100 години Райна Кацарова
A Hundred Years Raina Katsarova

Summary/Abstract: Raina Katsarova was born on the 71h of May 1901. She was a daughter of General Dimitar Katsarov, an amateur naturalist and scholar, a son of priest Ilia Katsarov from Koprivshtitsa, a participant in the April Uprising. Her mother, Stefania Konstantinova, was a housewife, but by self-education she reached a high level of learning and erudition. The enlightened family background and the childhood spent in Berkovitsa, Vratsa and Koprivshtitsa cultivated in her love and respect for the hard-working Bulgarian people, for its holidays and workdays, its customs and songs. She graduated from the Theoretical Department of the State Music Academy (1922-25). Her interest in the musical folklore made Prof. Dobri Hristov and the commission present at her state examination, particularly Prof. Vassil Stoin, direct her to work in the sphere of folk music. By that time she had already taken down on her own initiative several scores of songs. After successful trial work on location (sent by the Ethnographical Museum) to collect folk songs in the region of Teteven and the Rhodopes, at the end of 1928 Raina Katsarova was appointed assistant and later curator in the section for folk music at the National Ethnographical Museum. Here under the guidance of Vassil Stoin and with the friendly assistance of the museum workers, especially the ethnographer Hristo Vakarelski and the museum director Stefan L. Kostov, Katsarova developed as an excellent musical student of folklore and museum worker. Trips for collecting musical folklore materials all over Bulgaria followed. During the period of printing the collections of folk songs she actively collaborated with V. Stoin. At the end of 1930 Katsarova travelled at her own expense to Czechoslovakia and Germany. In Berlin she got acquainted with the best specialists in the area of folk music - the professors Hombostel, Kurt Sachs, Wolf, Schunemann and Dr. Lachmann. In Prague, in Berlin and in Dresden she won a lot of friends for the Bulgarian musical folklore. Following V. Stoin Raina Katsarova became curator of the section for folk music at the Ethnographical Museum. Thanks to her initiative and personal relations abroad she managed to supply the section with a phonograph apparatus “Presto” together with metalophone records for it. Hers was the initiative a collection of folk musical instruments to be created as well as the instruments from the first Plovdiv Fair in 1898 housed in the museum to be arranged and included in an inventory. Simultaneously she collected new instruments and studied some of them. Taking the risk of getting in conflict with the management of the museum, in 1944 Katsarova evacuated the property of the section for folk music to Koprivshtitsa and thus she rescued it from the fire in Sofia on the 3Oth of March 1944. In 1950 the section for folk music was transferred from the Ethnographical Museum to the Institute of Music (established in 1948) at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (today Department “Music”

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