Един живот не стига за обичта към пеещия български народ – разговор с Елена Стоин

Author(s): Lozanka Peicheva,Ventsislav Dimov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2015

The article presents an interview with Elena Stoin (1915 – 2012) conducted on 4 June 2007 at her home in Sofia, at 21 Ivan Vazov Str. The authors have opted for this form of an open-ended conversation so that to allow for figuring out the human dimensions to great personalities and historical events Elena Stoin has got in touch with: intimate pictures of her family life and her career, her personal experience of a researcher and song collector. At the time of the interview Elena Stoin was 92, sharp-witted, with fast reactions and as lively as ever after two hours of conversing. The conversation broaches issues related both to the history of Bulgarian folk studies and the personality of Elena Stoin, her father Vasil Stoin and their milieu. The subheadings in the interview give an idea of the content of the conversation: the family, her career at the institute, My Father in Me, Vasil Stoin and his willpower, folk song classification, folk musical dialects, Elena Stoin’s book of the same title, her favourite poets and artists, fieldwork and affection for the singing Bulgarian people, sound recording technology, her childhood memories, international contacts with renowned researchers and composers, male polyphonic singing, Raina Katsarova, Philip Koutev, radio and financing of the work of a folk song collector, stage and media formatting of folk music, Mita Stoicheva and other popular folk singers, the new schools and the vanishing old voices, politics, Gypsies, applied ethnomusicology... Elena Stoin’s word of mouth, recorded in the interview, presents a meeting with a unique eyewitness of the academic life in three ages of modern Bulgaria and the conversation conducted by the participants in it provides a document of the dialogue between different generations in Bulgarian folk studies.

„Нови идеи в етномузикологията”

Author(s): Ivanka Vlaeva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2015

The article points out the important stages in the development of ethnomusicology in Bulgaria. This is done in order outline the place and role of the already well established seminar “New ideas in ethnomusicology.” It is created and organized by the research group “Ethnomusicology” at the Institute of Art Studies – Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. The aim is to meet the need for dialogue in a community of like-minded people united by common ideas and topics in the ethnomusicological research. The article also presents a meeting at the seminar, that discusses the Bulgarian participation in the ICTM (particularly in the Study Group “Music and Dance in Southeastern Europe”), as well as prospects of the Bulgarian group in the ICTM and establishment of a national committee.

Ценка Йорданова: „Музикалната идея І”

Author(s): Kristina Yapova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2015

The reviewed book includes studies representative of the author’s area of research interests, which have been published in Bulgarian academic journals over the last decade. In terms of their contents, three groups of issues are discernible: the first one, which is also the main, is on the twentieth-century New Music. This issue is treated in: On truth and method in the twentieth-century New Music; Ideologemes at the turning point of the twentieth-century New Music; The twentieth-century New Music on the horizon of two leading thematic projects of Modernity: Fragments; Dichotomies and polarizations in Schoenberg’s holistic autonomous and terminological system and The concept Musical Idea (musikalischer Gedanke) in Schoenberg: an attempt for interpretative reading. The second group of issues is outlined through the construction by the author of a new area in musicology: the study The paramusical sphere as a subject field of semiotics. The third group is related to those of the phenomena generated by the post-modern culture that fit into the general term World Music: the study The World Music concept and the ethnocentric model. Being various and even establishing relations of opposing to each other, the phenomena subject to description and exploration in the three categories, are united by Yordanova’s general view and the approach related to it. This view is beyond doubt musicological, in a fundamental sense though. In it, musicology expands its philosophic horizons in order to bring up not only theoretical issues of musicology, but also those of the men of music. Within such horizons, the author goes beyond the boundaries of the aesthetical subject of music, referring to beauty, to study it as a language capable to speak of the truth of existence.

Комиксът като базов контент на трансмедийни проекти

Author(s): Vida Delcheva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2015

Presently, new technologies and new modes of using information make the interest of the audiences ever more volatile and passing. Attracting and maintaining their interest necessitates new methods of creating content in new media formats, transmedia storytelling. Comics are media using two semantic systems and a succession of representations, which makes them quite filmable. Seriality is typical of comics and for this reason some of the most successful transmedia projects venture to transform comic scripts into multi-platform scripts in development. The paper analyses the potential of comics as a basic content of transmedia projects seeking to define the position of comics within the new media reality, their role of a basic content and their function of a multi-platform script in development. The study deals with the successful comic scripts that have become successful transmedia projects, using the example of the film universe of marvel. It’s in fact a series of movies about superheroes, comics and shows, based on characters and subjects of marvel’s comics. Various media formats merge and succeed each other in transmedia storytelling, incorporating new types of media on the way. That is diversifying storylines rather than media. Still, this diversification is not final, alternating with mergence of storylines in a single story: departure from the original script is not typical of transmedia.

Привилегията да бъда близо до Райна Кацарова

Author(s): Lozinka Yordanova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2016

The article traces the author’s personal contacts with Raina Katsarova, giving reflections on the significance of some of her studies to the Bulgarian and world science. Yordanova recounts her own personal memory of holding the Koprivshtitsa Folk Fairs to accentuate Raina Katsarova’s role in the staging of these events. Raina Katsarova’s contribution is highlighted as a researcher of folk traditions, songs, ring dances, popular puppet shows, and tradition bearers. Invaluable personal impressions of Raina Katsarova’s stand on teaching folk arts at school are provided along with her role in Prof. Dr. Ivan Shishmanov National Ethnopedagogical Association.

Спомен за Райна Кацарова сред кукерите от Турия

Author(s): Asen Atanasov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2016

A photo story about one of Raina Katsarova’s latest fieldworks: watching masked games in the village of Turia, Kazanluk region on Shrove Sunday, 1977 by a participant in the event, who was assigned to take pictures of the ritual.

Ганка Неделчева: Две издания посветени на ноктюрните за пиано от Димитър Христов

Author(s): Elisaveta Valchinova-Chendova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2016

Prof. Ganka Nedelcheva’s studies of the cycle of 12 nocturnes by Dimiter Christoff are related to her activities of a pianist. Over the last decade and a half Prof. Ganka Nedelcheva has been the premiere performer of a number of Dimiter Christoff’s pieces. The author has had a unique chance to theoretically figure out her interpretational and pedagogical experience. Her first book, Dimiter Christoff’s nocturnes for piano in Bulgarian and international experience. Interpretational polysemy of the technological parallel with Chopin’s nocturnes is a theoretical study. Nocturne is treated as an idea, a title existing over time to tempt composers. For the purposes of her study, the author spells out the term nocturne, specifying it terminologically. Her rationale for treating it as a title, relates more often than not to a broader creative interpretation of the known characteristics of the genre of short piano pieces. The approaches to nocturne are traced in the context of the nineteenth- and the twentieth century Bulgarian music and musical experience. Her text has also an informative value with the large amount of examples, placed historically and stylistically. The two time span benchmarks in the study, Fryderyk Chopin and Dimiter Christoff, are treated through technological aspects of expression. Night with Chopin and Christoff is not just a parallel: through the title nocturne Chopin’s arguments of romanticism suggest parallels with the contemporary compositional project of Dimiter Christoff at the turn of the twenty-first century. The author asks as to whether the turn of the twenty-first century has not given rise to a new romanticism, to a new avant- garde that is mostly aesthetical, being achieved musically and technologically through new idioms. The emergence of Dimiter Christoff’s 12 nocturnes for piano is significant both to Bulgarian and world music with its cyclical form. The 12 faces of night in Dimiter Christoff’s nocturnes for piano. A possible performative vision contains facsimiles of the author’s scores with a thorough semantic and concrete pianistic interpretational analysis of each of them (p. 52). This idea is brilliantly vindicated, which makes it especially valuable to potential performers and researchers.

Опити върху настоящето. За книгата на Камелия Николова „Театърът в началото на ХХІ век”

Author(s): Asen Terziev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2016

„Когнитивни подходи към музикалния слух и музикалната памет”

Author(s): Andrey Diamandiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2015

Angelina Petrova’s book corresponds to the most up-to-date and topical studies on solfeggio worldwide, without breaking the relation with the traditional teaching practices in Bulgaria. The categories of musical understanding, hearing, aural training, consciousness, the latest scientific approaches used in the creation of the so-called neural network structures and neural maps, the terminological and structural study of musical memory, of the so-called ‘auditions’, as well as ‘F0 listeners’ or ‘spectral listeners’ present solfeggio in a completely different light, keeping nonetheless its substance in the strict music educational practices. In Chapter 1, Philosophic and Musical Hermeneutics and Ear for Music the author comments on the postmodern philosophy and its interpretations of musical hearing, drawing on the modern and postmodern theories of Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and later also of Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari, making the important distinction in German language between ear for music and musical hearing, which in the Russian and Bulgarian traditions are fused into the former term, ear for music. In Chapter 2, Ear for Music in the Light of Contemporary Cognitive Psychology solfeggio is studied through cognitive psychology, shaping of musical perception and of musical notions in accordance with the cognitive and neuropsychological studies. Chapter 3 deals with musical memory, broaching the paramount views of cognitive psychology of musical memory: its definition, types, assumptions about its dynamic structure, the issues of the long-term musical memory and the correlation between it and melodic dictation. Chapter 4, Tonal Syntax and Ear for Music interprets melodic dictation, basic theoretical notions in music aural analysis, an ​analytical aural method in dictation are considered, with the study focusing here on its practical part: 1-, 2-, 3- and 4-part dictation. The section dealing the specifics of the dictations by ‘parameters’ in some systems of West-European methods is especially valuable. Chapter 5 explores the models of the post-tonal ear for music and melodic dictation in post-tonal music. The chosen thematic line evinces the author’s innovative methodology drawing on various modern views and models, e.g. Pierre Boulez, Utz and Kleinrath, including also postmodern composers in the process of solfeggio training such as Stockhausen, Ligeti, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough.

Masculinity (Re-)Formulation and Nation (Re-)Branding: Takarazuka Revue’s Cooperation with Dove Attia

Author(s): Maria Grajdian / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2022

This paper focuses on the five performances resulted from the cooperation between the French-Tunisian composer and producer Dove Attia and the Japanese all-female popular musical theater company Takarazuka Revue. Based on in-depth ethnographic research and extensive literature review, the phenomenological interpretation aims at highlighting the intricate relationship between the construction of masculinity by means of on-stage representation and off-stage advertising and a progressive sense of national identity in tune with late-modern global tendencies.

A magyar reformátori istentisztelet kontúrjai Huszár Gál rubrikáiban (1560/61)

Author(s): Dezső Karasszon / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 6/2022

Gallus Huszár’s Debrecen church hymnal (1560/61) is a rich source for 16th century Hungarian Reformed service singing, uniquely distinguished by its musically notated melodies. The current study investigates its so-called rubrics, short (or sometimes longer) liturgical annotations, which, on the one hand, outline the course of the church services of his era, and, on the other hand, provide a glimpse into the contents of the individual liturgical moments, both on a theological and an emotional (or poetical) level. They allow us to distinguish the genres of hymns used within the worship services (chief services, canonic hours, para-liturgical occasions). The current article would like to contribute to the renewal of today’s Reformed worship that is long overdue, and which ought to follow the spirit of the Reformation. One will find here the most important pieces of information, as well as the inspirational bases for such a reform.

Възникване и развитие на валдхорновото изкуство. Интеркултурният професионален диалог между различните национални традиции и влиянието на Българската изпълнителска школа в Бразилия

Author(s): Asen Angelov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2018

Origin and historical development of the instrument. Technical improvement of the French horn. Corno da caccia (hunting horn). Birth of the Bohemian School. The presence of the French horn in baroque and classical music - composers and works. Creation of modern horn and reflection on instrumental repertoire. A look at the works and composers of Romanticism, modern and contemporary music. 178 Formation of the Bulgarian French horn School - traditions, guidelines, the most prominent representatives. A brief historical overview of the traditions of performing and teaching horn in Brazil. Influence of the Bulgarian horn School on the Brazilian tradition. The intercultural process of interaction between the Bulgarian and Brazilian horn schools

Празникът на Празниците ”песнопения от пловдивската синагога „Цион”

Author(s): Zoya Mikova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2013

Every Friday, solemn chants are sung in the synagogue. They are easy to memorize and can be performed by everyone present. My first participation in the service provoked many questions: What is the holiday? Should we, when analyzing the musical material that accompanies it, proceed from our knowledge of folklore patterns and look for signs of oral culture in it? Is it appropriate to use the criteria that we apply when working with Bulgarian folk songs for these chants? This material is part of a larger work, for this reason I present here the order of the service and the musical text of the chants that accompany it.

1944 NUANCES DE GÉOPOLITIQUE SUR LA SCÈNE DE L'EUROVISION. L’UKRAINE TRIOMPHE, LA RUSSIE DÉCHANTE

Author(s): Laurent Léothier / Language(s): French Issue: 6/2016

When strangers are coming. They come to your house, they kill you all and say we're not guilty. Qui penserait que ces quelques mots sont issus des paroles de la chanson ukrainienne ayant remporté l'édition 2016 du Concours Eurovision et non extraits d'un discours politique populiste ? En effet, le 16 mai, à l'issue de quatre heures d'émission en direct de Stockholm, la chanteuse Jamala, d'origine tatare de Crimée, portant les couleurs de l'Ukraine, remporta le grand prix européen avec un score à ce jour inégalé.

Lubomír „Čaroděj“ Drožď. Příběh představitele roszakovské kontrakultury

Author(s): Mirek Vodrážka / Language(s): Czech Issue: 04/2024

Lubomír "Čaroděj" Drožď, a significant figure in the Czechoslovak underground, was deeply influenced by Western subcultures and the political climate post-1968. His life was marked by a blend of artistic endeavors, pseudonymous writings, and resistance against the communist regime. Drožď's work spanned various mediums, including visual arts, music, and samizdat publications, reflecting his commitment to countercultural ideals. Despite facing numerous challenges, including police scrutiny and societal ostracism, he remained a pivotal figure in promoting alternative cultural expressions. His legacy includes a rich tapestry of underground activities, from organizing happenings to producing samizdat literature, all while navigating the complexities of a repressive political environment. Drožď's story is a testament to the resilience and creativity of the underground movement in Czechoslovakia.

Естетическата нагласа на Мориц Гайгер и нейните музикално-феноменологически измерения

Author(s): Hari Rangelov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2025

This article examines the main concept in Moritz Geiger’s aesthetics – the aesthetic attitude – which, as an extension of the phenomenological concept attitude, describes the art-oriented (art-attuned) self. The very concept of attitude always refers to the intimate turning towards (orientation) either the world or art. At the same time, however, there exists another third attitude, which is capable of describing the intimacy of both the aesthetic and the world attitude, and which is inferred as a logical necessity without any evidence of what precisely this third attitude is. This indicates the existence of methodological ambiguity in contemporary music philosophy and musicology. The possibility of elucidating it – by revealing the musical-phenomenological dimensions of Geiger's aesthetics – is one of the conceptual horizons of this article, while the relations between the three attitudes are part of the conditions in which its theme unfolds. In order to clarify the aesthetic attitude, Geiger introduces additional concepts, namely outer concentration and value perception. Geiger analyses their modus operandi phenomenologically, and this makes it possible to reveal the musical-phenomenological dimensions of the aesthetic attitude, which directly links it to themes and ideas in musical-philosophical literature. Musical-philosophical concepts such as musical nomos, transcendental musical synthesis, and the faculty of co-being enable Geiger's ideas to be developed and placed into a concrete musical-philosophical perspective that sees the relationship between the self and music as fundamental and autonomous.

Първото общобългарско състезание за майстори на естрадното изкуство и ролята му за дефинирането на популярната култура на социализма

Author(s): Anton Anguelov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2024

The First All-Bulgarian Competition for Masters of Estrada Art in 1954 was an initiative of the Committee for science, art and culture, which has its кey role for defining and importing the Soviet concept of the estrada art in Bulgaria in terms of aesthetics, functions and organization. This concept would be reproduced in the following more than three decades and would set the frames of the state-supported official popular culture. Through quoting and analyzing the preserved archival documents related to the preparation and holding of the event, I offer my conclusions about the nature of this event and the art of estrada – a composite scenic art, combining spoken word, music, singing, dancing, acrobatics, circus acts – all together building up a unitary performance. The discussions within the jury in the course of the competition make clear the specifics of this art and its differences to the classical academic genres. After the competition, the estrada art became a centralized technology for covering remote audiences by a centrally approved cultural content between entertainment, satire and propaganda.

The film industry and its critical reflections in biographical dramas

Author(s): Lenka Rusňáková,Zuzana Kvetanová / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

The film genre called biographical drama (abbreviated as biopic) focuses on depicting the unique fates and professional achievements or failures of public figures, including popular figures in the music industry. Given the long-term success of these film narratives, there is a need to explore biographical audiovisual narratives about musicians of the past and present. The main aim of the study, therefore, is to elucidate the conventional genre patterns and iconography of the film genre of biographical drama in the form of a critical reflection on feature films, contemporary biopics from the music industry that resonate in the world of cinema. To fulfil the stated aim, the first step is to explain key concepts and processes closely related to the issue at hand. In a follow-up case study, we explain the ways in which the music industry collaborates with the film industry in the application of qualitative content (narrative) analysis of selected research materials. We work on the assumption that biographical dramas about music personalities have the potential to create financially and audience successful media content, reaching relatively high qualitative levels, despite their generally low reputation by the professional public. This assumption opens up a debate about ways of working with the relevant genre iconography. We are also interested in answering the question of how and whether the meaning of the presented facts changes to dramatize the plot, and to what extent the examined film narratives referring to real life stories of selected persons fulfil their informative-educational character. In fact, we believe that the representation of reality in the media reality (represented by audiovisual images of the described genre) is modified to a certain extent. For this reason, we consider it necessary to approach the interpretation of cinematic works in a critical manner.

Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands

Author(s): Hankus Netsky / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

Review of: Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands. Hrsg. von Francois Guesnet, Benjamin Matis und Antony Polansky. (Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Bd. 32.) Liverpool University Press—Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Liverpool – London 2020. XIII, 552 S., Ill., Notenbsp. ISBN 978-1-906764-73-9. (€ 51,–.).

Cindy Bylander: Engaging Cultural Ideologies

Author(s): Michał Piekarski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2025

Review of: Cindy Bylander: Engaging Cultural Ideologies. Classical Composers and Musical Life in Poland 1918–1956. (Polish Studies.) Academic Studies Press. Boston 2022, 343 S. ISBN 979-8-88719-022-8. ($ 149,–.)