Bulgarian Rarities
Vassil Kazandjiev was an anomaly among artists in communist Bulgaria.
He was a well-known and respected composer and conductor who expressed his creative independence in a society whose leaders abhorred individualism.
Kazandjiev was among a generation of Bulgarian composers, says U of L musicologist Jean Christensen, "who had to forge their language in a way that expressed their own individuality, but also could speak to their own people above and beyond expectations set up by government policies."
Yet few people outside of Bulgaria—a Soviet satellite from the mid-1940s until the day after the Berlin Wall was breached in 1989—know Kazandjiev's name. Nor would they recognize the names of Ivan Spassov or Gheorghi Arnaoudov or any of their counterparts.
This is something Christensen hopes to help change with a monograph on 22 contemporary Bulgarian composers born between 1922 and 1967. She will co-author the work with Bulgarian musicologist Ekatarina Dotcheva.
Christensen was awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Award to support her Bulgarian studies.
As a prelude to her slated research journey to Bulgaria in the summer of 2004, Christensen received a thorough introduction to the country's culture, language and history during a course last summer at the Fulbright Institute in the city of Pomorovo.
"I have met composers who had been communists because of idealism and who still work on those premises," she says. "I met composers who were able to work with the regime, though they themselves were not members of the party; I met several who managed to survive, albeit somewhat restricted—and often very severely criticized—as independent and defiant composers."
Christensen says she went to Bulgaria without knowing if she would find good composers able to communicate their ideas with sensibility, thought and imagination. But she did.
"We have to keep our ears open for new voices because they're certainly out there," she says.
Bulgarian composers, especially those who studied in Russia or Poland, were well acquainted with modern music from the West even during the most repressive years of communism.
In the 1960s when French composer Pierre Boulez was composing aleatoric works—a then-new type of improvisation in which the performers choose their own timing and notes based on "suggestions" from the composer—Bulgarian composer Spassov was doing the same thing.
He was able to work within the communist regime by writing aleatoric pieces that used concepts from Bulgarian folk music—one form of music the regime approved. Yet, Spassov's compositions were far more individual than folk.
Christensen says Bulgarian contemporary composers were, and are, isolated from the rest of the world for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with music.
"Bulgaria is in the very southeast corner of Europe," she says. "They were subject to the Turks for 500 years and then after less than 100 years of freedom they were overtaken by the communists in 1944."
Since the fall of communism, the country's isolation continued because of its poor economy.
The fall of communism has been a mixed bag for Bulgarian composers.
Arnoaudov, a relatively young composer, says that now he can openly call works by their real titles.
Despite creative freedom, Bulgarian composers receive little government support in the post-communist era and their audiences find it difficult to attend concerts because of economic hardships.
However, some younger composers see hope. Many are turning to computers to compose their own scores to sell on the Internet or through a publisher. Necessity is working to revise the traditional relationship between composer and publisher.
"I hope that I can bring attention to these good composers," Christensen says, "and make some connections for them and the musicians to outside agencies and institutions."
