Donna Buchanan’s Performing Democracy brings a unique ethnographic lens to the growing scholarly interest in the collapse of post-WWII Eastern European socialism and its subsequent period of transition. By working for almost two decades (from the late 1980s to the early 2000s) with professional players from leading Bulgarian state folk-music ensembles—the cultural showcase of the socialist regime—Buchanan touches on one of the most sensitive ideological nerves of the Bulgarian case, the role of symphonic folk orchestras and ensembles as primary cultural manifestations of the socialist-nationalist project of modernity, which propagated the erasure of the Ottoman past and the integration of the Bulgarian nation into Western civilization.
The power of the book comes primarily from Buchanan’s ability to address the historical question of post-socialist transition by weaving together rich ethnographic fieldnotes and knowledgeable ethnomusicological, discursive, and historiographical analyses. Buchanan’s multivalent discussion reveals the conflicts and paradoxes implicit in the social system that tied professional folk musicians, all of them state employees, to the Bulgarian socialist regime. The collapse of this regime that functioned both as benefactor and oppressor did not release folk musicians from their dependency on structural social forces. As Buchanan illustrates through engaging case studies, the advent of democracy implemented market mechanisms of sponsorship and oppression which, just like the socialist system, manipulated, reinvented, and re-engineered the national “authentic” folk canon in order to produce different imaginings of Bulgarian nationhood.
Buchanan’s discussion of how professional folk musicians decontextualized their performance from nation-state socialism and recontextualized it in Western democracy informs her ethnohistoricist approach. She argues that neither political transition nor poor material conditions were the major issues that confronted these folk performers after the fall of socialism. Like most other Bulgarians, the musicians with whom Buchanan worked carried from the socialist period the hope that the poor present was a route toward a better future. More severe was the utter collapse of the hegemonic social system that formulated and employed folk music ensembles as a prime metaphor of the national project of historical evolution. Prior to this collapse, musicians’ careers were completely designed and sponsored by the socialist regime, from the initial stage of pedagogical training to the final stage of employment in one of the professional folk ensembles. As emblems of the state, folk musicians were endowed with a doctrinal and organizational role of enacting the discourse of communist evolution and its semiotic link between the Bulgarian folk heritage and Western Bulgarian nationhood (see Parts I and II).
The new context of post-socialist democracy abandoned this discourse of evolution and its semiotic implications, thereby reducing state financial and ideological sponsorship to a minimum (see Part III). Consequently, the few ensembles that survived the changes were pushed to the cultural margins after a brief revival in the Western world-music market. In post-1989 Bulgaria, the genre of obrabotka—symphonic compositions and orchestrations of folk tunes—turned into an artificial and anachronistic venue, mainly for touristic consumption; public attention shifted heavily to the synthesized sound of the booming popfolk/chalga/ethnopop scene (described in detail in Chapter 12).
Buchanan explains through the examples of Ensemble Balkana and the internationally acclaimed Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices, discussed in Chapter 10) what happened to state folk ensembles while moving to the world-music market of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The new commercial environment manipulated performers’ concepts of musical tradition and authenticity (the pre-1989 version of these two concepts is discussed in length in Chapters 3–5, especially in regard to the ideal of national izvor [folklore wellspring]), in order to meet the demands of music marketers and impresarios both in Bulgaria and abroad. In the particular case of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, “gendered stereotypes associated especially with Radio Ensemble’s female choiristers transformed narodna muzika [‘folk music’] from a manifestation of socialist cultural policy into an exotic product” (343). As a result, if the socialist regime created the State and Radio Female Vocal Choir (as well as other orchestras and ensembles) as a platform for the decontextualization of the Bulgarian folk from its disturbing oriental past, Western promoters took the same route but in the opposite direction. They renamed the choir to capture a sense of French (colonialist) enigma, thereby erasing its socialist connotations and inciting Western world-music consumers to imagine orientalist mystique.
The case study of “Dilmano Dilbero” (Chapter 11) summarizes the central historical trajectory of the book. The journey that this folk tune took (albeit with substantial modifications) from the wedding folk tradition of Shop (a rural region near Sofia) to the urban folk philharmonia of the socialist era, to a Bulgarian TV rock show a month after the fall of Todor Zhivkov’s regime, and, finally, to European techno-pop club scene of the 1990s, illustrates, for Buchanan, the most significant meaning of “performing democracy.” The myriad transformations of “Dilmano Dilbero” exemplify:
“[t]he ongoing transmutation of late nineteenth-century Bulgarian culture from the localized environs of the rural community, in which it played an integral, functional role in village life, to the urban-oriented socialist collective, where it became a homogenizing, ideological emblem of the socialist nation-state, to the post-1989 world private enterprise, where it is brokered now as a form of transnational entertainment. Commercial productions [of symphonic folk music] represent a transfer in musical ownership from the collectivity of the socialist state to a world of a private, foreign enterprise, in which Bulgarian musicians collaborate, but which they neither dominate nor control” (425).
Buchanan is nevertheless cautious not to oversimplify the transition from socialist to post-socialist folk music professionalism; she does not portray this process as one in which musicians fell from the status of state artists to become hired amusers of their audiences’ exoticist tastes. Especially in Chapters 3–5, Buchanan describes in depth what the socialist duality of benefactor and oppressor meant for the players of state ensembles. It meant that the regime’s doctrine of folk music professionalism conditioned expressions of grassroots authenticity. In order to be hired and paid by the state, musicians had to succumb to the hierarchical superiority of Western classical music, accept that homogenization and symphonization were the refining formulae of rural folk traditions, perform the peasant exotica “correctly,” and deny any affiliation with Romany and Turkish musical styles—the contaminators of narodna muzika, the Bulgarian term for “authentic” and “pure” folk music.
In sum, although this expansive book is first and foremost an ethnomusicological investigation, its value exceeds narrow disciplinary boundaries. For the particular needs of folklorists, especially those who trace the impact of folk and counter-folk cultures on the imagination of modern social identities (above all, nationalist ones), Performing Democracy contributes a highly important approach. In her project of deciphering what happened to the Bulgarian national imagination in the period of break and transition from pro-Soviet socialism to Western democracy, Buchanan shows that as a mass-produced culture, folk heritage cannot be perceived or performed exterior to hegemonic social systems. On the contrary, the intertextual malleability of folk heritage is what makes it such a powerful metaphor and historical rationalization of hegemonic systems.
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[Review length: 1167 words • Review posted on August 29, 2006]