The book “Elena Stoin’s music folklore dialects in sound”, published by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Art Studies, will be presented at 6 PM tomorrow, 27 January in the academy’s’ grand hall. Though a small volume, the book is an invaluable source of information.

To all people familiar with the work by the celebrated researcher as well as to all fans of traditional culture, the book offers a rendezvous with the “living soul” of the fundamental theoretical work – fieldwork recordings, never published before. The recordings are perhaps the most interesting part of the book for people living in our day and age – an age of high tech in sound recording. The recordings were made in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s’; the CD that goes with the book features 222 songs and instrumental pieces, presenting but a fraction of the colossal audio archives collected by Elena Stoin through the years and preserved at the institute. These recordings seem to transport listeners to another world – a world where traditional songs and rituals were not a reenactment or something to be swotted up for an examination but a living and breathing part of life. The performers are just ordinary people who acquired this knowledge in the only way “valid” in folklore – “by word of mouth”. Men and women, young and old sing and play “from the heart”.

Bulgarian theoreticians, folklore music teachers and performers have all, at one time or another, leafed through the book by Elena Stoin – a veritable encyclopedia of Bulgaria’s folklore regions. Its pages carry a fount of information about the living (but practically forgotten) customs and rituals in different regions of the country she has been to, as well as about the metro-rhythmic and melodic specifics of the music that goes with these practices. The new additions to the book are the transcriptions of the specimens she tape recorded after 1954. Before that, the indefatigable author, along with all of her co-workers from the institute, recorded everything using a gramophone and, at least for the time being, these recordings are inaccessible. The archive references, digitalization and description of the recordings are the work of Maria Koumichin and Diana Danova-Damyanova, the audio processing is by Alex Noushev. Project leader Prof. Goritsa Naydenova PhD. compiled the CD and wrote the text to the new edition of the book. She says that she listened to over 3,000 recordings from the institute’s archives before making up her mind how to present Elena Stoin’s text best. If, by chance, the recordings “in the field” proved insufficient, Goritsa and her team selected samples from the studies of other folklore experts.

“These are archives we have had for a long time,” says Goritsa Naydenova. “But they used to be practically inaccessible because of the medium they were on; there was a time when there was no money to transfer the recordings to a more modern medium. We are now doing just that and even though we are short staffed, we have definite results. We started out this project because it is the best way to honour Elena Stoin and her enormous contribution. It is a way to mark the centenary of her birth, celebrated in 2015. Her work is familiar to all people working in this sphere, but to my mind, it is the recordings made through the years by Elena Stoin and other researchers that are invaluable. She often worked together with her husband Ivan Kachoulev. I hope that this new edition will help popularize our archives, which have preserved very old forms and styles of singing and playing different instruments. The emotions while working on the project were indescribable – one may think one knows what to expect, but there is always something astounding to be found in these tapes.”

English version: Milena Daynova