The light is changing.
I stepped out of my apartment yesterday afternoon and it hit me. This happens to me every Fall. There is a singular feeling, impossible to describe, that I get on a certain day in September every year when Fall makes the first hints of its presence felt. I used not to be able to figure out what triggered it, but I felt it nonetheless.
There's a certain intangible smell in the air that reminds me of apple cider and brown leaves and wind. There's the subtle suggestion of a chill - the air remains warm, but there is the tiniest wisp of something hiding behind it, something that makes the air feel impalpably heavier. Overnight, there's a change in the light of the late afternoon. It is somehow older, feebler; it slants in a way that the light of summer just doesn't.
I sensed all of these yesterday, and, I'll admit, it surprised me. I should have expected it; the climate here (which I would presume is responsible for all these overnight changes) is not all that different from that of Pennsylvania, and, albeit less similarly, LA. I don't know why they took me by such surprise. Perhaps because they take me by surprise every year - nine intervening months can make you forget the feeling of a season, even though you experience it year after year.
I recall having a similar collection of feelings and reactions on That Day the first year I went away to college, in the Fall of 2006. It startled me that year, because I had assumed--and who could blame me? LA had, up to that point, been a summer-at-the-beach-like pseudo-paradise--that I had left the milieu of what I had come to think of as "Autumn in the Country" behind me when I left the East Coast. But the same feelings took hold of me That Day in 2006--only much more forcefully--as the ones that did so yesterday.
And so I'm forced to conclude that this feeling that has gone along with the changing of the seasons may come back, year after perpetually surprising year, no matter where in the world I find myself. In a way, the change is comforting, but, to a greater extent, it's inexplicably disquieting. It raises a certain feeling within me that, as you can probably tell by the difficulty I'm having in describing it, is not so clear-cut. It isn't overtly positive or negative, and it doesn't really have a name. I suppose it isn't quite homesickness, though the feeling does remind me of home; homesickness presupposes loneliness.
But I don't feel lonely here, nor did I by the time That Day came around my first year in college, or in any subsequent year. But the feeling came around all the same. I really don't know quite what to call it. Perhaps the most suitable option is that amorphous, ill-defined boondoggle of a word, nostalgia.
Leaving that for now:
I had my first meeting with my adviser, Dr. Goritza Naidenova, on Thursday, and it gave me a wealth of ideas about how to start my research. If you're interested in the academic summary that follows, read on. If not, feel free to skip the last paragraph.
Essentially, what I learned boils down to this:
The origins of the diaphonic chant of the Shopi, the type of music I will be studying, are untraceable; we simply have no way of uncovering them. This type of music is very likely hundreds of years old, dating back to the early Ottoman Period (1396-1878), or even before. As with all folk music, it serves a purpose and has a function as a part of the Shop culture. The original purpose of it remains unclear.
The Ottomans, when compared to all of the other influences wrought upon Bulgarian culture, probably had the least influence upon it.
However this music came into being, it was unwritten, at first. A few lyrics were recorded at certain points, but up until the 19th century, there was no practical or established system for recording its pitches and rhythms. During the Bulgarian Revival (1762-1878), folk music took on enhanced meaning as one of the symbols of an independent culture and a renewed national identity. But as Bulgaria urbanized, and the emphasis in cultural life shifted to the city, the purpose and function of folk music changed as village culture did overall.
The 1850's saw the first attempts at transcribing folk music, but there were significant obstacles to this. Many of the common rhythmic gambits were nearly impossible to render accurately, and to make matters worse, scholars could not agree on the best way notate it. Some favored modern Western notation, whereas some favored a system of neumes similar to that used to notate chant in the Orthodox Church. After the Liberation in 1878, modern Western notation was used exclusively, and transcriptions started to become more accurate.
In the 1930's and -40's, several factors that would lead to the decline in the practice and preservation of this music began to coalesce. The Shopi, who, while never fully isolated from Bulgarian society at large, fiercely maintained their own separate culture, began to integrate more fully into that society. After World War II, Bulgaria became a Socialist Republic, which drastically altered folk traditions and the attitudes thereto. However, many of the best and most accurate transcriptions and recordings of Bulgarian folk music come from this era.
Today, the diaphonic chant of the Shopi is nearly extinct as it has traditionally existed in the villages of Bulgaria, surviving primarily through the curation and performance of professional folk groups. The specific techniques used to perform this type of chant are no longer widely taught, so the younger generation lacks the skills to sing it. It can still be heard upon occasion, but it is now heard very infrequently in informal contexts.
On the role of the Church:
The scales ("intonations" or "tones") used in this music are similar to those heard in the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, but there is little, if any, connection between the two. There is little evidence of influence in either direction - any similarities are coincidental. Traditional Bulgarian folk music took shape in pagan societies prior to their adoption of Christianity. As Christianity was introduced to these cultures, it changed them, and their folk music--along with its purposes and functions--as well.
The Church in Bulgaria did not, unlike the contemporary Catholic Church in Western Europe, keep extensive records and histories through its culture's periods of mass illiteracy. Thus, most histories of Bulgaria's antiquity were actually written by outside observers, Romans and Greeks foremost among them. This leaves our understanding of Bulgarian history clouded by outsiders' biases without the benefit of a cohesive insiders' narrative to which to compare them.
On cultural homogeneity:
Bulgarians, as an ethnic group, have a long established history as a cohesive, if not homogeneous, culture. The citizens of the First Bulgarian Empire, founded in 681 AD, are universally accepted as the common ancestors of the modern Bulgarian people. Bulgaria's situation is therefore unlike those of Spain, Germany, Italy, and other countries that were founded as federations of tribes who all had their own separate languages and cultural identities. Bulgaria, vis-a-vis the other nations of the world, has a comparitavely unified culture.
There are regional variations, however. A propos to this discussion - the folk music of any given village in Bulgaria differs from that of its neighbors, sometimes subtly, sometimes wildly. It may, therefore, be necessary to design comparative analyses between villages. And, as I mentioned before, the Shopi, though never fully isolated from the rest of Bulgarian society, deliberately maintained a culture more or less distinct from that society, at least prior to 1930. This cultural isolation has almost certainly contributed to variation within the Shopi's culture.
/End academic discussion
So things continue to go well. More sentimentality will most likely be forthcoming in subsequent posts. Until next time...
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