Cities And Memory

This project was a bit of a step out of my comfort zone, since, not having any cultural connection to or knowing anything much about Bulgarian traditional music, I felt extremely out of place working on this project. As someone who works with ethnomusic on a regular basis, the questions of cultural appropration and sensitivity to such things all too often come up. But, it is a tradition that inspires me and that I would like to learn more about, so I wanted to approach this with as much care and knowledge as I could, and hopefully learn something in the process. My first step was to research the songs sung in the long recording, and hopefully find more about their traditional contexts, i.e. what they mean, what seasons and context they were sung in, etc. since from my own knowledge traditional music often has a certain (often seasonal) context it is sung in. And not knowing the language made it more difficult, especially when one is dealing with archive recordings, which are often extremely unclear. However,