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A Major Musical Mystery From Bulgaria
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15594 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
2 / 1989 |
1,677 Words |
| Author
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Chris Manion
Chris Manion is a contributing editor of High Fidelity and
Saturday Review. |
What sort of music do you think will greet you at the Pearly Gates? Perhaps you like the last moments of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, or Bach's Mass in B Minor, or Four Green Fields, if you're Irish. But would you consider, for a moment, some music from Bulgaria?
Bulgaria?
Well, admittedly it's not the first thing that came to my mind either. But that was before I heard the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir, whose singing is the substance of the mystery that the two-volume set Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares (The mystery of Bulgarian voices) celebrates. Turn the recordings on, close your eyes, and be prepared to spend eighty-nine minutes traveling outside the known universe.
Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares, released by Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, captures the imagination and surpasses anything one might expect from having looked at the history of Bulgarian music. About eleven hundred years ago, Saints Cyril and Methodius converted the Slavic peoples on both sides of the Danube to Christianity. Although Old Bulgarian became the official language of the church, the language of the peoples of Bulgaria, still in the process of assimilation, retained many rhythms and inflections of the Illyrian speech prevalent in the region since ancient times. Le Mystere rings with haunting echoes of those ancient modalities and presents a musical Rosetta Stone of some of the most pristine, beautiful, and uncluttered vocal music of our time. It has incorporated strains of all that Bulgaria received as a crossroads between Central Asia and the Balkans, on the one hand, and between the Orient and Europe--the path traveled by Marco Polo through present-day Turkey and Asia Minor--on the other.
Bulgarian music survived and grew during five centuries of Turkish rule (which ended barely a century ago), embracing some of the distinctive traits of that foreign heritage. Even now a folk tradition of sorts lives on, celebrated, of all things, by Bulgaria's communist government, which recruits the choir's members from throughout Bulgaria, sending scouts from village to village at fairs, festivals, markets, and funerals, where the best of this singing is to be heard.
The music is heard everywhere. It is sung to be heard far away, across fields full of harvest workers, the majority of whom have always been women in a country that has been primarily devoted to the soil. The voices are strong, unwavering, uncluttered by Western
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