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Lecture
Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series: Texts from the Event Flyers
Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture
by Professor
Timothy Rice, Chair, UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology; and President,
Society for Ethnomusicology
Illustrated lecture with numerous audio and video examples
Book signing with Rice to follow
Wednesday, March 23, 2005
6:30 pm
Room 119
1st Floor, Thomas Jefferson Building
Library of Congress
10 First Street, SE
Washington, DC
Music in Bulgaria: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture
By Timothy Rice
Bulgaria, a small country about the size of the state of Tennessee, is
located in the southeastern corner of Europe, on the Balkan Peninsula.
Its population of about eight million people speaks Bulgarian, a Slavic
language written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The majority of Bulgarians,
ethnic cousins of other Slavic groups such as the Russians, Ukrainians,
Poles, Serbs and Croatians, share the country with minority populations
of Roma (Gypsies), Turks, Jews, Armenians, Greeks and Russians. The music
of Bulgaria, with its additive meters, powerful women’s voice, homemade
musical instruments, and vigorous, intricate dances, has fascinated Americans
and Western Europeans for a century or more. Ethnomusicologist Timothy
Rice was first captivated by it in the 1960s, when he learned Bulgarian
dances at international folk dance clubs as a university student. He made
his first research trip there in 1969 and has continued to travel there
ever since.
In this lecture, Rice will examine a variety of genres and types of Bulgarian
music for what they tell us about the nature of music in general and its
importance in people’s lives. Since the 1950s, Bulgarian music has
changed its character many times as the nation’s social, cultural,
political, and economic life has changed. Rice examines Bulgarian musical
performances as “texts” in need of interpretation, as powerful
symbols of the state and of opposition to it during the communist period
(1944-1989), as ways of negotiating gender roles and kinship, and finally
as a means of expressing and debating national identity in the post-communist
transition from totalitarianism to democracy. The lecture will be illustrated
with numerous audio and video examples.
Rice will be signing two books which will be available for purchase at
the lecture:
May it Fill Your Soul is a vivid musical ethnography documenting and
interpreting the history of folk music, song, and dance in Bulgaria over
a seventy-year period of dramatic change. From 1920 to 1989, Bulgaria changed
from a nearly medieval village society to a Stalinist planned industrial
economy to a chaotic mix of capitalist and socialist markets and cultures.
In the context of this history, Rice brings Bulgarian folk music to life.
Combining interviews with his own experiences of learning how to play,
sing and dance Bulgarian folk music, Rice presents one of the most detailed
accounts of traditional, aural learning processes in the ethnomusicological
literature. This work comes complete with a compact disc and numerous illustrations
and musical examples.
Music in Bulgaria presents a focused introduction to the rich and varied
tradition of Bulgarian music. Taking readers on a tour of the country's
musical landscape, it explores ways in which Bulgaria's rural traditions
affect the expression and interpretation of its music and examines how
Bulgaria's history has influenced its music over many decades. The book
also shows how musical traditions have been preserved and have flourished
despite the social changes brought about by the post-WWII era of industrialization,
modernization, and urbanization. Written in a lively style accessible to
both students and general readers, Music in Bulgaria features vivid eyewitness
accounts of performances, interviews with performers, and glossaries of
Bulgarian and musical terms. Incorporating numerous listening examples
and other activities that help readers learn to listen, sing, and dance
to Bulgarian music, this volume is packaged with a 70-minute CD containing
examples of the music discussed.
Timothy Rice, professor and chair of the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology,
researches the traditional music of Bulgaria and Macedonia. In addition
to numerous journal articles and book chapters, he has written or edited
four books: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Music (University of Toronto
Press, 1982, co-editor); May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian
Music (University of Chicago Press, 1994); The Garland Encyclopedia of
World Music, Vol. 8: Europe (Garland, 2000, co-editor); and Music in Bulgaria
(Oxford University Press, 2004). From 1981 to 1984 he edited the leading
journal in his field, Ethnomusicology, and is currently serving as President
of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is an ex officio board member of
the American Folklife Center.
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