Improvised Identities: Bulgarian Wedding Music and Imagined Communities

Author: Yuval Klein

Romani Wedding in Sofia, 1936

“Thus it was that, when a new dynasty took over, all the royal instruments had to be retuned, since it was clear that the old order had fallen...” 

–Christopher Small

In the global popular imagination, Roma occupy a sphere of transcendence – of specters floundering in the margins of modern nation-states, arcane clairvoyants, primitive patrons of eros and pathos, wanderers, and most importantly, people with a seemingly genetic predisposition to music. Contrary to these notions, I will argue that Romani music is not characterized by rootlessness and incommensurability with their neighbors, rather, by multi-rootedness. I will show that Romani musicians in the Balkans exist in dialectical relation to non-Roma “folk” traditions by describing the eclectic influences of Bulgarian wedding music and the discourse which surrounds it. The Roma belong, if somewhat ambivalently, to a modern tapestry of nation-states. In their capacity as arbiters of Balkan folk music, they preserve and reinforce national hegemonic narratives, while also complicating them. In lieu of the popular conception, Roma are not a wholly amorphous and ahistorical people, who cannot and/or do not negotiate a place for themselves in a world of “roots.”

Does nationalism presuppose homogeneity? As Michael Herzfeld notes, ‘resemblance has a temporal dimension’ (Herzfeld 1996). A stable notion of homogeneity, therefore, cannot exist. Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger provides a more appropriate paradigm for understanding nationalist “resemblance.” Douglas writes that the establishment of collective norms and codified moral systems stem from rigid symbolic categorization. The boundaries of reified mental categories are set in place so as to separate that which is “pure,” and conversely, “impure” (Douglas 1969). In the Balkans, Roma occupy a liminal, hence ambivalent, status within their respective nations – and in this capacity, they challenge the normative order. During the socialist period in Bulgaria, for example, a monoethnic framework necessitated a deconstruction of “resemblance.” The government was thus prompted to categorize Roma as people of “modern” Bulgarian ancestry (Silverman 2014, 129). This demonstrates one mechanism of dispelling “pollution”: to superficially deny the verisimilitude of an aberrant entity in order to sustain an impression of purity. Rather than expelling the minorities, thereby consolidating a monoethnic character, propaganda insisted that Bulgaria is a land devoid of minorities (Silverman 1996). In order to impose this image on individuals, Todor Zhivkov’s highly authoritarian regime – more so than any other satellite state in the region – sponsored “folk” musicians to preserve the national repertoire, and in doing so, cleanse it of foreign influences (Silverman 1996). In contrast to the ordained folk practitioners, wedding musicians drew from myriad influences (e.g. Classical Turkish, Rock, Jazz, as well as Indian and American film music), and were, therefore, poised in counterpoint, so to speak, to the sanctioned tunes (Silverman 2014, 58). Their popularity amongst Bulgarians of all religious, linguistic, and ethnic backgrounds, particularly the younger demographic, created two currents of Bulgarian identity that existed in tandem and in dissonance. The administrators’ nationalist sensibilities were embarrassed by the modal Makam scales and kyuchek rhythms associated with an Ottoman past. Moreover, the Western European instrumentation and Jazz influence cast wedding music further outside the lines of the folk canon, and led to its outright ban by the early 1980s (Silverman 1996, 239).

The consumption of Romani, Turkish, Greek, and Serbian music became illegal towards the end of Zhikov’s regime, precisely during the apex of Wedding Music’s popularity as a countercultural movement (Buchanan 1996, 209). Therefore, the zurna and tupan instruments were removed from music festivals and any official settings, all while continuing to be embraced by vast and intersecting swaths of the Bulgarian populace (Silverman 2014, 128). The intention of the zurna ban was to cover the indelible footprints of bygone Ottoman invaders much in the same way that India outlawed the British-imported harmonium from radios until 1971 (Rahaim 2011). Both were immensely popular instruments in their adopted countries such that their national character became ambiguous, heralding “pollution” to nationalist thinkers. During the 1980s, Bulgaria sought to forcibly assimilate Roma by outlawing the Romani language, Muslim dress, and requiring that they change Turkish names to Slavic ones (Buchanan 1996, 233). These prohibited cultural properties were, in effect, relegated to the homes – illicit and adopted names were employed interchangeably, traditional clothing still adorned women in private settings, and multilingualism persisted in its transnational splendor (Silverman 2014). 

In the public sphere, Roma were largely acquiescent towards these prohibitions, whereas the ethnic Turkish minority outwardly resisted them (Silverman 1996, 129-130). The ethnic Turkish citizens’ demographic size and association with the neighboring Turkey, paired with a legitimate indignation at a gross erasure of their de jure liberties, afforded them a bargaining voice that stoked international outrage. Nevertheless, these policies – officially, the “regeneration process” – obstinately remained (Buchanan 1996, 209). The discourse employed to whitewash these acts exemplifies George Orwell’s concept of doublespeak, whereby euphemisms and inversions of meaning obscure truth in favor of cynical political entities. In its refraction of collective memory, the Bulgarian consensus spoke and thought in hypocritical distortions of reality. In describing the assimilation campaign, the Bulgarian press omitted the coercive reality of the policies’ implementation, and, meanwhile, decried the bygone Ottoman establishment for analogous crimes against Bulgarians. Donna A. Buchanan writes that “underlying the monoethnic ideology was an obsession with constructing a genetically, culturally, and musically pure society that would fuel Bulgarian national unity and ward off the encroachment of Islamic fundamentalism posited in theoretical Turkish imperialist ambitions” (Buchanan 1996, 209). Turkism became synonymous with Ottomanism, which was synonymous with Islamism, the Turkish language, colonialism, and notably, too, modal scales (Buchanan 1996, 212). The truth is that neither Turks nor Bulgarians nor, for our sake, Roma, are reducible to such stratifications of “resemblance.” Collective memories and held identities did not simply crystallize in the age of “imagined communities,” rather, disparate notions of resemblance were internalized. In any case, the xenophobic resentment towards all things perceived to be Islamic and Turkish were rooted in a real but strategically conflated collective memory of Ottoman oppression. In the assimilation campaigns, Zhivkov's regime exerted violence against vulnerable minorities – people – while framing it as circumvention of a residual Ottoman presence. This conflict culminated in the 1989 exodus, euphemistically referred to as “The Great Excursion” by the Bulgarian government, in which 370,000 Muslims emigrated to Turkey, very few of whom were Romani (Silverman 2014, 130). The region and character of this event recall the Greece-Turkey population exchange of 1923. Soon thereafter, Bulgaria transitioned into being a democracy.

Historically, Roma in the Balkans have been excluded from all but certain occupational niches, and as such, became entertainers, merchants, fortune-tellers, and of course, musicians. The wedding musicians in socialist Bulgaria illustrate, as Carol Silverman notes, “the paradox that Roma are powerless politically and powerful musically” (Silverman 2014, 241). In socialist Bulgaria, the Romani population was fragmented and immobilized. This, as well as a particularly oppressive regime, afforded them sparse political power. In this respect, they were different from the Romani community of Skopje, which seized political representation and cultural spaces in Yugoslavia, a markedly decentralized Soviet satellite state. In Macedonia, the Roma were and are considered a protected minority – a “nation” – and in this capacity, are both accepted and marginalized (Silverman 1996). Conversely, socialist Bulgaria was a multiethnic state in denial. The Roma could not derive legitimacy from a collective space within a regimented society because of the disunity amongst them. Mary Douglas is right to note that ‘hierarchy does not necessarily perform better, but it is capable of being more aware of minority interests, because it is a political system for incorporating subgroups… If the existence of the minority is not acknowledged, even the scale of its problems is not assessable: the figures are not there. A minority in a well-run hierarchy should find it easier to organize its own consciousness of difference’ (Douglas 2007, 35). Carol Silverman’s profile of wedding musician Yuri Yunakov highlights the fragmentation of Bulgarian Roma (Silverman 2014, 221-39). He ultimately vacillates between exclusionary notions of resemblance, while accruing cosmopolitan depth with the passage of time. 

Yuri Yunakov grew up in a Muslim Turkish-speaking Romani community to a Turkish-born father and Bulgarian-born mother. They identified as Turks, not Roma. Their Turkish identity was, nevertheless, distinct from non-Romani Turks. The communities didn’t intermarry and received the other’s claim to Turkish identity with condescension. Many Roma adopted Turkish names and Islam during the Ottoman period in order to obtain better social and economic opportunities. The Romani language was erased from certain Turko-Romani communities, and in effect, Yunakov’s connection to his Romani-speaking neighbors was severed. As well as a condescension for the light-featured Turkish-speakers, he was inculcated with a sense of superiority to the “dirty” Romani-speakers. His family were musicians who, though mainly practitioners of Turkish music, were able to perform Bulgarian and Romani pieces in order to accommodate the requests of diverse patrons. During the 1970s, Yunakov slavicized his name in order to quell persecution. The government-chosen name, “Yuri Yunakov,” is an interesting distillation of his multifaceted identity. ‘Yuri’ pays homage to the Russian astronaut Yuri Gagarin, representing a nascent Bulgarian identification with the Soviet Union due to ideological proximity. Perhaps more interestingly, though, ‘Yunakov’ pays homage to his grandfather – the yunak (hero) – who allegedly serenaded anti-Ottoman guerrillas. This musical “resemblance” to martyred Bulgarians has a distant Turkish parallel. There are records of Roma – both men and women – crossing over from Anatolia as camp followers for Ottoman mercenaries. In this capacity, they would tend to the soldiers by – among other things – playing music for them (Hancock 2002). After emigrating to the U.S. due to intensified discrimination towards Roma in a post-Socialist Bulgaria, Yunakov came to embrace a pan-Romani identity, while still carrying other distillations of resemblance, i.e. ‘Muslim,’ ‘Turkish,’ and ‘Bulgarian.’ 

Benedict Anderson contends that the dissemination of standardized vernacular print, as well as folk compositions, were immediate precursors to the age of nationalism (Anderson 1983). During the first half of the 19th century, Bulgaria underwent a national awakening. This occurred soon after the standardization of a Bulgarian literary language, which was categorically differentiated from other regional dialects, languages, and everything in between (Anderson 1983, 73-74). The aforementioned ban on Turkish and Romani shows that language is a looming motif in Bulgarian history. So, too, music. Wedding music in socialist Bulgaria illuminates how while musical performances may appear to be innocuous and apolitical under the banner of “world music,” they can precipitate crises of meaning in times of national iteration. By “iteration,” I refer to a fundamentally imaginative, hence deconstructive process. As Seyla Benhabib notes, ‘iteration is the re-appropriation of the “origin”; it is at the same time its dissolution as the original and its preservation through its continuous deployment’ (Benhabib 2006, 48). Just as the invocation of “all men are created equal” in American politics has a different resonance today than at the time of its conception, the statement “Bulgarian folk music” has proven to be semantically volatile. 

By erasing certain sounds from the public sphere, the Bulgarian government intended to define what music is to be extant in the collective Bulgarian experience. Police would thus monitor wedding musicians, and at times, arrest them when they transgressed the musical “order of things” by incorporating “foreign” styles. Also, Turkish radios and cassettes would be confiscated and sometimes penalized by fines or imprisonment (Buchanan 1996, 208). In 1985, the authorities declared that in the Pirin Folk Festival, the “foreign” oboe-like zurna was to be replaced by the “indigenous” flute-like svirki (Silverman 1996, 238). On the day of the event, Romani zurna players brought their instruments to a space adjacent to the festival site, performing for an audience before being dispersed by the police (Silverman 1996, 238-39). This event beautifully encapsulates the character of wedding music during the time period, how, as Buchanan describes, “because wedding orchestras thrived outside the sphere of state-sponsored folklore, they were perceived as an uncontrollable phenomenon that threatened the domination of state musical culture and the livelihood of musicians employed within professional folk ensembles” (Buchanan 1996, 216). In the case of Pirin, one performance was state-sanctioned, the other marginal. The sheer volume of the zurna then bridged the parallel spheres of culture, attracting supporters and antagonists before rupturing. As Yaron Klein shows through interpreting various deliberations about music in Ḥisba literature, even when music is secreted under the auspices of the “private,” it may seep into the public sphere, which gives it a uniquely liminal quality; it can be simultaneously concealed and heard, visually absent and aurally manifest (Klein 2006). In Bulgaria, unlike in Muhtasib jurisprudence, the de facto split between public and private occurred not because authorities were lenient towards the private, but because they were incapable of properly regulating it. The zurna is what Douglas calls “matter out of place,” a symbolic pollutant that, in the case of the Pirin festival, was dispelled. But what happens when “matter out of place” asserts itself and demands recognition? Herzfeld calls these extant pollutants “the very substance of [his concept of] cultural intimacy” (Herzfeld 1996). 

Herzfeld’s culturally “intimate” are the embarrassing characteristics of a nation that are strategically muted in the external expression of national identity, a concept relevant, though not limited, to the ruling class. He further posits that a permissive approach to “a certain degree of disobedience, naughtiness, and even political dissidence” is conducive to stability, whereas “humorless” institutions are vulnerably fickle. Anderson notes that the longevity of many pre-modern empires can be attributed to a ‘porous and indistinct’ demarcation of borders – that heterogeneous and sometimes non-contiguous populations were unified by the empire’s undefined character (Anderson 1983, 19). “Matter out of place” must be tolerated to an extent. Therein lies the Achilles’ heel of Zhikov’s Bulgaria and other totalitarian regimes. By the end of Glasnost, a period ironically marked by extraordinarily stringent regulations in Bulgaria, nationalist critics who previously disparaged wedding music for being “impure” and unsophisticated reversed courses (Silverman 2014, 157, 194). The government-sanctioned folk music dissipated to obscurity alongside the antiquated pre-democratic rhetoric; wedding music garnered international acclaim and became quintessential Bulgarian folk; and Chalga superseded the former as the most popular music genre in Bulgaria. Bulgarian critics proceeded to decry Chalga with the same militancy and rhetoric of “purity” previously employed against wedding music (Silverman 2014, 163).

Nations are collectively imagined, internalized in the process of enculturation. In linguistics, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson demonstrate that language is often unconsciously metaphorical (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In the rabbi and philosopher Maimonides’ late work of esotericism Guide for the Perplexed, he laments that the common Jew internalizes a subjective and imaginative image of God. Basically, the Hebrew bible is a parable in which God is metaphorically represented, but the common "believers" literalize the descriptions, leading them to erroneously prescribe words to the ineffable and impose a defined anthropomorphic figure on an entity whose form is unintelligible. This is precisely what I intend to articulate about the nature of nationalism. It never simply calcifies around an origin. Instead, its every iteration is an improvised – decidedly atavistic – act. When its dynamism is reduced to a static frame (e.g. “I play Bulgarian folk music”), there transpires a phenomenon that I refer to as “national anthropomorphism.”

The notion of India being a motherland is neither ubiquitous nor a viable prospect in the Romani diaspora. That said, a pan-Romani movement has coalesced around language, internalized notions of an innate exoticism and musicality par excellence, an elusive homeland in Northern India, a flag, and most importantly, an arduous fate of persecution. The latter point is illustrated by the Romani national anthem Djelem Djelem, which laments the Roma’s tragic fate during the Holocaust. Proponents of this melancholic – “lachrymose conception” – nationalism include the late Macedonian Romani singer Esma Redžepova, who incorporated a Hindi song into her repertoire and regularly sang Djelem Djelem (Silverman 2014, 201-219). In spite of the Indian pan-Romani connection, she regarded Macedonia as a homeland; this dual notion of belonging permeates much of the movement (201-219). Djelem Djelem is musically and semantically more convoluted than other national anthems, a fact which illustrates the uncodified and subjective sense of belonging that, through music, Romani musicians express. It uses a Hijaz scale, one that is found in Turkish, Klezmer, Arab, and various Romani styles – and in each rendition, the singer generously embellishes upon the melody (notable interpretations are those of Šaban Bajramović, Esma Redžepova, and Ljiljana Buttler). Djelem Djelem’s multivalence is consistent with the larger pan-Romani ethos; the song’s lyrics urge Romani brothers and sisters to traverse the roads of exile and implacable loss in order to find one another – not a “motherland,” nor any orientational clarity in the world, rather, the provisional home of the other “other.”

Works Cited:

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books, 1983.

Buchanan, Donna A. Wedding Musicians, Political Transition, and National Consciousness in Bulgaria, in Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 200–230. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smmbd.14.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1969.

Hancock, Ian. "FOREWORD." In Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia, by Charles Keil and Angelina Keil, ix-xxiv. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy : Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies, and Institutions. New York & London: Routledge, 2016.

Klein, Yaron. “Between Public and Private: An Examination of Ḥisba Literature.” Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 7 (2006): 41-62.

Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Rahaim, Matt. “That Ban(e) of Indian Music: Hearing Politics in The Harmonium.” The Journal of Asian Studies 70, no. 3 (2011): 657–82. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41302388.

Silverman, Carol. “Music and Marginality: Roma (Gypsies) of Bulgaria and Macedonia.” In Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Mark Slobin, 231–53. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smmbd.15.

Silverman, Carol. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.