New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Martin Koenig arrived in Bulgaria in 1966 at age 27 with letters of recommendation from fellow recordist Alan Lomax and anthropologist
Margaret Mead, an educator and cultural documentarian determined to study the folk dances of rural communities throughout the country. As he travelled, absorbing the culture and speaking with the people he encountered, Koenig became captivated by the earthy and ancient, yet very much alive, music he heard all around him. He recorded the music he was exposed to, and took photographs of not only dancers, but the village singers and musicians as well as those going about their daily lives around these hotbeds of creative expression. Enraptured with the people of Bulgaria, their way of life and the art they made, he returned several times between 1966 and '79, documenting everything he could.
Although much of this music went unheard for over 50 years, on November 1st Smithsonian Folkways will issue much of Koenig's archive as 'Sound Portraits from Bulgaria: A
Journey to a Vanished World,' continuing its core mission to preserve rare and endangered musical traditions and share them with the world. The collection is housed in a large format art book featuring intimate and candid photographs taken during his travels that chronicle the beauty and complexity of life for the musicians, dancers, and artisans he met, as well as recollections by Koenig, and notes on the music by several leading American and Bulgarian scholars in both English and Bulgarian. The release celebrates a way of life that has largely vanished due to industrialization, technological shifts, and emigration, telling the story of a rural lifestyle that was shifting rapidly during the mid-20th century and continues to evolve today.
The reedy bagpipes, ecstatic and drone-centric singing, and odd-metered rapid-fire dances featured on 'Sound Portraits from Bulgaria' paint a vivid picture of a multi-faceted culture that sat at the crossroads of
Europe and the Middle East. The styles and traditions included here evolved over the course of hundreds of years, developing alongside dances, agricultural rituals, and other hallmarks of agrarian life. Koenig witnessed many of these ceremonies, documenting them with his audio recorder and camera. One piece included here, recorded by Koenig and his colleague Ethel Raim in a classroom in downtown Smolyan in 1968, is the haunting folk tune "Izlel e Delyu haidutin" as sung by Valya Balkanska. In 1977 this recording was chosen by Carl Sagan to be included on the famed Golden Record that sits inside the Voyager spacecraft, currently being hurdled at forty-thousand miles per hour outside our solar system.
The work of Lomax and Mead, two legendary cultural preservationists and thinkers, is an apt frame for the work documented in 'Sound Portraits from Bulgaria' in its forthright, yet affectionate, look at the way music and dance impacted the life of rural Bulgarians and what is lost as it disappears. As Koenig writes in his introductory essay, this music and culture "should not be forgotten, as it reveals a dimension of strength and beauty in the human spirit that we, in our longing, may not even know we are missing."
Available today (9.5) is the first of two digital samplers, 'Dances of Sound Portraits from Bulgaria'.
'Dances of Sound Portraits from Bulgaria' Track List:
1."Kyuchek" - Shein Limanov Kurtov (Demirov)
2."Bulchinsko horo (Bride's Dance)" - Shtiliyan Tihov, Nikola Atanasov, Mitko Velkov, Mitko Hristov
3."Pravo horo (Straight Dance)" - Iordan Tsvetanov, Nikola Ivanov Krushkin
4."Dobrudzhansko horo (Dobrudzhan dance)" - Stefan Panchev Boranov
5."Poloska" - Gheorghe Hristović, Jon Barbolović, Jovan Anasonović, Jon Varalongović
More: orcd.co/soundportraitsfrombulgaria
ABOUT SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS:
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the "National Museum of Sound," makes available close to 60,000 tracks in physical and digital format as the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian, with a reach of 80 million people per year. A division of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the non-profit label is dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among people through the documentation, preservation, production and dissemination of sound. Its mission is the legacy of Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document "people's music" from around the world. For more information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, visit folkways.si.edu.
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