqId9Y9iE (accessed January 17, 2020). 19 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiz7-IHiyjI (accessed January 2, 2020).

Notes

20 I would like to thank Adam Good for helping me identify the source and the contour of this melody. See Seeman (2019) for a discussion of how 9/8 Oyun Havası became the quintessential Turkish Romani genre.

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21 See Silverman 2007; 2014; Statelova 2005; Levy 2002; Dimov 1995; Buchanan 2007; and Rice 2002.

22 In 1994, 40,000 fans attended, but by 1996, this was down to only 4,000. In 1996, for the first time, Bulgarian television and radio did not broadcast the event; they demanded a subsidy from the sponsors, and when they refused, they did not attend. The sponsors even had a hard time raising the prize funds. After 1996, the festival was abandoned. 23 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Ap_ eXSHEk&list=RDx-Ap_eXSHEk&index=1 (accessed January 17, 2020). 24 Trakiya Folk was held in 1994 (Dimitrovgrad), 1995 (Haskovo), 1999 (Stara Zagora), 2000 (Stara Zagora), and 2003 (Plovdiv). 25 Yashko Argirov and Slavko Lambov (Brestovitsa), for example, appeared in the Hungarian touring production Gypsy Spirit; Filip Simeonov (Trŭstenik) performed and recorded with the Romanian Romani band Taraf de Haidouks. 26 See https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw5hh1zZpayUMXI5vouGOQ and https://www.youtube.com/ playlist?list=PLWhONodvbQnc-RpgSYrNoYCQX0mFQok74 (both accessed January 17, 2020). 27 The Wall Street Journal reported in 2011: “Anti-Roma Protests Escalate in Bulgaria.” See Kratunkova 2018b for a cogent analysis. 28 Pioneering Bulgarian scholars writing on Roma include Lozanka Peycheva, Ventsislav Dimov, Antonina Zhelyaskova, Ilona Tomova, Elena Marushiakova, Vesselin Popov, Rosmary Statelova, Claire Levy, Ivalyo Ditchev, Alexey Pamporovo, Alexandar Marinov, Hristo Khyuchukov, Yelis Erolova, Magdalena Slavkova, Krassimir Kŭnev, Dimitrina Petrova, etc. Notes

29 Ditchev is referring to an educational integration project initiated by the NGO, Drom, in Vidin and funded by the Open Society Institute.

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30 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huS0z2YCGHA (accessed January 17, 2020). 31 See https://www.facebook.com/groups/332794816736088/ wp/1399294566885972/ (accessed January 17, 2020). 32 All websites accessed July 15, 2020. 33 Sponsors bargain for Ali separately for a fee of 500 leva ($285) plus gas. In addition, he may receive tips.

Notes

34 See this 2012 clip where younger generation master clarinetist Alyosha (Aleksei Stefanov) plays one of Papazov's compositions (‘Papazliyska Rŭchenitsa’) to honor him. Papazov is seated next to Turkish–Romani clarinetist Ahmet Babati; Salif Alis is playing drums. Neshko Neshev, Paicho Ivanov, Vasil and Mitko Denev, and Maria Karafezieva are also present at this wedding: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=zCu4ezMaELs&list=RDQ1_GLNPPekU&index=3 (accessed July 14, 2020). Also see Alyosha playing ‘Ergenski Dance’ (from Balkanology) with Ali drumming at 10:10 in this clip from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=cnKTzdM8Cac (accessed July 14, 2020).

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Discography Balkanology, Ivo Papazov and His Wedding Band, 1991, Hannibal Records/RykoDisc HNCD 1363.

Ivo Papazov, 1989, Balkanton BHA 11330. Le Mystère des Voix Bulgaire (The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices), 1987, Elekra Nonesuch 79165-1. Orpheus Ascending, Ivo Papazov and His Wedding Band, 1989, Hannibal Records HNCD 1346. Panair (Fairground), Ivo Papazov, 2003, Kuker Music KP/R 07. Stambolovo ’88, 1988, Balkanton BHA 12367/8. Tantsŭt na Sokola (Dance of the Falcon), Ivo Papazov, 2008, World Village 450004. The Forest is Crying, Trio Bŭlgarka, 1988, Hannibal HNBL 1342. The Music of Bulgaria: Balkana, 1987, Hannibal HNCD 1335. Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music, 2005, Traditional Crossroads CD 4330.

References 133

Index Agoston-Nikolova, E. 13 Ali, Salif 1987 television appearance 59 ban on wedding music 51 Facebook page 117 forced name change 42, 49 interviewed by Silverman 11 musical role models 35 performing with Trakiya 2, 43, 73, 115 popularity of Trakiya 107 popularity of wedding music 114 solo career 118 Together Again album 10 touring in Australia 102 “A Musical Stroll around Bulgaria” 14 Angelov, Stefan see Ali, Salif Argirov, Yashko 5, 94, 116 Bakalov, T. 64 Balkana 9, 72, 75 Balkanology artists featured 41–7 Bulgarian music 17–18 conception 71–7 diversity of Balkan music 14 “Ergenski Dance” 85 “Hristianova Kopanitsa” 81 inclusion of kyucheks 77

introduced to western audiences 4 “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” 81–2 “Ivo’s Rŭchenitsa” 82–3 jazz style 68 “Kasapsko Horo” 88–9 liner notes 9 listening guide 78–89 “Mladeshki Dance” 79–81 “Mominsko Horo” 85–7 planning of album 77 political implications 1–2 produced by Boyd 4 production 71–7 “Proleten Dance” 88 Romani music 18–20 “Song for Baba Nedelya” 84–5 timing of release title suggested by Boyd 78 “Tsiganska Ballada” 87 “Veseli Zborni” 87–8 wedding music style 11–20 Balkanton 58, 60–1, 93 Belomorkso 42 Biseri 100, 116 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan 82

chalga 91–2, 95, 98–101, 103, 107–8, 113 discrimination against Roma 22–3, 25, 93, 108–12 expulsion of Muslims 49 folk music 12–13, 25–8 forced name changes 49–50 Helsinki Committee Report 109, 110 mafia crime 97 monoculturalism 112 origins of wedding music 1–3, 5, 12 Ottoman domination 26–7 political parties 111 post-socialist economy 91–8 resistance to state prohibitions 55–6 Romani music 23–5 socialist ideology 28–9, 31 Stambolovo festivals 61, 65–9, 94 state ambivalence 57–61, 66–7 wedding rituals 30–1 Bulgarian Radio Folk Orchestra 116 Cartwright, Garth 89 chalga 91–2, 95, 98–101, 103, 107–8, 113 Denev, Mitko, 115, 117 Denev, Vasil 40, 102, 115, 117 Dobrev, Matyo “Classics of Bulgarian Wedding Music” 116 death of 117

Index

Boyd, Joe difficulties of Trakiya touring in West 74–5 financial difficulties 89 ignorance of Bulgarian ethnic divisions 73–4 interest in Bulgarian music 71–2 introducing Trakiya to Western audiences 4 licensing song to Baron Cohen 82 meeting Papazov 72–3 planning Balkanology 77 political constraints on Romani music 79 presenting BBC award to Papazov 104 recording Trakiya for Western audiences 69 retirement from music 101 signing Trakiya 72–3 suggesting title for Balkanology 78 Tantsŭt na Sokola 105 touring with Balkana 9 Trakiya touring in Western Europe 77 Trakiya’s 1989 tour in West 76–7 Brestovitsa 100, 116 Buchanan, Donna 16, 26, 28, 33, 63–8, 75, 93–4, 98 Bulgaria ban on Romani music 1, 4–5, 28 ban on wedding music 47, 50–7

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friends with police officers 56 joining Trakiya 102 performing with Trakiya 12, 115 Dzhamgyoz, Halil 35 East European Folklife Center 9 European Commission Civil Society Monitoring Report 110 Filipov, Stefan 34 folk music difference from wedding music 12–15 Folk Music High School, Kotel 5 Folk Music High School, Shiroka Luka 4 heritage of 25–8 Folk Palitra 101 Folklore TV 107

Index

Gagarin, Ivan Mihaylov 94 Gaitandzhiev, Gencho 100 Gardzhev, Ali 7, 42, 46–7, 82 Georgiev, K. 48 Good, Adam 79

136

Hagopian, Harold 10 Hannibal Records 71, 77, 89 Hapaz, Mehmet 35 Hapazov, Ibryam 5, 8 see also Papazov, Ivo 1991 US tour 9 forced name change 50

leader of Trakiya 6 Papazov’s birth name 1 Helsinki Committee Report 109, 110 Hendryx, Nona 77 Herzfeld, M. 57, 60 Hristov, Dimitŭr 116 Husein, Huseinov see Yunakov, Yuri Ibryamov, Nedzhyatin see Neshev, Neshko Iliev, Ilian 118 Iliev, Nikola 6, 8, 56 children 118 conservatory training 35 decline in popularity of wedding music 113–14 interviewed by Silverman 11 musical role models 35 thirtieth anniversary 113 Ivanov, Paicho 11, 42 Kaev, Bayram 34 Kamzamalov, Aidŭn 44, 49, 117 Kamzamalov, Andrei see Kamzamalov, Aidŭn Kamzamalov, Gyurai 43–4 Kanarite 100, 101, 116 Karafezieva, Maria early musical career 46–7 Fairground 103 imprisoned 53 interviewed by Silverman 11 “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” 81–2

married to Gardzhev 42, 46–7, 82 married to Papazov 39 pension 114 robbed at gunpoint 97 “Song for Baba Nedelya” 84–5 Trakiya 2 “Veseli Zborni” 87–8 views on Bulgarian musical style 33 vocal style 18 Karakachanov, Krasimir 111 Kaufman, D. 68 Kaufman, Nikolai 16, 48, 68, 100 Kavaldzhiev, Lyubomir 68 Kazakov, Radi 2, 44 Keranova, Nedyalka 18, 81 Kirilov, Kalin 15, 18 Together Again album 10 Trakiya’s style of harmonization 43–4 Kirisha 35 Kolev, Nikolai 56 Konushenska Grupa 6–8, 100, 113 Koprivshtitsa folk festival 61, 71, 112 Kratunkova, Rositsa 110 Kulev, Anri 54 Kŭrdzahli Cultural Center 32 Kutev, Filip 46 Kuzmov, Stoicho 34

Malakov, Angel 118 Malakov, Mladen 32 children 118 “Classics of Bulgarian Wedding Music” 116 decline in popularity of wedding music 113 interviewed by Silverman 11 musical role models 34, 35 Papazov’s musical innovations 40 sixtieth birthday 115 sought by clients 32 Marinov, Tanyo 37 Mesechina Muzika 104 Mihailov, Aleksandŭr see Ali, Salif Milev, Atanas 34 Milev, Ivan 34–5, 44–6, 68 Mladost 44, 65 Mustafov, Ibryam 41 Nalbantoğlu, Nedim 117 Nedyalkov, Nedyalko 117 Neshev, Neshko 1987 television appearance 59 ban on wedding music 54 birth name 41 children 118

Index

Labyrinth: Balkan Messages 117 Le Mystère des Voix Bulgare 71, 75

Lenovska Grupa 34 Leviev, Milcho 54 Levy, Claire 100 Levy, Mark 4–6, 9, 10 Lolov, Ramadan 34

137

Index

“Classics of Bulgarian Wedding Music” 116 co-founder of Trakiya 36, 41 composing track for Balkanology 78 decline in popularity of wedding music 113 early musical career 32, 39, 41–2 experimenting with music 34 Facebook page 117 Fairground 103 forced name change 49 interviewed by Silverman 11 “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” 81 “Ivo’s Rŭchenitsa” 84 “Kasapsko Horo” 88 Labyrinth: Balkan Messages 117 legacy of Trakiya 118–19 “Mladeshki Dance” 81 “Mominsko Horo” 87 musical innovations 40 musical role models 35 performing with Trakiya 115 preserving Bulgarian heritage 98 solo career 117 Together Again album 10 touring in Australia 102 Trakiya getting visas to tour in West 75–6 “Tsiganska Ballada” 87 Night Music TV show 76

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Ork. Orfei 42, 72, 97–8, 100–1 Ork. Plovdiv 101

Ork. Tangra 101 Orkestŭr Trakiya see Trakiya Ornithology 78 Orpheus Ascending 73–4, 79 Pamukov, Orlin 116 Papazov, Hristo 81 Papazov, Ivo see also Hapazov, Ibryam 1987 television appearance 59 ban on wedding music 50–5 BBC award 103–4 birth name 1, 36 “Celeste” 94 children 118 clarinetist 7, 38 decline of wedding music in 1990s 95–6 desire to work with Boyd 101 difficulties of Trakiya touring in West 74–5 early musical career 32, 38–9 “Ergenski Dance” 85 experimenting with music 34 Facebook page 117 Fairground 103 forced name change 49–50, 59 highly paid 36 “Hristianova Kopanitsa” 81 imprisoned 51–4, 59 interviewed by Silverman 11 “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” 81 “Ivo’s Rŭchenitsa” 83–4 jazz style 67–8

Trakiya’s 1989 tour in West 76–7 “Tsiganska Ballada” 87 Turkish identity 40–1 views on Bulgarian tax system 33 views on playing at weddings 30 views on post-socialism 98 Pareles, Jon 76 Parker, Charlie 34, 78 Parmakov, Vasil 103 Payner 93–5, 97–8, 101, 106–8 Petrova, Nadya “Pictures of Bulgaria” travelogue 107 Pink Floyd 71, 73, 74 Pinko 20 Planeta Folk 107–8 Plovdiv Folk Jazz Band 72 Plovdiv Music Academy 28, 41, 55–6 Princes Amongst Men 89 Pŭrvanov, Georgi 106 Pŭrvomayska Grupa 34 Radev, Petko 35, 94 Ralchev, Petŭr 35, 42, 98, 100 “Classics of Bulgarian Wedding Music” 116 interviewed by Silverman 11 legacy of Trakiya 118–19 performing with Trakiya 115 project work 117 Rice, Timothy 13, 15, 28, 64, 66–7 Roma

Index

“Kasapsko Horo” 88 Kŭrdzhali birthplace 36 lack of rehearsals 15 legacy of Trakiya 118 meeting Boyd 72–3 “Mladeshki Dance” 79–81 “Mominsko Horo” 86–7 musical innovations 37, 40 musical role models 35 musical skills 37 official accolades 105–6, 116 Orpheus Ascending 73–4 pension 114 Pinko 20 popularity 36–7 popularity of wedding music 113 preserving Bulgarian heritage 98 “Proleten Dance” 88 recruiting musicians to Trakiya 42–6 resistance to state prohibitions 56 robbed at gunpoint 97 Romani identity 40–1 simultaneously playing two instruments 14 “Song for Baba Nedelya” 84–5 Stambolovo festivals 61, 65–9, 94 state-sponsored record 58 Tantsŭt na Sokola 104–5 Together Again album 10 track titles for Balkanology 78

139

Index

different groups of 25 discrimination against 22–3, 25, 75, 93, 108–12 forced name changes 49 musical heritage 23–5 Macedonian 9 Muslim faith 26 origins of 21–2 Romani music see also wedding music excluded by Bulgarian state 25–6, 28, 111–12 innovation 24–5 kyuchek 18–20 nineteenth-century ensembles 12 played by ear 35 ritual occasions 23–4 Romani wedding rituals 6–8 Ronnie’s Club 76 Rupkina, Yanka 114 Ruseva, Dinka 97 Rykodisc 77, 89

140

Sadovska Grupa 34 Sanborn, David 76 Scott, James 59 Shiroka Lŭka music school 55–6 Silverman, Carol playing with Yuri Yunakov Ensemble 9–10 researching wedding music 8–9, 11 Romani wedding rituals 6–8 studying music in Bulgaria 4–6 Together Again album 10

Simeonov, V. 109 Slavey 100 Spassov, Teodosi 72 Stambolovo festivals 61–9, 93–4 Staples, Pops 77 Stoev, Atanas 101 Stoyanovi, Maria and Neli 117 Sŭnuvam Muzika 39, 54 Tantsŭt na Sokola 104–5 The Forest is Crying 72 The Music of Bulgaria: Balkana 72 Todorov, Manol 33, 47, 68 claims to support wedding music 100 liner notes 58, 69 Stambolovo festivals 63, 65 Todorova, Atanaska 33 Todorova, M. 27 Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music 10, 104 Trakiya Folk festival 94–5, 97 Trakiya 1987 television appearance 58–9 1989 tour in West 76–7 career after Balkanology 101–2 change of personnel 102, 103 concert work 78 Fairground 103 fees charged for weddings 31

Trŭstenik 100 Tsintsarska, Rumyama 72–3 Tunar, Şükrü 79 Tyankov TV 107 WDR studio 77 wedding music see also Romani music amplification 12 banned in Bulgaria 5–6, 8, 47, 50–7 Bulgarian origins 2–3, 17–18 category system 33 copyright problems 97–8 countercultural 99–100 criticism of 47–8 dance accompaniment 16–19 decline in 1990s 95–7, 100–1 difference from folk music 12–15 economic context 29–33 emergence of 1–2, 5, 12 ethnic minorities in bands 13 genres 11–20 grey market 60–1 improvisation 15–16 instruments 12 introduction of synthesizers 88–9 legacy of Trakiya 118–19 musicians targeted by criminals 97 musicians’ salaries 31–3 oral tradition 12, 36

Index

founded by Papazov and Neshev 1, 36 instruments 12 lack of rehearsals 11, 15 legacy of 1, 5, 118–19 musical heritage 23–4 musical role models 34 musical skills 84 musical style 18, 43–4, 67–8 official accolades 105–7, 116 Papazov’s improvisations 83 performing in Russia 75 post-socialist economy 91, 97–8 Radev gala concert 94 recorded for western audiences 69, 103 Roma musicians 1–2 signed by Boyd 72–3 social media 116 speed of music 37 Stambolovo festivals 65–7 Tantsŭt na Sokola 104–5 targeted by Bulgarian authorities 51–3 Together Again: Legends of Bulgarian Wedding Music 10, 104 touring in Western Europe 77 uninvited fans 1, 36–7 US tours 9–11, 79, 104 visa problems re: touring in West 74–5 Trakiyska Troika 72, 73 Trifonov, Dimitŭr 72 Trio Bŭlgarka 71–2, 73, 75

141

origins in 1970s 4, 12 popularity in Bulgaria 29 post-socialist economy 91–8 professional musicians 29 resistance to state prohibitions 55–7 resurgence of 106, 113–16 Romani music 18–20, 23–5 self-censorship 59 social context 29–33 social media 116–17 Stambolovo festivals 61–9 state ambivalence 58–60, 62–4 state studios 60–1 style 11–20 theatricality 14–15 Thracian influence 17–18 tunes not identified by title 78 youth audience 61–3, 66, 68–9 WOMAD 104 World Village label 104

Index

Yanev, Georgi 35, 72, 97, 98, 101 Yaneva, Pepa 101 Yaneva, Tsvetelina 101 Yankulov, Stoyan 103 Yunakov, Ahmed 96, 118 Yunakov, Yuri 1987 television appearance 59

142

ban on wedding music 51, 54–5 boxer 45 children 118 early musical career 45 emigrated to USA 9, 96, 102, 117 Facebook page 117 “Istoria na Edna Lyubov” 81 “Ivo’s Rŭchenitsa” 84 “Mladeshki Dance” 81 “Mominsko Horo” 87 musical role models 35 name change 49 imprisoned 51–2 joining Trakiya 46 official accolades 106 preserving Bulgarian heritage 98 reunion tours 104 Romani identity 45 speed of Trakiya’s music 37 Together Again album 10–11 touring in Australia 102 Trakiya 2 Turkish identity 44, 49 views on playing at weddings 30 Yuri Yunakov Ensemble 9, 102 Yuseinov, Ateshhan 103 Zhekov, Osman 94 Zhivkov, Todor 75

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