But what actually is this world we live in

This project was a bit of a step out of my comfort zone, since, not having any cultural connection to or knowing anything much about Bulgarian traditional music, I felt extremely out of place working on this project. As someone who works with ethnomusic on a regular basis, the questions of cultural appropration and sensitivity to such things all too often come up. But, it is a tradition that inspires me and that I would like to learn more about, so I wanted to approach this with as much care and knowledge as I could, and hopefully learn something in the process. 

My first step was to research the songs sung in the long recording, and hopefully find more about their traditional contexts, i.e. what they mean, what seasons and context they were sung in, etc. since from my own knowledge traditional music often has a certain (often seasonal) context it is sung in. And not knowing the language made it more difficult, especially when one is dealing with archive recordings, which are often extremely unclear. 

However, the first song in the 45-minute recording had a refrain I was able to pick up, and through that I was able to find a different version of the song in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Art Studies archive - the link can be found here, https://archive.artstudies.bg/FolklorMusicArchive/View/14 - and I was able to figure out that this song is a harvest song - Вечер малка моме - inviting a girl to come and eat and drink (presumably at a feast). I have seen so many traditional songs from different cultures that basically mean ”come party”, so I felt that this would be a common theme that resonates with international audiences. 

With the subject matter of the song itself known I had to then figure out what context my own piece would be in. I decided that I would put this in the context of modern life - that often modern society asks us to be staring at our screens working in sterile spaces, far from nature, singing together, and those sort of parties can often be far from our modern existence. 

In the context of the recording we open in a space of hectic movement and clacking computer keyboards (and the oddity of it all is that I created this staring at a screen…). Somewhere in between the sound of an old woman comes in, imitating birds (this is another ethnographic recording, this time from the Estonian Folklore Archives - where I currently live and study traditional music). Then the song that started this whole project comes in, several times. At certain points other sounds come in, but every time the songs come in the clacking and modern life sounds - the movement inside public transport, the slamming of doors - disappears and nature takes over. Each time the song comes back, there are more and more nature sounds, as if drawing us to a more peaceful place to be together, sing together, and have fun together. At the end we are only surrounded by nature, with only a violin tune played by fiddlers Mihkel Toom and Mart Männimets in the background (also from the Estonian Folklore Archives), bringing us to the celebrations. 

I hope that this piece can remind the listener of the importance of being in nature and being together. I also hope that, if it is not already, the archive recording that this piece was based on will be made available/known to all who study, perform, or are interested in Bulgarian traditional music, I think it would be of huge interest and help to that community. 

Bulgarian village conversations and women singing reimagined by Katja Rumin.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds