Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures through an East-West Gaze

11: "Move Over Madonna": Gender, Representation, and The "Mystery" of Bulgarian Voices

212 eleven ‘‘Move Over Madonna’’ Gender, Representation, and The ‘‘Mystery’’ of Bulgarian Voices Carol Silverman When New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote ‘‘Move over Madonna, tastemakers on two continents are embracing a Bulgarian women’s choir’’ (1988, 27), he both reflected and promoted the Bulgarian music craze that swept the United States and Western Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Whereas people used to stare at me incredulously when I said I was studying Bulgarian folk music, in that era Bulgarian CDs were prominently displayed in Tower Records, critics proclaimed Bulgarian folk music ‘‘the most beautiful music on the planet,’’1 and rock and classical stars waxed eloquent about the group Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices) and collaborated with them in ‘‘crossover’’ productions. Following Steven Feld, who wrote that ‘‘transcultural record productions tell specific stories about accountability, authorship and agency, about the workings of capitalism, control and compromise ’’ (1994, 258), I discuss the historical background of Bulgarian choral music, highlighting issues of labor (both socialist and capitalist), representation , and gender in the transcultural dialogue between East and West.2 Furthermore , I locate my discussion of Bulgarian choirs within the theoretical frameworks of the emerging literature on the conception, marketing, and imagery of ‘‘world music.’’ It is no accident that the term ‘‘world music’’ was gaining ground precisely ‘‘Move Over Madonna’’ 213 at the time when the Bulgarian choirs first toured the West; the choir’s fame in the West was intricately entwined with the emerging marketing success of ‘‘world music.’’ According to Timothy Taylor, this term gained currency when it replaced the terms ‘‘ethnic,’’ ‘‘folk,’’ and ‘‘international’’ and began to be used as a sales category, marked by the debut of Billboard’s world music chart in 1990 (1997, 3–5; also see Feld 2000, 146–150). As Steven Feld remarks, ‘‘the phrase swept through the public sphere first and foremost signaling a global industry, one focused on marketing danceable ethnicity and exotic alterity on the world pleasure and commodity map’’ (2000, 151). World music is, indeed, a fruitful arena for examining global flows of commodities and symbols in a charged atmosphere revealing multiple representations of ‘‘difference’’ and conflicts over who has rights to sell what to whom. The Bulgarian case is particularly rich because we may examine all of the above within the contrasting contexts of socialism and postsocialism. Steven Feld characterizes the scholarship on world music of the last decade as focusing either on anxiety or celebration, loss or gain. On one hand, anxious accounts stress the loss of musical diversity that accompanies increased homogeneity (Alan Lomax’s cultural ‘‘gray-out’’) and the ‘‘complicity of world music in commodifying ethnicity,’’ noting that there is little possibility of resistance to world capitalistic institutions. On the other hand, celebratory accounts uncover active resistance, laud reappropriations of Western forms, and revere the emergence of local, creative, hybrid genres (ibid., 53). My analysis of Bulgarian choirs is an anxious tale, but it is not one that isolates capitalism as the enemy. A significant danger of the anxious narrative is the tendency to essentialize a prior authenticity (socialist or presocialist), which is then contrasted with a degraded and exploitative capitalist commodity. In my analysis, there is no prior authenticity, rather merely a series of historical moves wherein music is part of ideological and commodity exchanges within both socialism and postsocialism. The Emergence of Bulgarian Choirs The form of Bulgarian vocal music which attracted the most attention in the West in the 1980s was the a cappella female chorus, a form ‘‘invented’’3 in 1951 by the Bulgarian composer Filip Kutev (1903–1982). Kutev’s brilliant idea was to take traditional village songs, which are monophonic in most of Bulgaria or have drone-based harmony in the southwest region of the country, and arrange them into four- or five-part Western harmonies and add dynamics and tempo changes while preserving the throat-placed vocal quality.4 With the goal of creating a national folk chorus, Kutev traveled around Bulgaria in the early 1950s to recruit the best female village singers and instrumentalists for the newly formed state-sponsored music ensembles.5 Choruses featured female singers because singing in Bulgaria is predominantly a female tradition; ritual and work songs, for example, are almost exclusively sung by women. Carol Silverman 214 Moreover, women are symbolically associated with tradition and nationalism...