Writing reviews of Ethnographies

May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music - Reviewing a musical ethnography

The following is an approach to reviewing Tim Rice's ethnography traversing Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares and Bulgarian gaida music.

"....Even if, as Bohlman asks, we consider the agendas behind the wider colonial/missionary projects that many ethnographers historically accompanied, we must agree that their ethnographic writings were, in some measure ‘the attempts of our intellectual forebears to account for the distance between themselves and the societies whose music and musical life they so passionately wished to render meaningful.’[1]  The attempts of turning beyond one’s familiar world to learn something about oneself by observing another seemed all the more promising in light of the rigorous objectivism seemingly offered by enlightenment philosophy’s influence upon the institutionalization of the fledgling discipline of ‘comparative musicology’, what with its assumptions of the ability to detachedly apprehend the musical reality under study and the squeaky clean potential to ‘tell its as it really was’[2].  However ethnocentric, or saddled with elitist baggage earlier ethnographic discourses are thought to be though, as Bohlman points out, ‘the rhetorical modes and ethnographic motivations of ethnomusicological cultural critique are multifarious, but historically reflective of the changing ways in which the music of the Other is engaged and appropriated.’[3] 

The historical issues given voice notwithstanding, much recent ethnographic literature has attempted to grapple with our own issues, those such as self awareness and ‘the systems of power to which we are intellectually opposed to and yet implicated within.’[4]  Rice alludes to the virtual impossibility of being able to write a musical ethnography unself-consciously or without embarrassment and himself attempts to appease some of these problems in his own ethnography by, for example, embedding quotes within the main body of his text rather than reduced size off-set quotes that juxtapose the main body of the work where the supposed analytical work is being done, or in the use of the past tense as oppose to some ‘abstract ethnographic present’.  Through using such techniques, Rice hopes that at least he can shift the balance of his ethnographic prose to help build ‘a sense of the Other, as author and interpreter constructing meaning that are not wiped out by my representations and interpretations, manages to surface even within the confines of the monologic form.’[5] Moreover, despite the inherent problems surrounding monologic authority exemplified in the many issues raised under the so-called ‘crisis of representation’, what seems to remain important for musical ethnographers, however subversive some of the underlying agendas and whatever questionable tactics are employed in legitimating our ethnographies, as Turino rightly points out ‘is the explicit questioning of our construction of other people’s realities.’[6]

The issues of representation that arise when attempting to understand the actions of those we study, perforce involves the construction, for ourselves, of the contexts and life-worlds of the people we study; of finding the meaningful connections between alien signs and their contexts. It follows that if, indeed, ‘man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’[7], then any attempt to understand these culturally ‘alien’ webs of significance must involve the act of interpretation, that is tangling those webs within our own webs of significance, but in the process problematically leaving our interpretations susceptible to dispute.  ‘Understanding is a reflexive process ultimately realised as self-understanding, although the self is not necessarily the ‘object’ of enquiry.  Neither the self nor the Other is the object of understanding, rather, the interpretation seeks to expose the world or culture reference by symbols and symbolic behaviours –a process necessarily finite, open-ended and contestable.’[8]

Tracing his own initial experience of Bulgarian music, where he encountered an alien world of symbols, Rice, refers to an example where he imbibed, internalised, and experienced these ‘alien’ musical symbols in use (he cites his experience of dancing to Bulgarian musics as an example of embodied nonverbal appropriation and encounter with dancing to ‘new meters’ ), and sought to approach an understanding by distancing himself from the ‘joys of dancing’ in the act of systematization using symbols from his own musicological background (that of ‘western’ art music theory).  He was then able to go on to reappropriate his new mode of conceptualising the different metrics of Bulgarian dance music back into a performative encounter and enjoy a new broader understanding of Bulgarian music which ultimately influenced his experience of it.  ‘I learned that each dance type, labelled with its own generic name, had a unique repeating pattern of short and long beats.  Only after I literally embodied these patterns did I realise that the unequal beat [combinations] could be subdivided conceptually into equally spaced pulses and therefore be “measured” and “explained”… the two unequal “beats” of paidushko could be explained as five equal pulses and transcribed in 5/8 time.’[9]  Rice, in effect, built on his own ‘pre-understandings of music that were part of my world before I encountered Bulgarian music’[10] and in doing so expanded his own horizons by enmeshing symbols and webs of significance within his own webs.  ‘When, as in ethnomusicological research, a new world of music is encountered, new understanding results when the horizons of the researcher’s world are expanded to include at least some part of the world that the new music symbolically references.  From this perspective, the researcher seeks not so much to understand the inner experience of people from another culture, but rather the world suggested by music sounds, performances, and contexts.’ [11] 

In seeking to narrow the gap ‘between the descriptive, scientific, language-encoded methods used to study music and the vivid, deeply moving, often unarticulated inner experience we have performing or listening to it’[12], Rice locates his approach towards his ethnographic objectives of understanding how Bulgarian music is experienced within the spheres of Ricoeurian hermeneutics.  Following Geertz’s contestation of Levi’s Strauss’ structuralist notion ‘that all cultures, however diverse, manifest at bottom patterns basic to human thought in general’[13], Rice too looks to overcome hindrances of substance sapping theories that divorce ‘raw data’ from the contexts that give them meaning and render them unintelligible.  Like Geertz, Rice asserts that given we can never become natives of the cultures we study, the inner experience of the Other is neither attainable nor for that matter desirable.  The aim of anthropological ‘investigation’ becomes, then, an ‘expansion of understanding based on meaningful discourse with other peoples and their cultures’[14], and for Rice, of pointing the hermeneutical window towards the views gained from meaningful discourse and using it towards approaching an understanding of Bulgarian musical experience by investigating the meetings between both parties’ symbolic territories.

Upon acknowledging that understanding lies in the individual’s encounter with the multiple worlds of symbols and that such understanding is necessarily ‘finite, changeable, multidimensional, forced to compete with other understandings, and limited by the expandable horizons of the individual’[15], Rice asks us to experience our an expansion of understanding within these dynamics. ‘May it Fill you Soul’ contains accounts of just such similar hermeneutical arcs as experienced by Rice in his attempts to understand what it is to be Bulgarian making music, and we are invited to approach our own explicated understandings of Bulgarian musical experience, seemingly so far removed from the ‘source’ by virtue of our interpretative distance as readers of his academic prose (albeit nicely supplemented by sound media of the accompanying CD and its well documented examples), within similar reflexive contexts of his written representations.

It is within this context, then, that Rice defines musical experience as ‘the history of the individual’s encounter with the world of musical symbols in which he finds himself’[16] and in doing so firmly situates his approach towards ‘experiencing Bulgarian music’ within attempts to track and interpret the individual’s encounter with their symbolic territory and by looking towards the meanings they construct given particular social, cultural, economic and historical contexts.  In other words, in order to approach an understanding of how and why Bulgarians create and understand music, Rice suggests the necessity of recourse to their world of culture where actions and symbols have meanings that are socially and historically constructed; ‘I want to understand how music is individually created and experienced, how it is historically constructed, and how it is socially maintained.’[17] 

Rice sets about his experimental approach to reconciling both experiential and ‘documentable’ dialectics by focussing upon the lives of two individuals, husband and wife –Kostadin and Todora Varimezov, and their encounters with drastic changes to life in Bulgaria during the seventy years of their lives.  Rice posits that ‘since individuals appropriate, activate and manipulate the social and historical world of symbols –that is, traditions –and in the process give to culture and history whatever expressive force they have’[18], by reverse, through tracing the Varimezov’s reflections upon their expressive musical interaction with their changing ‘worlds’, their encounters offer insights into ‘how music, history, and social, economic and ideological forces unite in everyday experience.’[19]  

By privileging the discourse of the Varimezovs, Rice notes the potential limitations on a potential ‘polyphony of voices’ for interpretation, noting that their two voices are not necessarily representative of eight-million Bulgarians.  However, ‘May it fill your Soul’ is self-confessedly experimental approach from the start in this respect.  Due to their not insubstantial engagement with their musical tradition in contemporary musical circles, however, Rice suggests that as individuals they had interpreted ‘not only their own work but that of others, and other have interpreted their work.  To shine a light on their views is to illuminate the experience and interpretation of others and the dialogue between people and groups over the diverse meanings they give to music.’[20]    

In his home-tome of Gergebunar, where Kostadin had grown up as a boy, he was exposed to music making in his own family and had himself ‘whiled away long hours herding animals by playing on [a] small flute… bought for a few pennies at a fair.’[21]  The hard grinding work necessary to eke out a living in the agrarian mode of village life placed no value on formal musical tuition for boys in part due to the lack of a significant viable economic interest (being a professional musician was not well looked upon, as Kostadin’s father would often point out, but which at a later date he was able to square in becoming a professional state-employed musician).  Kostadin’s musical learning was more the result of hours of ‘noodling’ and experimentation with the instrument to produce something which resembled music whilst involved in animal husbandry.  Only after some degree of mastery in the ability to form something which resembled traditional melodies that he had heard, would older boys and men begin to impart the melodies they knew to Kostadin to begin to realise on this instrument. 

The development of the cognitive skills necessary to develop an understanding of the more formal theories that govern melodic structure most likely, argues Rice, evolved in this way, and such skills were seemingly well prized by a society that did not necessarily have access to the types of formal abstract systematic theories that assist cognition in western musicology.  Rice documented that often a good musician who had developed such skills was often deemed virtuosic more by nature of the size of his repertoire rather than technical aptitude, because in part of the time investment needed to learn these skills by oneself (much like the prized ability of a concert pianist to conceptualise, for example, lightening fast scalic passages as one familiar neuro-motor pattern learned through practice, and thus execute it with ease).  Only once such serious musical learning had been demonstrably achieved, however, did adults begin to even reluctantly consider the financially frivolous acquisition of a ‘serious’ instrument, as was the case for Kostadin. By noting, for example, the comments made during a Gaida lesson at which Bai Dimitûr’s addressed his grandson’s burblings on the Gaida by comparison to Rice’s ability to copy his tune, Rice suggested this as an indication of what pre-war learning might have striven for when attempting to learn and master the abstract principles governing melodic formation in the absence (or not as the case may now be) of a clear verbal mode of expressing them;  ‘Bai Dimitûr’s own playing I take as prima facie evidence that he possessed the cognitive categories, strategies, or schemata necessary to produce music, although these categories, in the case of older village musicians like himself, were tacit, non verbal ones… in aurally transmitted traditions without such terminology and theory, music knowledge and categories are acquired in a different way.’[22]

It is in describing his own attempts to learn aspects of the musical tradition too that I would argue Rice illustrates some of the key findings in his ethnography.  Following on from the difficulty in learning many of the traditional melodies that might have been passed down aurally, Rice looks to the dense ornamentation accompanying the melody, and the difficulty in trying to separate melody from stylistic ornamentation in the total sound produced.  His breakthrough came in the form of a conceptual shift for Rice.  His mystification at the sheer speed at which ornamentation was applied to melody benefited from a modified perspective of viewing ornamentation as, in part, the by-product of the methods used in articulation and accentuation; ‘I now understood that the myriad sounds I perceived as melody and ornamentation were, from a player’s conceptual and physical point of view, unified into a single concept as ways of moving from tone to tone… the ornaments were simply a part of the physical motion of playing the melody.’[23]

Drawing further on the possibilities of understanding expounded by hermeneutic theory for interpreting arcs of new understanding, Rice points out that the ‘expansion of horizons’ he had experienced during his conceptual shift might tempt him to ‘infer that non literate Bulgarian musicians think about their music in the same way.’[24]  However, he cautions against such a presumption, instead asking us to place these interpretations within a context of Ricoeur’s fusion of horizons where ‘understanding is ultimately realized as self understanding, in this case one that was objectified and tested in the crucible of performance and eventually judged at least marginally adequate by Bulgarian musicians and listeners.’[25]

The potency of Rice’s encounter with Kostadin in particular lay in his account of Kostadin’s recollections of his encounters with his own musical ‘Tradition’ and the struggles of his first-hand endeavours to negotiate meaning referenced from his musical heritage (and more broadly his own value system) against the forces of a ‘modernity’ that sometimes acted in dialectic opposition.   Rice builds on the foundations laid earlier in the ethnography and in doing so enables us to begin to appreciate, for example, Kostadin’s confrontations with tradition and the quantization of its flexible musical parameters within the confines of art-music arrangements, and how Kostadin responds expressively towards these challenges.  The lack of a drone pipe on the Gaida, or the adherence to new tonal centres that ill suited the natural and matching physical ability to realise stylistic ornamentation easily, as well as lack thereof to ‘blend’ more harmoniously with the rest of the state-operated ensembles are part of the multitude of changes within which Kostadin and many others had to operate.  Further, Kostadin’s successors, the next generation of Gaidari, for the most part attempted to appreciate the traditional contexts within which he had acquired his repertoire and musical aptitude, but void by time of his lived experience, they were able to at best empathetically suggest the need to be versed in the traditional manner before knowing how to sympathetically arrange this music in its new contexts, themselves unaware and inexperienced in the contexts in which it would have originally been heard.

Todora, too, no less, proves to be a ‘fount’ of ‘traditional’ songs, learned in the contexts of ‘traditional’ musical acquisition, and Rice cleverly analyses her song texts, placing them into the contexts of the calendrical cycle of agrarian life.  Rice also explores the value-based parameters that shape where, when and how a woman’s repertoire might be sung, happily investigating the expressive judgement exercised by Todora in choosing specific lyrics or melodies in accordance with her own aesthetic judgement, and the degree to which both village values and Todora’s on aesthetic taste informed the repertoire of songs she had remembered and their contexts for use.

Particularly thought provoking are the undercurrents Rice alludes to when reconciling notions of past and present, and Todora’s negotiation of changing symbolic territories when intimating her repertoire to young professional performers and arrangers, especially the confrontation between the abstracted distance with which they attempt to portray traditional wholesomeness of her melodies within framework of aesthetic contexts orbiting state musical ideals that promote a sense of national identity and against Todora’s own musical experiences and recollections of use. 

Rice, although less intimately, also explores, for example, the positions ‘traditional’ values tied up in the symbolic musical territory referenced, against their explicit confrontation with modern contexts at seeming ideological odds, and views the wedding music phenomenon of the late communist era from this perspective.  In challenge of what was viewed as the state’s strangling control of musical aesthetics, wedding music of the 1980s was played by ensembles supplemented by unfamiliar new musical instruments, such as American guitars and Japanese synthesizers, and their sounds were projected through loud sound systems as an almost ‘aural projection and icon of their power.[26]’  In amplifying the music to volumes that simply distorted the sound, however, it was rendered unattractive to the older members of its audience who might have experienced wedding music in its ‘traditional’ contexts.  Not only were they ‘unmoved’ to dance to such an ugly sound, but disappointed by its rigidity, the suit structure having evolved out of circumstances necessitated by the strictures of time when broadcasting horos on the radio, and thus somewhat stifling to the very organicism and improvisatory nature of music that might have accompanied traditional wedding festivities.  Here, the duration of a suit might have originally been dictated by the size of the lines dancing in the village square, the stamina of the dancers, and the ability of the musicians to keep their interest engaged.  Thus in both the musician’s expression of personal freedom from government control, or the disappointment of older audience members were confronted and negotiated symbolic references of old and new territories. 

The unique perspectives that the Varimezov’s provide in Rice’s ethnography would undoubtedly be more fully realised by simply reading his excellent ethnography, as would the wealth of examples he cites during his attempts to stimulate thought on Bulgarian musical experience.  The warmth of the Varimezov’s recollections, and the nature of their musical experience comes through well in Rice’s prose, as do his own reflexive learnings.  Although not a criticism, and merely a consequence of the particular life circumstances of the Varimezov’s, it would have been satisfying to perhaps impart a wider spectrum of perspectives that might have included a more thorough history of the state officials, conductors and arrangers, additional musical activities and organisations etc in order to better understand the impact of their work upon Bulgarian music.  Other alternative musical perspectives might also have benefited Rice’s objectives within the complex Bulgarian music, and trying to understand how and why it is experienced.  Moreover, ‘May it fill your Soul’ is fantastic bringing to life of the musical experiences of Bulgarian individuals, and offers one excellent window into what it means to be a Bulgarian making music.  If, as Leiris contends, the ultimate goal of an ethnography should be that of ‘Portraying living people and their behavior rather than focusing primarily on their institutions… examining the techniques they bring into play and their ways of seeing the world…’[27], then Rice’s ethnography does indeed animate the truly human goal of a science that is too often diverted towards jargonisitc abstractions.