“Look, I'm doing everything I can to preserve the old music. We won't let it die. But what can I do? I have to make a living.” —Diana Ivanova Dimova, Singer
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Sandy Tolan
In the fall of 2003, I found a mystery. It was in a record shop in Bulgaria.
I was in the small central European country for the first time, doing research on Bulgarian Jews in the 1940s for my book, The Lemon Tree. One afternoon in the capital, Sofia, between interviews and trips to the national archives, my friend and colleague, Polia Alexandrova, took me into a little shop near my hotel. "If you want to understand the soul of Bulgaria," Polia told me, "you need to listen to this." And with that she pulled out a CD from a multi-volume series called "The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices," also known by the French term, "La Mystere."
In my room that night, I played the CD through my tinny portable speaker, and tears came to my eyes. It was the most haunting, and perhaps the most beautiful, music I had ever heard: Women singing a cappella in harmonies I didn't know were possible. Their voices sustained undulating notes, quavering yet powerful.
I could understand why the sounds were considered a mystery. (One Bulgarian singer would later tell me that when she toured in the United States, the American impresario Bobby McFerrin came up to her to touch her throat, asking, "How do you make those sounds?")
The next day Polia told me more. This was centuries-old music that emerged from the Balkan and Rhodope Mountains, and in the hills of Macedonia, as a way of telling stories — conveying news during the harvest, or in the village squares. The songs had been refined for countless generations, so much so that, as a master of the music told me, they grew perfectly smooth with time, "like stones in a creekbed." At that moment, I knew I had to return to learn more about the music and the women who sing it. continued »
