ROSEMARY STATELOVA the Seven Sins of Chalga
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ROSEMARY STATELOVA The Seven Sins of Chalga Toward an Anthropology of Ethnopop Music Edited and introduced by Angela Rodel PROSVETA SOFIA contents editor’s introduction œOut of One Throat Many VoicesB / 7 introduction What I Study and Why / 11 Why Anthropology? / 17 chapter I Ethnopop Music and Contemporary Bulgaria / 21 Images of Today’s Bulgaria / 23 The Dominant Culture of the Excluded / 30 chapter II Ethnopop Music and the Trauma From the Past / 38 Different but Together / 48 Etude on the Interpretation of a Word / 58 chapter III Basic Aspects of Ethnopop Music: Scientific Approaches and Ideas / 64 Chalga and Orientalism / 66 Ethnopop Music and Regionalism / 72 Chalga as a Cross-cultural Product: The Mixed / 77 Chalga – Eroticism and Vulgarity / 85 Ethnopop Music in Relation to Folklore / 99 Appendix to Chapter III / 112 5 chapter IV Ethnopop Music as Creativity: Two Roma Cases / 117 Neshko Neshev – The Passions of a Music / 118 An Extract From the Story of Neshko Neshev: His Childhood and First Steps in Playing Music / 119 Neshko Today / 122 Biculturality / 124 Evaluative Duality / 126 The Aesthetics of Mixing. Improvising Again / 129 Extracts From Neshko’s Story. Pop Music or Chalga / 132 A Debut at the Fair “Muhabet in B-minor” / 134 An Expert’s Appraisal / 135 The Big Assumption / 136 Extracts From Penka Nesheva’s Story. The Ban and its Lifting / 136 Deceptive Cadence / 140 The Real Finale / 140 Anita Christi: “I Will Leave Something to the World …” Subject, Motives and Goals of the Study / 141 Family Background and Childhood / 143 Bulgarians and Gypsies: Problems of Coexistence / 147 The Professional Life of a Singer. Getting Married. To Berlin and Back / 152 The Mission / 155 “Nomads” / 157 chapter V Ethnopop Music as a Craft / 163 Peter Dimitrov: “We cannot Allow Ourselves to Have a Style of Our Own” / 163 The Road to Music / 165 The Fascination of Wedding Music / 169 In Search of Music Which Does “Something Useful” / 174 From “Тhe Gypsies With the Small Trumpets” to Chalga Management / 183 First Conversation / 185 Second Conversation / 192 Bibliography / 198 Discographia / 207 6 editor’s introduction: œOut of One Throat Many VoicesB In my work with Bulgarian folk songs, I have often come across the phrase “ot edno gurlo dva glasa,” which literally means “from one throat two voices,” used to describe a singer of great skill and power, who when singing solo sounds like a chorus-unto-herself. I was reminded of this phrase as I read Rosemary Statelova’s The Seven Sins of Chalga: Toward an Anthropology of Ethnopop Music; out of her throat (or, rather, pen) come not just two voices, but a myriad of voices, woven skillfully into a complex and multifaceted analysis of chalga, a Bulgarian popular music phenomenon that burst into popularity in the 1990s after the fall of the Bulgarian com- munist regime in 1989. Yet as Statelova herself makes clear, her book is not a musical or textual analysis of chalga itself, but rather an examination of chalga as a social phenomenon. In her analysis, Statelova tries to understand why this music evokes such strong reactions, both positive and negative, in listeners. She also does not limit her focus to the current state of Bulgarian popular music, but also explores the relationship between chalga and popular music genres that have preceded it, such as chalgia (Turkish-influenced urban popular music) and wedding music from the 1970s and 1980s. Her approach entails juxtaposing voices from different walks of life, includ- ing the voices of her students, the intelligentsia, conservatory- trained musicians, self-taught Roma musicians, and media per- sonalities. She also engages a number of different literatures, including literary criticism, cultural studies, anthropology, the discourse in the Bulgarian mass media, and ethnomusicological “Out of One Throat Many Voices” 7 literature from both inside and outside of Bulgaria. Statelova succeeds in painting a picture of chalga as a complex social phenomenon that is tied not only to the workings of the mass media in a newly-opened-up market economy, but also tied to questions of Bulgarian identity, especially vis-à-vis Bulgaria’s Ottoman past. Statelova takes an interesting position with respect to her sub- ject, chalga, which may strike western readers and scholars as somewhat unusual: She openly declares in her introduction that she, in fact, dislikes chalga, as does most of the Bulgarian intelligentsia of which she is a member. This is quite a differ- ent attitude from that of many western popular music scholars, who, reacting against Adornian dismissals of the popular, often position themselves as champions out to resuscitate aestheti- cally-maligned genres (the work of Simon Frith and Robert Walser comes to mind). Yet despite her personal dislike of the music, Statelova approaches the Bulgarian intelligentsia’s negative (or at best ambivalent) discourse about chalga with a critical eye, looking behind the rhetoric for larger issues of Bulgarian identity during a difficult period of economic and social transition. Statelova’s careful attention to her own position as a scholar is apparent not only with respect to the case of chalga, but also in terms of in her discussions of the fields of ethnomusicol- ogy and popular music studies as a whole. She revisits the emic-etic debate, but from the intriguing position of an eastern European looking on at the sidelines of the western discussion of globalization and transnationalism (a discussion she subse- quently critiques for not always taking into account sufficiently specific local histories). Statelova’s work is also important for popular music studies in that it raises questions particularly a propos of Bulgarian or eastern European contexts; for example, the modernist concept of the high-low cultural divide, which in the western post-Warholian cultural landscape has been for the most part abandoned or superseded by postmodern approaches, is still extremely relevant to systems of cultural production in Bulgaria and plays an important part in discussions of culture 8 editor’s introduction in the Bulgarian mass media. Statelova’s work offers a fresh look at how such concepts can still be important analytical frameworks in popular music studies. Statelova as a scholar, however, is far from an example of the typical Bulgarian academic; in fact, I would argue that she is part of what might be called a “new wave” in Bulgarian musicology, as part of a group of scholars (including Lozanka Peycheva, Ventsislav Dimov, and Claire Levy, among others) who in post-1989 Bulgaria have abandoned soviet-style struc- turalism and have begun developing theoretically sophisticated responses to problems of Bulgarian traditional and popular music. In fact, as Statelova herself points out, this wave is not so new, rather its appearance on the academic radar is; having worked for more than twenty years on popular music within the confines of a totalitarian regime that limited the kinds of ideas and discussions scholars could have (a limitation which led to many of her manuscripts being buried in desk drawers for years), Statelova is now enjoying the opportunity to address the questions of race and ethnicity so crucial to the dynamics of Bulgarian popular music that were impossible to fully explore during the communist era. Yet a different kind of limitation now often prevents Bulgarian scholars and many of their eastern European colleagues from taking full part in international scholarly dialogues: the prob- lem of funding. With the fall of communist regimes, many obstacles to research disappeared, but with them also disap- peared much of the state funding for academic activities and publications. Thus, while doing fieldwork in Bulgaria, I have often sensed the frustration of my Bulgarian colleagues, who are doing exciting work that deserves to be heard and recog- nized in the west, yet who face financial limitations that often make such participation impossible (for example, paying for a decent translation of one’s work is often prohibitively expen- sive for a Bulgarian scholar). Thus, scholarly debate continues to be rather one-sided, with those in wealthier nations domi- nating the discussions. I was therefore extremely happy when Rosemary approached me to participate in this project, as it “Out of One Throat Many Voices” 9 gives me an opportunity to help Bulgarian voices be heard in international discussions. Working on the solid foundation provided by the Bulgarian translator, I have tried to render in English Statelova’s sophisticated literary style, which in Bulgarian at times sounds reminiscent of Adorno at his most deliciously caustic, while at other times approaches a poetic reflection on the current state of Bulgarian culture. The reader will have to judge to what extent I have been successful in bringing Statelova’s voice and the myriad of voices in her text to life out of my English-speaking throat. 10 editor’s introduction introduction: What I Study and Why The subject of my study is a phenomenon of popular music in Bulgaria that caused the word chalga (popfolk) to reenter our speech in the 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. However, the text is not a monographic study of ethnic music in the period mentioned; such a study has already been written and published by Ventsislav Dimov (2001). Etymologically the word “chalga” means popular entertainment music, once played in Bulgarian towns during the Bulgarian Revival by ethnically mixed instrumental bands, the so-called “chalgii” (Valchinova-Chendova 2001:14).1 But at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries in Bulgaria chalga has not only acquired a new meaning, but also has a different emotional context. It is this context that interests me, not the very chalga itself. I place the term ethnopop in the subtitle of my study (which should be considered its true title) to refer to a broadly defined notion of a whole array of mod- ern popular music phenomena – I will use both “chalga” and “popfolk” as contextually equivalent for this notion – in which, going against globalization in the sphere of popular music, the local and the ethnic are the dominant factors marking the product.