Bulgarian Folk Music

Bulgarian Academy Monographs (9)

Bulgarian Folk Music is a scientific work offering a large-scope investigation of the issue of musical folklore dialects in Bulgaria in connection to the specificity of all-Bulgarian musical folklore style.

It is for the first time that the history of Bulgarian musical folkloristics is presented in its entirety -from its initial steps to the latest publications. The activities of Bulgarian folklorists in the basic trends of musical folklore science create a prerequisite for its integration into the world musicology.

Professor Dr. Lydia Litova-Nikolova (born 1942 in Sofia) is a lecturer at Pancho Vladigerov State Musical Academy and Head of the Department of History of Music. She has taught Bulgarian musical folklore there for more than 30 years. Basic points in her research activities are her dissertation thesis Influence of Refrains on the Process of Music Formation in Some Ritual Songs (Sofia, 1974), the textbooks Bulgarian Folk Music (Sofia, 1982, 1988, 1995, 2000), and A Reader in Bulgarian Folk Music (Sofia, 1988), The Regional as an Object of Study in Bulgarian Musical Folkloristics (Sofia, 1996), many publications on Bulgarian folk music as a teaching discipline, on the methodology of dialect studies, on the history of Bulgarian musical folkloristics, on contemporary vocal and instrumental practices on the basis of traditional musical folklore, on inter-Balkan musical culture interrelationships, on ritual folk songs as components of ritual semantics, etc.