Roger Bourland recently linked to a video of the Bulgarian State Women’s Chorus, which reminded me of my latent obsession with Bulgarian folk music. Check it out, (and read the comments for your daily dose of surrealism).
Years ago, during a very short stint as the vocal director of a folk ensemble, I had the pleasure of preparing that first song in the video, which is called “Ergen Deda”. The rhythm of the piece is a fast 7/8 Šopska dance (from the Šop region of Bulgaria; Šopska is also a tasty salad).
These 7/8 dances are so fast that the notion of “7/8″ fails to really capture it. It’s really just a matter of “short-short-long”. In Bulgarian (and Greek and other Balkan) music all kinds of interesting combinations of “short” and “long” are used, and we’re forced to notate them with awkward 11’s and 13’s.
See if you can figure this one out:
You can see why I love this stuff, right? If you listen to the end, it gets faster and becomes increasingly difficult to turn off.
Here’s another one:
There’s even better stuff out there, but I don’t own any. I was able to find these online thanks to this site.
To really appreciate this music, you need to see it danced. Found this for you. If you don’t watch the whole thing, at least let it load and skip to the end. There’s always a wild finish in these presentations.
P.S. - Poking around on YouTube for Bulgarian stuff, I found this travel pitch for Bulgaria, which despite the lady’s weird Bulgaro-Surrey accent has me contemplating summer vacation 2008.
P.P.S. - I managed to sneak a Bulgarian(ish) 7/8 into the coda of Letter To Hungary (try excerpt #2), but it’s all right; sometimes Hungarian music gets into this rhythmic territory.
Categories:One Response to “Bulgarian Rhythms”
Hi there. It’s quite a surprise to see that kind of music out here (being bulgarian and all).. As u put it above..”There’s even better stuff out there, but…”.. yeah, i own quite enough of bulgarian folk music, also played in a folk group for a few yours (accordeon) but i got into composing now. Unfortunately too few people know of that kind of music. The uncommon to the world 7/8, 11/16, 5/8, 17/16 are indeed quite common for my region. I live on the border with Romania, which adds even more color to my local music traditions. Thanks for all the good words about this sort of music…
