Folk in Opposition? Wedding Bands and the New Developments in Bulgarian Popular Music

Abstract

The following is an excerpt from my recently published book Etnodžazat: lokalni proekcii v globalnoto selo [Ethnojazz: local projections in the global village] (Sofia: BAN—Institut za izkustvoznanie, 2007). Devoted to the idea of ethnojazz as an innovative form of interaction between Bulgarian/Balkan folk and a global jazz vocabulary, the book discusses the music of emblematic artists from different genre backgrounds, who articulate a new development in music and a new horizon in the mixing of musical languages. Such musicians introduce a specific artistic awareness, which goes beyond blank mimicry in the appropriation of traditionally-oriented ideas concerning the jazz idiom. Not accidentally, their common line, defined by Western critics as “Bulgarian exceptionalism,” is dominated and stimulated by the Balkan wedding-band tradition, which is now moving in new musical directions that are difficult to define under established musical labels. Perhaps this is why this genre is so distinct and thrilling. The excerpt draws attention to the controversial attitudes toward the wedding band boom in the 1980s and its significant impact in the following decades on both the dominant Bulgarian sound environment and those innovative forms of jazz fusions, spiced with a tangible Balkan flavor. Seen from the perspective of drugata narodna muzika (the other folk music), wedding bands are a melting pot of multi-ethnic vernacular traditions. By drawing away from the concept of folk purism, an ideology essential for national politics and the dominant culture during the socialist period in Bulgaria, wedding music opposes the romantic understanding of folk music as a pure tradition and brings forward the notion of a particular underground genre that freely encourages the involvement of a variety of “foreignisms” in the Bulgarian musical lexicon. This opposition perspective is further developed in relation to the process of self-identification among contemporary folk musicians who personify an updated artistic model that is identical neither to the aesthetics of the State-promoted folk ensembles nor to the museum-like idea of preserving traditions. My key thesis focuses on the understanding of a neofolk perspective that abandons the claim of “art” as an autonomous object, and embraces the essence of folk as a specific cultural field in the modern world, open to unpredictable paths of artistic freedom. I argue that today’s folk musicians experience a new wave of creativity and freedom in reappropriating the “two sides of the coin,” as if to revive the syncretism of that artistic behavior which, in jazz as well as in folk, does not divide musicians into composers and performers but makes them full masters of the process of music-making.