Conference Agenda

In his landmark tome, Music in the Balkans, Jim Samson remarks that with the exception of Dimitar Nenov (1901-1953), European modernism did not make a mark on musical life in Bulgaria between the World Wars (Samson, 2013). After the devastation of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, many musicians in the newly independent nation were busy returning to the work of building institutions and professional life. There was hardly a classical tradition from which to break; in the standard historiography, the “first generation” of Bulgarian composers, such as Dobri Hristov (1875-1941), were largely concerned with forming choirs and arranging folk songs according to Western European harmony, while the second, led by Pancho Vladigerov (1899-1978), which came of age in the 1920s, integrated these folksongs into larger symphonic forms. This Southeastern pocket of Europe—confined, as historian Maria Todorova has noted, to the reputation of the most rural, backward, and “Balkan” of Balkan nations—was out of step with the rest of the continent, striving to replicate the long nineteenth century within a few short years of the twentieth.

And yet, many of the new Bulgarian intelligentsia had all the experiences constitutive of modernism. Many had studied abroad in Russia, Vienna, or Istanbul, most were multilingual, and all had the experience of accelerated modernization that left sharp epistemological ruptures. In this paper, rather than seeking modernism in Bulgarian music of the 1920s and 1930s, I turn to music in Bulgarian modernism of that period. I provide close readings of fiction, critical sketches, and philosophical essays in modernist periodicals such as Plamuk (The Flame) and Zlatorog (Golden Horn), arguing that specific repertoires and concepts of music, ranging from Western classicism to futurism to folk song, served as key intellectual resources for Bulgarian modernists. Concepts of realism, expressionism, and impressionism that these intellectuals worked out through discussions of music, in turn, shed new light on how music may be defined as part of artistic modernism in the broader project of Balkan modernity.