Monday, June 3, 2024

Gerlach Oliver, What Exactly is Bulgarian Church Music? A current attempt to answer an apparently simple question










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Summary
The question leads me back to my first fieldwork ever, I have done at Bačkovo Monastery (Rhodope Montains) in August 2002. There I got my first basics of psaltic chant thanks to the generosity of Otec Stiliyan, the tipikar of the monastery, and of Deniza Popova, a German-Bulgarian scholar whom I know, while we studied at the Humboldt-University and who visited Bačkovo for many years.  When I returned in 2015, I found another Bulgaria and met young people at the church who opened a new world for me. With this paper I would like to try to answer this seemingly innocent question, and point at local Balkan traditions of the country which earn more scholarly attention, free from the usual and common preconceptions, also in response to current trends in ethnomusicological research which have changed the common perspectives considerably.
The overview includes various traditions since Neofit Rilski’s educational reforms and the later foundation of the Bulgarian state and various new approaches to look at the history of Slavonic chant in the territory of the current state Bulgaria.

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