Cosmopolitan Creativity in the Southern Balkans: Three Contemporary Responses to Folk Music Institutions
Chair(s): Donna A Buchanan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,)
Discussant(s): Donna A Buchanan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
The southern Balkan nation-states of Greece and Bulgaria share a history of state-sanctioned investment in “national” folk music since their post-Ottoman founding. Yet, their contrasting 20th-century political conditions of a right-wing junta and authoritarian socialism gave rise to differing postnationalist cultural legacies amid shifting institutional landscapes. Since the 1990s, a revived urbanite interest in Greek traditional culture contributed to the institutionalization of folk music pedagogy, whereas in Bulgaria, the collapse of its socialist regime saw a decline in state support for folk music institutions. This panel considers how folk musicians respond to the challenges and affordances of institutional change through cosmopolitan creative strategies in performance and pedagogy. We thus strive for a synthetic approach to musical cosmopolitanism scholarship (Turino 2000; Stokes 2007; Collins & Gooley 2017) that considers institutional structure and creative agency together, to underscore the efficacy of cosmopolitan creativities within contemporary folk music scenes. The first presenter contrasts two variants of jazz cosmopolitanism among Epirote musicians in their musicality and self-image. The second presenter examines how leading figures in folk-revivalist music seminars in Greece transcend Hellenocentrism through a pan-regional conception of traditional music. The third presenter explores how two recent Bulgarian folk music recordings draw upon jazz and funk as a source of creative direction amidst the decay of the scene’s folk music institutions. Collectively, these three contributions illuminate the utility of a cosmopolitan creative outlook in confronting the shifting presence of folk music institutions in the southern Balkans.
Presentations in the Session
Parakalamos Blues vs. Pogonisio Jazz: Musical Creativity and Positionality Among Two Epirote Musicians
Gabriel Zuckerberg
Brown University
My paper compares the musical identities and aesthetic ideologies of two cosmopolitan-minded Epirote musicians, Yiannis Chaldoupis and Vasilis Kostas. As a participant-observer temporarily living in Epirus, I have been taking lessons and performing with both musicians, and socializing among their peers to understand their reception. Chaldoupis is a clarinetist born and living in Parakalamos, the sole “Roma village” in the municipality of Pogoni. Yet, during a 17-year stint in Amsterdam, Chaldoupis found a love for blues and created his idiosyncratic Epirote “Gypsy jazz” style. Also with roots in Pogoni, Vasilis Kostas grew up in Ioannina and was educated in jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music, only through which he discovered his homeland’s lute, the laouto. Kostas quickly became internationally renowned for his melodic use of the laouto and modal ethno-jazz collaborations. While both musicians are united by their affinity for African-American music and the creative obstacles in developing idiosyncratic fusions, their communication of those fusion styles diverges in social life. The festival-goer and musician community praises and criticizes these musicians for a mixture of reasons, often conflating issues of identity, urbanization, “artistry,” and “tradition.” I argue it is most elucidating to compare these musicians by a dialectic between musical experimentation and aesthetic identity: their self-reported perception of musical affinities (Stokes 2004) with blues versus modal jazz and their public efforts to integrate those styles into their self-image. This dialectic is visible in their claims to stylistic rootedness, the repertoire they perform in presentational contexts, and their public reception.
Mediterraneanist and Balkanist Cosmopolitan Visions at Greek Summer Music Seminars: Two Case Studies in Pedagogy and Performance
Dimitris Gkoulimaris
University of Texas at Austin
In the context of the Greek folk revival movement, intensive music seminars have emerged as prominent pedagogical spaces that complement the traditional institutions of the conservatory and the university. Many seminar instructors take on explicitly cosmopolitan attitudes, framing their teaching and performance of diverse repertoires through notions of a shared Eastern Mediterranean and/or Balkan musical culture, and thus challenging the once-dominant Hellenocentric approach to the study of folk music. In this emergent post-nationalist paradigm, musicians may look for affinities and inspiration in two intersecting directions: eastward, in the modal traditions of the Islamic world, or northward, in the stylistically familiar repertoires of the Balkans. The present paper examines these parallel and overlapping Mediterraneanist and Balkanist visions for a cosmopolitan understanding of musical culture, as they manifest in the pedagogical and performance choices of seminar instructors. My study draws upon participant observation conducted at five seminars in Greece over three summer periods, while it also dialogues with existing literature on the Greek folk revival (Dawe 2007; Kallimopoulou 2009). My analysis focuses on two case studies: the makam workshops of Evgenios Voulgaris and the polyphonic choirs of Martha Mavroidi, in addition to these instructors’ performances within the seminar programming. I dissect the two teachers’ repertoire selection, as well as their aesthetic choices in teaching and performing this repertoire, specifically regarding modal and rhythmic vocabulary, harmonization, and arrangement. Ultimately, I argue that the seminar instructors’ creative choices inform and advance the cosmopolitan visions that continue to shape the Greek revival movement.
“A Crisis of Ideas”: Institutional Decay, Creative Stasis, and Musical Identity in Contemporary Bulgarian Folk Music
Nathan Bernacki
University of British Columbia
Professional Bulgarian folk musicians currently navigate a scene characterized by the post-socialist decline of state support for folk music institutions (Rice 1994; Buchanan 2006; Silverman 2012). This deemphasis of institutionalized music making has left professional folk musicians with the responsibility of creatively defining the future of their tradition in its post-socialist condition. Yet this effort is further hindered by a sense of creative stasis within the tradition following the groundbreaking virtuosity of wedding music from the 1980s-90s. This twofold dilemma has led to fusion with external styles as the only remaining creative direction for Bulgarian folk music. This paper explores how the stylistic choices of this cosmopolitan approach ground discussions of musical identity amidst post-socialist institutional decay and a perceived creative scarcity. I consider two recent recordings, “Pletenitsa” by Peyo Peev, and “Paidushko” by Zhivko Vasilev. Peev’s style of folk music, with dense extended harmony, mathematical reorderings of Bulgaria’s asymmetric dance meters, and funk-inspired arrangement, are creative decisions deployed to challenge listeners to hear his work as a departure from wedding music and institutionalized staged folklore. A younger Vasilev, the first folk musician trained abroad in jazz performance, finds inspiration in jazz greats, with his jazz-folk music fusion work entirely circumventing institutional restrictions. Fieldwork interviews with Peev, Vasilev, and other prominent folk musicians indicate that while there is general consensus concerning the necessity of this cosmopolitanism, disagreements remain around themes of audience-musician relationships, (in)appropriate degrees of fusion, and the shifting influence of folklore institutions.
