Music Theory as an Instrument of Nationalism: Notation, Identity, and Systemization in Dobri Hristov’s Conception of Bulgarian Meter^*

1. Bulgarian Meter, Eighth Wonder of the World

[1.1] In “Language as an Instrument of Nationalism in Central Europe,” Tomasz Kamusella (2001) describes the key role that localized codification of languages in the nineteenth century played in processes of nation building. In particular, it was not only language that acquired new political significance, but also the study of language, which often supported attempts to define an ethnonational identity and to establish an independent state unifying the people who belonged to that identity.⁽¹⁾ The study of cultural practices other than language, including music, was subject to similar political dynamics, and as my variation of Kamusella’s title suggests, the present article offers an example of these dynamics in music theory—specifically, in theory of musical meter. As such, in line with Jade Conlee and Tatiana Koike’s (2021) call “to view music theory as a form of worldmaking—as a field that produces knowledge not just about ‘the music itself,’ but about people, nature, politics and power,” I aim to contribute to a growing body of research that charts relationships between music-theoretical claims and political factors and explores the significance of these connections.⁽²⁾

[1.2] Numerous musical repertoires feature meters with sequences of categorically unequal durations, such as the repeating patterns that are often notated as groupings of two and three eighth notes with time signatures including ${}_8^5$ and ${}_8^7$. This type of meter, which I call unequal meter, is also referred to by various other names including irregular, odd, complex, asymmetrical, non-isochronous, and aksak.⁽³⁾ Unequal meters are common in Bulgarian folk songs and dance music, and they have come to be associated with Bulgarian national identity.

[1.3] As an orientation to the significance of unequal meter in Bulgarian discourse about folk music and dance, consider Video Example 1, which is excerpted from the trailer for a 2016 stage show titled The Eighth Wonder by the dance troupe Ensemble Bulgare (Dimitrov 2016b).⁽⁴⁾ The video portrays a fictional encounter between James Bourchier, an Irish journalist who advocated for Bulgarian political interests during the Balkan Wars and the First World War, and Béla Bartók, who took compositional and scholarly interest in Bulgarian meters. In the scene, Bourchier and Bartók have met by chance in a train car, and Bourchier sets out to introduce Bartók to meter in Bulgarian music by asking him, “How many time signatures are there in music?”

“Uh, 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4, and that’s all,” replies the composer, with misplaced confidence.

“How boring!” Bourchier exclaims. “In Bulgaria, things are a little different.”

With growing enthusiasm, Bourchier proceeds to describe various patterns of unequal beats (“three beats, the third beat longer than the first two”; “four beats, the fourth beat longer than the other three”; “five beats, the third one being longer than the rest”), while an amazed Bartók murmurs, “My music will never be the same.” The video cuts back and forth between this conversation, shots of the troupe dancing, and the words “Let us take you on a journey . . . across the richest . . . folklore . . . on the planet,” while cinematic underscoring swells in intensity. During the stage show itself, the name of each dance and its time signature are projected above the performers (Dimitrov 2016a).

[1.4] Ensemble Bulgare’s video dramatizes the belief that Bulgarian unequal meters are unique and richly varied, and that these qualities evince the greatness of the Bulgarian nation. This perspective may have first been disseminated in the work of Dobri Hristov (1875–1941), a near contemporary of Bartók’s and a major figure in Bulgarian music history. The oversized photo shown in Example 1, from Hristov’s biography in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Bulgarian Musical Culture, is no doubt meant to symbolize his status.

[1.5] Beginning in 1894, Hristov worked as a grade-school music teacher and community choral director in his home city of Varna, with a hiatus from 1900 to 1903 to study composition with Antonín Dvořák in Prague. In 1907, Hristov relocated to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, where he spent the remainder of his career composing in a style influenced by Bulgarian traditions, directing choral ensembles, teaching at secondary and post-secondary levels, and publishing numerous articles about Bulgarian music.⁽⁵⁾ One of Hristov’s earliest and most significant writings is his 1913 study, “The Rhythmic Fundamentals of Our Folk Music.” This 50-page essay is generally regarded as the first published theory of meter and rhythm in Bulgarian music, and its nationalistic agenda is striking.

[1.6] Previous authors have noted Hristov’s nationalism, including the link with meter. Svetlana Zaharieva (2000) and Karen Peters (2003), for example, each explain how, in claiming that unequal meter is prevalent in Macedonian music, Hristov seeks to provide evidence that Macedonians are in fact ethnically Bulgarian, thereby bolstering the Bulgarian government’s bid at the time to control the Macedonian region (see [3.5] below). In doing so, Hristov goes beyond simply associating Bulgarian national identity with unequal meter; rather, I argue that he conceptualizes the nature of unequal meter itself so as to serve nationalistic ends. If this claim is correct, then specific components of the theory should be designed to articulate Bulgarian identity and support the Bulgarian nation-state. Accordingly, I outline three nationalistic objectives of Hristov’s theory of meter: standardizing rhythmic notation for folk music transcription, demonstrating that rhythmic organization differentiates Bulgarian music from that of other nations, and illustrating the extensive and systematic variety of Bulgarian rhythmic patterns. My analysis centers primarily on “The Rhythmic Fundamentals of Our Folk Music” (Hristov 1913) and a later revision of the same text, with reference to some of Hristov’s other writings.

[1.7] To be clear, what follows is not an evaluation of Hristov’s work or of Bulgarian nationalism and national identity; indeed, passing judgment on Bulgarian nationalism would be neither productive nor feasible in light of the wide range of perspectives expressed in Bulgaria even during Hristov’s lifetime (see, e.g., Mangova 2005; Todorova 1995). I am concerned, rather, with interpreting Hristov’s ideas in order to identify the role that sociopolitical circumstances played in the creation of a particular theory of unequal meter, as well as with suggesting the influence these factors may have had on how scholars and performers have come to understand Bulgarian meter.

[1.8] Recent research has highlighted close connections between music theory and nationalism in numerous musical traditions. Stephen Blum (2023) devotes a chapter of his book Music Theory in Ethnomusicology to surveying forms that such connections have taken in examples of theorizing from Asia and Africa. Daniel Walden, working in a similar vein, shows how late nineteenth-century theories of just intonation were embedded in several types of national and colonial relationships in Asia, Europe, and North America, arguing that “the history of music theory has never been shielded from the messy dynamics of socio-political entanglement” (2019, 33). Within this body of literature, notable points of contact with Hristov’s metric theory can be found in the historical narratives about polyphonic singing in Georgian music theory (Fairley 2022); the pulse-oriented codification of metric categories by twentieth-century theorists of Sri Lankan music (Peiris 2022); and the racial subtext of Soviet theories of “free meter” in Kazakh music (Abrahamyan 2023). The present study complements these examples, contributing to understanding of interactions between music theory and ideology in many settings during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as to awareness of the relevance of such interactions for musical thought in the present (see Martin 2019).

2. Notating Bulgarian Rhythms

2.1. Nineteenth-Century Transcriptions

[2.1.1] When Dobri Hristov was born in 1875, Bulgaria was on the verge of gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire, which for almost 500 years had controlled much of southeastern Europe. Ottoman suppression of a Bulgarian rebellion in 1876 gave the Russian government a justification to initiate the Tenth Russo-Turkish War; as a consequence of this conflict, an autonomous Bulgarian principality within the Ottoman Empire was established in 1878 (see Crampton 2007, 91–95). The armed resistance and eventual creation of the principality resulted from a growing sense of national identity that was cultivated by Bulgarian intellectuals in a movement known as the Vŭzrazhdane (Renaissance). Parallel to similarly named movements in other parts of southeastern Europe (Sugarman 1999, 421), the Vŭzrazhdane supported developments in Bulgarian education, literature, print media, political activity, and ethnography, influenced indirectly by Johann Gottfried Herder’s view of the nation (Buchanan 2006, 33–34; see also Zaharieva 1995, 21).⁽⁶⁾ For instance, in the early nineteenth century, Slavic intellectuals disseminated a passage from Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit in which Herder (1792, 37–43) predicts that Slavic peoples will eventually gain political independence and advocates for the collection of declining Slavic traditions and songs (Arnold, Kloocke, and Menze 2009, 411–412; Mishkova 2011, 233). As Philip Bohlman notes, for Herder the potential of folk song collecting in connection with national identity lies in “transforming the differences of oral tradition into the commonalities of written tradition. A folk song anthology realizes the nation by affording a presence for national language in a shared repertory” (2017, 23).

[2.1.2] The potential political value of articulating a national identity through the publication of folk songs was discussed by leading participants in the Vŭzrazhdane. In an 1837 letter to Vasil Aprilov, a Bulgarian merchant known for helping to establish a Bulgarian-language educational system, the influential Slavic folklorist and philologist Yuriy Venelin lists folk songs first among the types of ethnographic material that Bulgarians should collect (Venelin [1837] 1889, 177).⁽⁷⁾ According to Venelin, “if through songs one becomes acquainted with a nation, and if the songs give the reader pleasure, then this pleasure will compel the reader to mention the nation itself with the same respect and as often as Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey” (181).⁽⁸⁾ He further advocates publishing folk song collections in Russia, France, England, and Germany to win support for the Bulgarian national cause, seeking to repeat the success of Serbia and Greece in disseminating their national music (Venelin [1837] 1889, 181).⁽⁹⁾ Folk music’s role in promoting Bulgarian statehood and cultural significance abroad, as noted above in connection with Video Example 1, is thus a longstanding part of the national discourse. Although Venelin’s letter was not published until 1889, Aprilov distributed copies to other Bulgarian intellectuals soon after receiving it (Arnaudov [1929] 2003).

[2.1.3] This evidence supports the notion that documenting Bulgarian songs was an important component of the nationalist project that the Vŭzrazhdane initiated. Most early transcriptions, however, consisted solely of lyrics; those folklorists who attempted to include pitch and rhythm encountered a challenge in the rhythmic organization of some songs and dance music.⁽¹⁰⁾ The secular musical practices that were part of village life in nineteenth-century Bulgaria did not include a writing system, leading transcribers to employ a variety of approaches for notating rhythm. Some of the first such transcriptions borrow Chrysanthine neumes from notation for Eastern Orthodox chant, as illustrated in Example 2.⁽¹¹⁾ The original neumatic transcription in Example 2 was published by Angel Sevlievets in 1868 (reprinted in Lyondev 1967, 170); Example 3 provides a transcription of Sevlievets’s neumes into Western staff notation by Petŭr Lyondev (1967, 171). Based in part on comparison with twentieth-century variants of the folk song, Lyondev concludes that the melody Sevlievets heard was in an unequal meter that would now be written with a time signature of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$, as illustrated below his transcription in Example 3.⁽¹²⁾

[2.1.4] Bulgarian folklorists did not begin publishing large numbers of transcriptions using staff notation until after the establishment of an effectively autonomous Bulgarian government following the Russo-Turkish War in 1878. The territory proposed for the Principality of Bulgaria early that year by the provisional Treaty of San Stefano extended well beyond Bulgaria’s present-day borders to include much of the geographic region of Macedonia as well as other lands that now belong to Bulgaria’s neighbors. Most other countries involved in the peace negotiation objected to such a large Bulgarian state, and the Treaty of Berlin soon superseded the Treaty of San Stefano, greatly reducing Bulgarian territory. The terms of these treaties were dictated by Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Britain, and served to balance those countries’ imperialist agendas without regard for the people living in the disputed territory (see Glenny 1999, 133–51). In Bulgaria’s case, the withdrawn promises of the Treaty of San Stefano motivated later irredentism and increased the urgency of folklorists’ efforts to define the nation.

[2.1.5] The tumultuous first years of Bulgarian self-governance were marked by authoritarian challenges to the newly adopted constitution, unification with the Ottoman-controlled province of Eastern Rumelia, the successful repulsion of a Serbian military invasion, and the deposition of Bulgaria’s first prince (Crampton 2007, 96–128). Despite these challenges, the Bulgarian state gradually established educational and cultural institutions, in many cases building on organizations that had originated during the preceding period of the Vŭzrazhdane. To provide constitutionally mandated primary education for all Bulgarians, the Ministry of National Enlightenment oversaw the centralization and regulation of the educational system (Daskalov 2005, 343–74). Despite frequent changes of leadership and low teacher salaries, this system contributed substantially to the standardization of the Bulgarian language and to a sense of national identity (Todorova 1995, 77). Beginning in 1888, the Ministry of National Enlightenment also administered state funding for cultural institutions, and a law passed in 1890 charged the ministry with studying historical artifacts, collecting folklore, and promoting literature (Daskalov 2005, 408).⁽¹³⁾

[2.1.6] This newfound institutional support fueled efforts to transcribe Bulgarian folk music. For example, the Ministry of Enlightenment sponsored the Collection of Folk Creativity, Science, and Literature, a periodical that issued thousands of pages of ethnographic material starting in 1889. The ethnographer, literary scholar, and politician Ivan Shishmanov served as the Collection’s founding editor, and his introductory essay in the first issue lays out a vision for Bulgarian ethnography.⁽¹⁴⁾ Shishmanov argues that folklore should be studied thoroughly “because [it] gives us the opportunity to delve into the soul of the nation . . . to find out in what way the nation has developed and to determine the direction of its future development” (1889, 18–19). Crucially, he holds that “folkloric studies also have important political meaning for [Bulgarians]: they are almost the only means of defining the ethnographic borders of the different Balkan nations” (1889, 27; italics in original).⁽¹⁵⁾

[2.1.7] In his essay on ethnography, Shishmanov gives pride of place to folk song when surveying the types of ethnographic materials that should be collected. For instance, he discusses at length the categories of folk songs that Bulgarian folklorists should seek out (Shishmanov 1889, 30–44), and cites the influence of Herder’s collection of songs on German nationalist literature as an example that Bulgarians should emulate (Shishmanov 1889, 24). Regarding transcription, he argues that Bulgarian folk songs often do not conform to the norms of western European music, and thus “the collector should abandon all traditions and write the songs with different time signatures, changing for example from ${}_4^4$ to ${}_4^3$ and so on” (Shishmanov 1889, 59).⁽¹⁶⁾

[2.1.8] In a history of the study of Bulgarian folk music, Todor Todorov (1981) surveys several approaches to notating unequal meters in transcriptions published in the 1890s in the Collection of Folk Creativity, Science, and Literature. Todorov attributes the notational variation both to differing, still-inchoate conceptions of unequal meter and to the limited formal musical training of the contributors to the Collection, many of whom were grade-school teachers who submitted transcriptions in response to a call issued by the Ministry of Enlightenment (Todorov 1981, 36–37, 109–110). Cases in which the transcriber may have altered the pattern of durations in a melody to conform to an equal meter are common; for instance, Example 4 is a variant of the melody from Examples 2 and 3, in this instance written in ${}_4^3$ (Kodzhamanov 1891, 82). Examples 5 and 6 show two transcriptions by Aleksandŭr Konev (1894, 52; 1895, 118) that Todorov (1981, 59) claims should have been written with a ${}_8^9$ time signature and a beat sequence of a quarter note, a dotted quarter note, and two more quarter notes in each measure, as illustrated by the rhythm below the first measure in Example 5. These transcriptions represent two more strategies in early notation of Bulgarian rhythm: Example 5 shows the use of a time signature that indicates the presence of unequal meter but involves a 1:2 ratio between unequal beat durations (as in the beat sequence of a quarter note, a half note, and two quarter notes) instead of the 2:3 ratio that is now widely accepted. Example 6 uses changing time signatures to write the 2:3 ratio, as in the mostly repeating pattern of ${}_8^2$, ${}_8^3$, ${}_8^2$, and ${}_8^2$.⁽¹⁷⁾

[2.1.9] Todorov (1981, 48) also remarks on the inconsistency of two transcriptions that were published together, shown in Example 7. The transcriber, Emanuil Manolov (1900, 198), identifies both melodies as instrumental music intended to accompany the same type of widely known Bulgarian dance, the rŭchenitsa. The first melody is notated in ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$, which would come to be accepted as the standard time signature for the rŭchenitsa; accordingly, Todorov deems the transcription of the second melody incorrect because Manolov uses a time signature of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 8}}$ instead.⁽¹⁸⁾ Unlike Todorov, I am not convinced that it is possible to determine exactly what rhythms or metric patterns Manolov and his fellow transcribers heard.⁽¹⁹⁾ Nonetheless, at the time when the transcriptions were produced, the differences among them represented an obstacle to effective communication among scholars seeking to document and define the characteristics of Bulgarian folk music.

2.2. Hristov’s Solution

[2.2.1] Dobri Hristov began his career as a teacher when the Ministry of Enlightenment was soliciting transcriptions for its new periodical, and he later offered a solution to the problem of notating rhythm in Bulgarian music accurately and consistently. His initial study on the topic, written in 1911, was supported by a grant from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and published in 1913 in the Collection.⁽²⁰⁾ By this time Bulgaria had taken advantage of the Young Turks movement in 1908 to declare full independence from the Ottoman Empire (Crampton 2007, 174–76), elevating its prince to a king. In 1912 the kingdom entered an uneasy military alliance with Serbia and Greece that succeeded during the First Balkan War in expelling the Empire from most of the Balkan Peninsula.

[2.2.2] In the introduction to his 1913 study, Hristov laments errors in transcriptions of Bulgarian music and advocates for the systematic, expert collection and classification of the repertoire. Hristov’s motivation for this work includes the decline in Bulgaria’s distinctive musical repertoire as a result of foreign musical influences, and he identifies the school system and the military as settings that expose Bulgarians to poor-quality music from elsewhere in Europe (1913, 5). He saw additional threats to Bulgarian folk music culture in the dissemination of gramophone records (Hristov 1913, 5) and in the broadcasting of corrupted versions of Bulgarian folk songs on Serbian radio (Hristov [1931] 1970​​​​, 153).⁽²¹⁾ As such, Hristov sought to preserve Bulgarian musical identity in many of his professional activities, from studying and collecting folk music to teaching and composing classical music with Bulgarian folk elements.

[2.2.3] Following this introduction, Hristov presents his formulation of the basic features of Bulgarian unequal meter:

With regard to meter, Bulgarian music contains a feature that is foreign not only to Western music, but also to the music of our neighboring countries, as well as to Eastern (Persian-Arabic) music. This feature is hidden in the formation of a series of meters that serve as the basis for our diverse dances. Serving as a fundamental element in these meters is a pulse with a tempo of around 400–432 per minute, i.e., five times faster than the heartrate of an adult person. As a note value, the tempo of this element can be expressed thus: = 400–432 M. M. or = 200–216 M. M. Grouped into twos and threes, these elements form two kinds of metric beats: a short beat—with two elements ( = ) and an elongated beat—with three elements ( = ). Different combinations of short and elongated beats form a series of irregular meters, each of which serves as the basis for a particular dance. (Hristov 1913, 6)

[2.2.4] Hristov then lists the unequal meters that he has identified in Bulgarian music, dividing them into two categories based on tempo as shown in Example 8. The tempo of the sixteenth note is constant in this example, so meters with an eighth-note pulse are half as fast as meters with a sixteenth-note pulse. For Hristov (1913, 8), “the difference between the first and second group of meters is quite substantial. Whereas the accents in the first group fall on duple and triple elements, i.e., on so-called short and elongated beats, in the second group each element manifests as a separate metric beat with independent accent.” In other words, in unequal meters that Hristov notates with a sixteenth-note pulse, the unequal durations in a ratio of 2:3 are the main beats of the meter; however, in meters notated with an eighth-note pulse, the beat instead consists of constant, equal eighth notes that can be grouped into unequal quarter-note and dotted-quarter-note durations. In defining these types of meter, Hristov creates a standardized way of notating rhythmic patterns that previous transcribers had written inconsistently. He establishes that Bulgarian unequal meters contain two different durations that should always be written as lasting for two or three fast elements, and the lists in Example 8 lay out for researchers the time signatures and beat sequences that are available to choose from when transcribing a melody.

[2.2.5] Much of the remainder of the study consists of commentary about each meter from the list, often associating the meter with a folk dance and including transcriptions of melodies that use the meter as well as notes about common transcription errors. Example 9 summarizes the dance names and the putatively erroneous alternate time signatures that Hristov gives for each meter. In many cases Hristov identifies more than one name for the dance associated with a meter; Example 9 includes only the names that he mentions most frequently. For cases in which Hristov’s discussion of a particular meter does not touch on one of the topics in this table, the corresponding cell is shaded gray.

[2.2.6] This discussion provides further guidance for transcribers by indicating the time signature that should be used when writing the music for a particular dance. For example, Hristov (1913, 21) indicates that “the [first type of] ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 9}}$ meter has four beats, of which the first three are short and the last is elongated.” He associates this meter with a dance known as radomirska igra, tropliva igra, or hoisata, among other names, where “the number of beats is directly linked to the dance itself, which is likewise danced with four steps: three quick steps and one (the last one) slightly elongated. The accompaniment on tŭpan [a double-sided bass drum] occurs in the following way: (heavy strokes with the right hand), (light strokes with the left hand)” (Hristov 1913, 21). Alongside other comments, Hristov provides transcriptions of three different melodies in this meter and warns that “${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 9}}$ meter is very easily altered by some transcribers with an addition at the end of one more sixteenth note, and in this case the result is a ${}_8^3$ + ${}_8^2$ or ${}_8^5$ meter (with extended note values ${}_4^5$). Many songs are found incorrectly notated in ${}_8^5$ or ${}_4^5$ instead of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 9}}$ meter” (Hristov 1913, 22). As examples that he believes illustrate this error, Hristov (1913, 23) quotes two melodies from a grade-school singing textbook by the Czech-born Bulgarian folklorist Karel Mahan; these are given in Example 10.⁽²²⁾ The rhythm below the two melodies in the example is my addition, inferred from Hristov’s description of how the rhythm should be written. According to Hristov (1913, 23), the incorrect notation implies that “the song would be accompanied with five equal strokes on tŭpan and consequently would correspond to a dance with five equal steps, which the radomirska igra is not. In the Ministry collections [i.e., the Collection of Folk Creativity, Science, and Literature] there are also songs in the meter of the tropliva igra that are incorrectly notated with ${}_8^5$ meter.” This passage shows Hristov attempting to convey to readers a specific, uniform way in which rhythmic notation should correspond to sounds and dance steps as well as his understanding of the metric organization that this notation represents.

[2.2.7] In comparison with his commentary about unequal meters, Hristov devotes relatively little space in the study to music in equal meters and to unmetered music, even though both of these forms of rhythmic organization are also well represented in Bulgarian folk songs and instrumental melodies. For example, his discussion of unmetered music is minimal, consisting of only four paragraphs and two transcriptions (Hristov 1913, 8–9, 50). Because it lacks the pulse groupings that Hristov relies on to standardize the notation of unequal meter, unmetered music represents a particular problem for transcription that Hristov’s theory does not solve.

[2.2.8] To a considerable extent, then, the motivation for and significance of Hristov’s metric theory rest in establishing a standard system of rhythmic notation to be used for transcriptions of metered folk music. In this regard, Hristov’s project parallels the standardization of language that contributed to ethnic nationalism. Kamusella (2001, 245) highlights the creation or adoption of a suitable script as an important step in codifying and legitimizing an emerging national language, and indeed, the development of a Bulgarian literary language occurred in tandem with the history of folk song transcription surveyed earlier in this section. The documentation of folklore, including song lyrics, allowed this new literary language to be based on contemporary speech; moreover, the norms of written language, like the notation of rhythm, were only solidified with the support of state institutions developed by the Bulgarian principality after 1878 (Todorova 1990, 441–44). Hristov’s 1913 study is thus comparable in some ways to the government-issued “Guidance for General Orthography” (Ivanchov 1899) that capped the standardization of written Bulgarian about a decade earlier.

3. Ethnic Identity and the Uniqueness of Bulgarian Rhythms

3.1. Shishmanov’s Influence

[3.1.1] In the 1889 essay mentioned above, Ivan Shishmanov declares an end to the “patriotic period” of ethnography. During this period, he maintains, Slavic researchers were prepared to offer “intentional or naive forgeries” in the name of “awakening the national spirit” and of proving that “we are also people and we have a glorious history, an original culture, and our own pantheon, filled with all kinds of riches, minor and major, but in any case at least not lesser than [those of] the Germans or the Greeks” (Shishmanov 1889, 13–14). According to Shishmanov, rather than insisting that the folklore of every nation is wholly original, ethnographers should recognize that cultural products have long been borrowed and exchanged and should examine the relationships among national cultures (Shishmanov 1889, 12; see also Mishkova 2011, 239–40). Yet as Diana Mishkova (2014, 24) explains, Shishmanov continues to endorse the notion that each nation’s folklore reflects an “inner ethnic essence” that can be distinguished from modern foreign influences. As such, he is ultimately more concerned with reforming the methods of patriotic ethnography than the ideologies: folklorists can and should continue to support their national cause; their work must just be more thorough, empirical, and dispassionate, bolstered by sound education and wide-ranging expertise in order to ensure the accuracy of the results (Mishkova 2014, 25–26).

[3.1.2] Shishmanov’s perspective appears to have informed some aspects of Dobri Hristov’s work on Bulgarian folk music, especially how the latter approaches the comparison of Bulgarian music with other national traditions. As I will show in discussing his comparisons with Turkish, ancient Greek, European classical, and Slavic musics, Hristov, like Shishmanov, does not hold that Bulgarian folk music is fundamentally different from all other music that has ever existed. Instead, Hristov believes that the Bulgarian people have preserved as part of their identity a distinctive combination of historical musical features that has been lost to other cultures.

3.2. Turkish Music

[3.2.1] In the course of presenting each Bulgarian meter in turn, Hristov mentions relevant rhythmic patterns in several other musical traditions, often providing the name of a Turkish usul that resembles the Bulgarian meter in question as listed in Example 11. Whenever Hristov elaborates on this comparison, though, he concludes that Turkish music cannot be the source of the Bulgarian meter. For example, in his comments about the ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ meter of music for the dance paidushka (now generally known as paidushko horo), he states that

In Turkish (Persian-Arabic) music ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ meter is found, with the same tempo of subdivided elements [as in Bulgarian music], in the cheerful endings of the peşrevs and the şarkıs performed without words . . ., and it is called usul jurjina. A dance with this meter does not exist in Turkish music; from this it is easy to determine that the meter is not intrinsic [присѫщъ] to Turkish music. Bulgarian folk music, meanwhile, abounds with danced and non-danced songs in this meter. (Hristov 1913, 10)

In a few cases Hristov also alludes to interviewing musicians and hearing music in Turkey, as in the following passage about the ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ meter of the rŭchenitsa:

When during my tour of the Turkish region I asked a master of Turkish music what the “usul” is of this song (I sang to him a song in the meter of the rŭchenitsa), he calmly answered that he knows this “usul,” but that it is not found in Turkish music. As an experienced instrumentalist and singer he performed a beautiful rŭchenitsa for me on “kemane” (violin), adding that they call the usul of this dance “mandra usulu” (i.e., farmer’s usul) and that it is used by the farmers in “Bulgaristan.” (Hristov 1913, 15–16)

Later in the article, Hristov discounts the potential Turkish influence more generally by claiming, first, that the Turkish folk music tradition is very limited and therefore not the source of the resemblances that he notes, and second, that most music performance in Turkey belongs to an art music tradition representing the confluence of Persian and Arabic musics, to which “the Turks . . . have added almost nothing new” (Hristov 1913, 24). In support of this claim, Hristov includes a footnote listing several Turkish musical terms that are derived from Arabic or Persian places and words.⁽²³⁾

[3.2.2] As Carol Silverman (1983) has noted, а dismissive attitude toward Turkish music is common in Bulgarian scholarship from much of the twentieth century due to the historical narrative that supported the formation of a Bulgarian national identity.⁽²⁴⁾ This narrative linked the Bulgarians of the present with medieval Bulgarian states that first appeared in southeastern Europe in the year 681, when the Bulgars (known in Bulgarian literature as the Proto-Bulgarians) migrated westward and subjugated the Slavic inhabitants of the region (Crampton 2007, 6–7, 11–12). Roumen Daskalov (2020, 270) explains that the narrative of Bulgaria’s medieval origins circumscribes the ethnogenesis of the Bulgarian nation, limiting the primary contributors to the Slavs and the Proto-Bulgarians and imagining Bulgarian identity to be largely unchanged since this glorious past. Establishing that the essential components of Bulgarian identity coalesced during this early era was particularly important for drawing a sharp distinction from the Ottomans, who controlled Bulgarian lands beginning in the late fourteenth century and whose potential influence had to be categorically repudiated to motivate the nineteenth-century push for independence. Within these broad contours, specifics of Bulgarian ethnogenesis, such as the relative prominence of the Slavs, the ancestry of the Proto-Bulgarians, and the involvement of the ancient Thracians, shifted over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in connection with developments in research and politics (Mishkova 2011; Marinov 2015, 75ff.; Iliev 1998).

[3.2.3] Hristov begins several of his writings about Bulgarian folk music with a retelling of this historical narrative, referring to “the Bulgarian nation . . . as an independent ethnic entity since the 7th century AD” (1928, 7). In Hristov’s version, during the period of the medieval Bulgarian states the Proto-Bulgarians and Slavs merged and also “intermixed their blood, culture, and customs with tribes and peoples from near and distant lands” (Hristov [1933] 1970​​​​​​, 157; see also Hristov [1930a] 1967​​​, 135). It is this originary “mixed racial type,”⁽²⁵⁾ not the influence of Turkish music, that accounts for the fact that “the complex . . . musical rhythm of the nations from the Near and Far East in its most complete form is synthesized in Bulgarian folk music” (Hristov 1967a, 98, 100). For Hristov, “Turkish culture . . . in the domain of music [has] not shown particular influence on [Bulgarian] folk creativity, because simple people have remained far from the intellectual life of large urban centers” ([1925a] 1967​, 34n).⁽²⁶⁾

[3.2.4] Hristov’s dubious generalizations about Turkish music support the historical narrative of Bulgarian ethnic identity by negating the possibility of Turkish influence on Bulgarian music. For instance, if “the Turks do not have their own music; they have entirely adopted the music of the Arabs,” as Hristov asserts in an early article about stylistic influences on Bulgarian music ([1905] 1970​, 32), then the evident similarities between Bulgarian and Turkish music can be explained as the result of independent, pre-Ottoman interactions with Middle Eastern cultures. The relationship between Bulgarian and Turkish music is a focal point for Hristov because he believes that “folk music reflects like a mirror the spirit, beliefs, and lifestyle of the entire nation” (1921, 6). Claiming that Bulgarians had adopted Turkish musical characteristics would therefore signify that their national identity had been compromised by their oppressors.

[3.2.5] The emphasis on tempo in Hristov’s formulation of meter is a consequence of the need to reject Turkish musical influence. He repeatedly identifies the fast tempo of a given Bulgarian unequal meter as a feature that differentiates it from an otherwise comparable usul (Hristov 1913, 14, 18, 20–21), and in a later study he states generally that Turkish and Greek meters that resemble those in Bulgarian music occur “at a comparatively slower tempo” (1928, 23). Hristov’s division of the possible meters into two groups based on tempo thus highlights the portion of the repertoire that he considers to be the most rhythmically distinct from Turkish music. In particular, the difference discussed above between the nature of beats in these two groups, such that meters in the faster group have unequal beats notated as eighth notes and dotted eighth notes while meters in the slower group have equal eighth-note beats, separates the group of fast Bulgarian meters categorically from slower meters that may also occur in Turkish music.

[3.2.6] Additionally, while Hristov does not identify the written sources of his knowledge of Turkish music,⁽²⁷⁾ by the time of his study some Turkish musicians had begun to incorporate time signatures into staff notation for makam music according to a system laid out in 1884 by Mehmet Hacı Emin Efendi (Ayangil 2008, 416–18). Emin Efendi employs time signatures including ${}_8^7$, ${}_8^9$, and ${}_4^9$ to notate some of the usul patterns that Hristov relates to Bulgarian unequal meters. If Hristov was aware of this type of notation, then his use of time signatures with a sixteenth-note pulse for fast unequal meters could be interpreted as a strategy to differentiate the Bulgarian system for notating rhythm from the Turkish system, comparable to differences in scripts and typefaces used to distinguish national languages (see Kamusella 2001, 246–47).

3.3. Ancient Greek Music

[3.3.1] More than a decade after the original publication of his 1913 study, Hristov undertook a substantial revision of the text. The revised manuscript, dated 1925, was discovered among Hristov’s papers after his death and published in a collection of his writings in 1967.⁽²⁸⁾ Along with changes to some details of metric terminology and other wording, the revisions consist of an expanded introduction, the addition of a few unequal meters and transcriptions, and a new section about phrasing and other dimensions of rhythm.

[3.3.2] The years between the two versions of Hristov’s study were difficult for the new Bulgarian kingdom. In 1913, shortly after triumphing against the Ottomans in the First Balkan War, the Bulgarian government initiated the Second Balkan War with attacks on Serbia and Greece over disputed territory in Macedonia. Romania and the Ottoman Empire crossed Bulgaria’s undefended borders to the north and southeast, precipitating a defeat in which Bulgaria was forced to surrender much of the land that it had gained in the First Balkan War. Two years later, aspiring to reclaim this territory, Bulgaria entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers; by the time the country withdrew from the conflict in 1918, its agricultural and economic systems had been devastated. Due to the losses, hardships, and political turmoil that Bulgaria endured, these two wars came to be referred to as the first and second national catastrophes. Instability continued into the following decade, with a coup and the assassination of the recently ousted prime minister in 1923, followed in 1925 by the arrest of thousands and execution of hundreds in response to the bombing of a funeral attended by leading politicians (see Crampton 2007, 198–238).

[3.3.3] As Boyd (2024, [3]) notes, Hristov opens the 1925 version of his study of meter with an allusion to the First World War, indicating that Bulgaria’s conflicts with neighboring states partly motivate the more pronounced arguments for the uniqueness of Bulgarian meter that appear in the revised manuscript. These arguments include comparison with ancient Greek music. The original text already claims that Bulgarian music has preserved rhythms described in ancient Greek music theory (Hristov 1913, 4), which the author supports by quoting an excerpt from Georgios Pachtikos’s transcription in ${}_8^5$ of the then-recently discovered paeans to Apollo from the Athenian treasury at Delphi (Hristov 1913, 41) and by comparing several Bulgarian meters with ancient Greek rhythmic feet such as the iamb and the epitrite.⁽²⁹⁾ Hristov mentions several additional rhythmic feet in the 1925 version of the study, as indicated by the blue text in Example 12.

[3.3.4] Neither version of Hristov’s study of meter includes many citations, but in a later paper Hristov ([1931b] 1967​​​​​​, 159) reveals that his conception of rhythmic feet and other aspects of rhythm is indebted both to a posthumously published textbook by the Russian music theorist and folklorist Yuliy Melgunov and a related treatise by German classicist Rudolph Westphal.⁽³⁰⁾ Westphal’s ([1880] 1968) treatise lays out a theory of rhythm derived from the writings of Aristoxenus and applies it to examples of European classical music. Melgunov, who studied and collaborated with Westphal (Carpenter 1988, 332), structures his treatment of rhythm according to many of the latter’s concepts (Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907). As Marina Frolova-Walker (2007, 245–50) explains, both Westphal and Melgunov sought to bolster Russian nationalism by associating Russian folk music with the high status that Europeans granted to ancient Greek culture.⁽³¹⁾

[3.3.5] Hristov’s interest in linking Bulgarian music with ancient Greek music might seem counterintuitive, since separating Bulgarian identity from Greek religious, economic, linguistic, and educational influences was a key preoccupation of his predecessors during the Vŭzrazhdane (Daskalov 2013); moreover, in the early twentieth century Greece and Bulgaria were on opposing sides of most regional military conflicts. Yet similar to his view of the relationship between Bulgarian and Turkish music, Hristov believes the characteristics that Bulgarian music shares with ancient Greek music did not originate in ancient Greece, but rather predate both traditions. For instance, in several essays Hristov addresses the proposal by Bulgarian historian and archaeologist Georgi Balaschev that the rŭchenitsa was introduced into Bulgarian culture in the thirteenth century as a result of the Mongol Empire’s incursion into southeastern Europe ([1925a] 1967​, 49n; [1925b] 1967​​, 218; [1921] 1970​​, 43). Since Hristov considers the rŭchenitsa to be Bulgaria’s “most characteristic national dance” ([1921] 1970​​, 40), he perceives Balaschev’s claim as a potential challenge to the distinctiveness of Bulgarian musical identity. In the most extensive version of his rebuttal, he states that:

this assertion is completely implausible despite our Turko-Tatar [i.e., Proto-Bulgarian] descent, because the songs with the meter of the ordinary rŭchenitsa ( ) and the mŭzhka rŭchenitsa ( ) are found in all our environs and probably have an origin much prior to the ethnic concept “Bulgarian” or Tatar, and I would say also much earlier than the existence of ancient Greece. ([1925b] 1967​​, 218)

Hristov goes on to describe “the possible legacy of some songs or musical fundamentals over the millennia from Egypt and India” ([1925b] 1967​​, 218). This view of music history resembles Westphal’s position that similarities between Russian and ancient Greek music stem from a common origin in ancient Iran (see Frolova-Walker 2007, 248–49) and Shishmanov’s (1889, 12) claim that ancient India is the source of much European, Asian, and African folklore. For Hristov, attributing shared musical characteristics to civilizations of the distant past releases Bulgarian music from any debt to the music of the Greeks and other competing nations, while still bestowing on it the prestige of comparison with ancient Greek theory.⁽³²⁾

[3.3.6] In line with this perspective, when Hristov revised his study of meter, he added to the introduction sweeping claims about Bulgarian music’s ties to antiquity. Comparing Bulgarian music to the Egyptian pyramids, Hristov boasts that this “heritage probably of millennia . . . is still heard unaltered” throughout Bulgarian territory:

Modern Western music and Eastern Persian-Arabic art music have not been in contact with this music and have not been able to alter its foundations. This is apparent from the metric and rhythmic features that are preserved in it to this day, from the wondrous regularities in the composition of its measures and periods, which remind us more of the once-secret numbers of distant Orphean and Pythagorean times. (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 33)⁽³³⁾

Hristov likewise denies that the historical presence of Byzantine, Turkish, and Roman Catholic cultures in Bulgaria has had any impact on the folk music, which he believes has remained “in a pure, uncorrupted, primitive form” due to rural isolation ([1925a] 1967​, 33–34).⁽³⁴⁾ While this general idea was already expressed in the original version of the text, the 1925 revision presents the argument much more expansively.

[3.3.7] Complementing Hristov’s intensified rhetoric about the ancient roots of Bulgarian music, the 1925 version of the text highlights several theoretical concepts that Hristov encountered in Westphal and Melgunov’s work. The most prominent of these is the chronos protos, which Melgunov defines at the outset of his textbook as the “shortest rhythmic unit of time,” an “indivisible rhythmic part” that the ancient Greeks used as a unit of measurement in a piece of music (Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907, 5). In Westphal’s reconstruction of Aristoxenian theory, the duration of a short syllable in a rhythmic foot corresponds to the chronos protos, while a long syllable lasts for two or more chronoi protoi (Westphal [1880] 1968, 34). When employing rhythmic feet to analyze European classical music, Westphal (followed by Melgunov) equates the chronos protos with note values in scores of both vocal and instrumental music, proposing that those composers who sometimes use the chronos protos in their music, such as J. S. Bach, inherited it from ancient Greece by way of early modern Christian music ([1880] 1968, 38–40).⁽³⁵⁾ The term chronos protos does not appear in the 1913 version of Hristov’s study, but in 1925 it is added in several places, including in parentheses in the initial definition of meter quoted above: “Serving as a fundamental (primary) element (chronos protos) in these meters is a pulse (beat) with a tempo of around 400–432 per minute” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 37). This insertion clarifies that Hristov conceives of the fast, sixteenth-note pulse that his notation of unequal meters depends on as a chronos protos. Indeed, some of the other words that he uses in the definition, such as fundamental and primary, are also borrowed from Melgunov’s discussion of the term.⁽³⁶⁾

[3.3.8] A related term that Hristov adds in the 1925 version is chronos alogos, which Melgunov and Westphal both refer to as “irrational elongation” (Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907, 45–46; Westphal [1880] 1968, 132–43). Extrapolating from Aristoxenus’s description, Westphal defines this phenomenon as the use within a rhythmic foot of a duration that is one-and-a-half times as long as the chronos protos. He illustrates irrational elongation in a chart, reproduced here as Example 13, that shows how this phenomenon affects three different types of feet, each represented with different note values for the chronos protos (Westphal [1880] 1968, 137).⁽³⁷⁾

[3.3.9] Hristov ([1925a] 1967​, 40) appears to have been inspired by Westphal’s chart to create the list in Example 14, in which he casts the eighth notes and dotted eighth notes as “secondary [metric] parts in an irrational relationship over time (chronos alogoi).” Comparison with Example 13 reveals that Hristov has had to manipulate the feet in order to produce the patterns in common Bulgarian unequal meters. For example, as highlighted by the blue and orange boxes overlaid on Examples 13 and 14, the parenthesized quarter note at the beginning of the dactylic rhythm in ${}_8^2$ evidently indicates that Hristov has omitted the initial quarter note from the dactyls in the eighth-note row of Westphal’s table, such that the durations in the measure of $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{2\frac{1}{2}}{8}$ correspond only to the eighth note and dotted eighth note at the end of the irrational dactyl. The other meters in Example 14 have similar, if less precise, correspondences with feet from Example 13.

[3.3.10] In comparisons between Bulgarian meters and rhythmic feet dating to the 1913 version of the study, Hristov often notes that the standard 1:2 ratio of short to long durations in a foot makes for an imperfect match with the 2:3 ratio in an otherwise similar unequal meter—as in, for example, the short–long rhythm of an iamb when compared with the eighth–dotted-eighth beat pattern in ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ meter (Hristov 1913, 10). The chronos alogos thus offers Hristov a way of establishing a closer connection with ancient Greek rhythm, notwithstanding his convoluted method of deriving the durations in Bulgarian meters from Westphal’s limited repertoire of rhythmic feet.

3.4. European Classical Music

[3.4.1] Hristov’s effort to associate Bulgarian meter with ancient Greek rhythmic patterns is tied to his argument that Bulgarian folk music is fundamentally different from European classical music. In particular, in another addition to the 1925 version of the study that immediately precedes the list from Example 14, Hristov states:

The irregular meters that, alongside the usual regular meters, are one of the main foundations of our music, differ significantly from the irregular meters that are known in European art music. The latter are formed from equal parts, 5 or 7 in number, which are subdivided into smaller duple or triple parts. . . . In our folk music irregular meter is formed from equal primary elements (chronoi protoi) that cannot be divided into smaller parts, and contrary to European irregular meters, here these indivisible parts are bound together into larger parts by combining two or three of them (short and elongated metric parts). (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 39–40)

This passage is accompanied by the figures in Examples 15 and 16 to illustrate the organization of unequal meters in the two musical styles. Hristov’s design of these figures, especially Example 15, appears to be inspired by illustrations of meter in contemporary texts on rhythm. For instance, Example 17 reproduces diagrams of ${}_4^5$ and ${}_4^7$ meters from a treatise by Theodor Wiehmayer (1917, 78, 81) that Hristov ([1931b] 1967​​​​​​, 167) cites elsewhere.⁽³⁸⁾ In Example 15, Hristov seemingly compresses the separate representations of duple and triple subdivisions from Example 17 into one figure each for five-beat and seven-beat meters.

[3.4.2] Hristov’s conception of the difference between European and Bulgarian metric systems is again closely related to Melgunov’s perspective. Despite his readiness to find ancient Greek rhythmic structures in excerpts from European classical music, Melgunov begins his discussion of the chronos protos by positing that “the fundamentals of the contemporary musical notation system and the ancient Greek system are completely different” for nearly the same reason that Hristov gives: rhythm in modern music is based on the division of a long unit into small parts, while ancient Greek rhythm instead depends on a short unit, the chronos protos, that can be combined into longer note values (Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907, 5). By substituting Bulgarian music for ancient Greek music in Melgunov’s comparison, Hristov thus uses the chronos protos to incorporate into his theory a categorical distinction between European classical and Bulgarian folk music.

[3.4.3] Hristov alludes to the stakes of this distinction in a reply to public criticism of his work by Hristo Panchev, a Bulgarian proponent of Hugo Riemann’s rhythmic theory. Responding to the charge that his theory of meter is mistaken because it does not conform to the Riemannian model of end-accented eight-measure hypermeter, Hristov ([1931b] 1967​​​​​​, 153) points out that “alongside the purely scientific meaning [of the dispute] there is also a social, even national meaning, because it relates to musical treasures, fruit of our universal national spirit, which we find original and even unique, but [which] Mr. Panchev takes to be subject to traditional musical theories.”⁽³⁹⁾ Motivating this disagreement is the question of how music theory should be deployed in the service of Bulgarian interests. A subtext of Panchev’s argument is that Bulgarian musicologists should prove Bulgaria’s worthiness as a modern European nation by demonstrating their familiarity with accepted music theories (above all Riemann’s), and by establishing that Bulgarian music is essentially European despite its distinctive characteristics. Panchev thus sees Hristov’s minimal discussion of existing theories and his denial that Bulgarian music conforms to European metric organization as a national embarrassment (Panchev 1928).⁽⁴⁰⁾ As one of Bulgaria’s first composers of music in a European classical style, Hristov clearly was not opposed to emulating western European culture; indeed, his standardization of staff notation for transcribing Bulgarian folk music could be understood as a contribution to legitimizing Bulgarian music scholarship in European terms. Yet his insistence on the uniqueness of Bulgarian folk music represents a more ambitious strategy than Panchev’s, whereby music theory serves to prove that Bulgarian music—and by extension, the Bulgarian nation—is worthy of the interest and respect of the international community because this music differs from all other national styles.⁽⁴¹⁾

3.5. Slavic Music

[3.5.1] Along with its relevance to the perceived value of the Bulgarian nation, Hristov’s metric theory had political implications for the Bulgarian state. While the popularity of irredentist nationalism wavered following the military struggles of the 1910s (Mangova 2005, 228; Pundeff [1969] 1994, 145–46; Todorova 1995, 84), throughout his career Hristov expressed support for Bulgaria’s territorial aspirations in creative and scholarly work. For instance, he composed several pieces about contested regions beyond Bulgaria’s borders;⁽⁴²⁾ he also explicitly linked the “ethnographic boundaries” of Bulgaria with the political boundaries proposed by the Treaty of San Stefano (Hristov 1967a, 99), alluding to this territory in the revised introduction to his study of meter via the bodies of water that delimit it: the Danube River, the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea, and Lake Ohrid (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 33).

[3.5.2] According to the then-common belief that the people of a nation should be unified within a single state, Hristov’s research on folk music had the potential to strengthen Bulgaria’s claims by providing evidence that people living in disputed territory were similar to Bulgarians. In this regard, the region of Macedonia was of particular interest to Hristov, as it was to other Bulgarian scholars of the time (see, e.g., Marinov 2015, 82–83); indeed, the political fate of Macedonia was a perennial source of turbulence in Bulgarian affairs both foreign and domestic for much of Hristov’s life (Crampton 2007). In several writings, Hristov seeks to demonstrate that Macedonian music closely resembles Bulgarian music and differs substantially from the music of other Slavic peoples, making clear that he considers Macedonians to be part of the Bulgarian nation (Hristov [1930a] 1967​​​; Hristov [1931] 1970​​​​; Krŭstev 1967b, 21).⁽⁴³⁾ This perspective on Macedonian music and identity parallels Bulgarian linguists’ argument that the Macedonian language is a dialect of Bulgarian (see Marinov 2013).

[3.5.3] As Svetlana Zaharieva (2000) and Karen Peters (2003) have explained, one of Hristov’s goals in discussing the affinities between Bulgarian and Macedonian music was to counter work by Serbian folklorists, who similarly justified their country’s southward expansion by identifying Serbian elements in Macedonian music.⁽⁴⁴⁾ For instance, writing after Serbia gained control of the territory that is now North Macedonia in the 1910s, Hristov ([1930a] 1967​​​, 123) comments that “the Serbian musicologists’ efforts to notate Bulgarian songs from Macedonia (now Southern Serbia?) as Serbian are in the interest of their political aspirations.” He further accuses his Serbian counterparts of distorting Macedonian music to make it appear Serbian, arguing that “the songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians are collected by ‘Yugoslav’ music scholars not as they are sung by the people, but with corrupted language and with straightened-out melodies, diminished consciously and unconsciously in their peculiarities, linguistic and musical” (Hristov [1931a] 1967​​​​​, 238).⁽⁴⁵⁾

[3.5.4] Hristov holds up unequal meter as a key characteristic for distinguishing Bulgarian and Macedonian music from Serbian music. As a result, his theory of meter not only provides guidance for Bulgarian folklorists’ notation of rhythm, but also supports his criticism of foreigners’ transcription errors (Zaharieva 2000, 97).⁽⁴⁶⁾ The types of mistakes that Hristov points out in transcriptions by folklorists from Serbia and from other Slavic countries are similar to those in nineteenth-century Bulgarian transcriptions, especially the “evening out” of unequal beats illustrated above in Example 4. Example 18 shows a melody that Hristov excerpted from a choral arrangement of a Bulgarian folk song by Serbian composer Josif Marinković, along with Hristov’s correction to the notation. Hristov ([1925a] 1967​, 50) added this example to the 1925 version of his study of meter, and he also mentions it in several other texts ([1921] 1970​​, 41; [1931] 1970​​​​, 153).⁽⁴⁷⁾ As Hristov describes, Marinković’s arrangement of the melody uses quarter notes in place of the dotted-eighth-note beats that occur at the end of each measure of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ in Hristov’s version of the folk song; each ${}_4^3$ measure in the arrangement corresponds to one and a half measures of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$, so that Marinković’s phrase lasts for four measures instead of six.

[3.5.5] Hristov interprets the equal meter and two- and four-measure phrasing in Marinković’s arrangement as characteristics of European classical rhythm that have been imposed on the Bulgarian melody. This alteration makes the melody appear more Serbian, because according to Hristov ([1931] 1970​​​​, 132), the musics of all Slavic peoples except for Bulgarians and Macedonians have been influenced by the European classical tradition and thus lack the ancient unequal meters that Bulgarian and Macedonian repertoires preserve. In support of this claim, Hristov compares the rhythm and dance movements of the rŭchenitsa in ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ with similar Czech, Russian, Slovenian, and Serbian folk dance rhythms in ${}_4^2$ (1913, 15–16; see also Hristov [1931] 1970​​​​, 132–33). Most of Hristov’s evidence for his position, though, appears to be derived from foreigners’ attempts to transcribe Bulgarian music. These musicologists, including several Serbians as well as the Croatian Franjo Kuhač and the Czech Ludvík Kuba, are “entirely Europeanized in their rhythmic feeling” (Hristov [1931] 1970​​​​, 132). Although Hristov suspects Serbians of deliberately falsifying Bulgarian rhythm, he also takes the inaccuracies of their transcriptions as an indication that due to their “close contact with the cultured countries Austria and Italy, they have lost a true sense of the musical rhythm typical of [Bulgarian] folk songs” ([1930a] 1967​​​, 123).

[3.5.6] Hristov continues to emphasize this difference in rhythmic sensibility in his description of Bulgarian performance practices. In his initial study of meter, Hristov (1913, 32) states that ${}_8^3$ meter is not typical of Bulgarian music: when Bulgarian folk instrumentalists perform a melody in this meter, they make the three equal beats unequal by adding a sixteenth note to the third beat in each measure, as in Example 19.⁽⁴⁸⁾ This tendency is, in his words, “exactly the opposite [of what] the cultured musician does” in Example 20 when evening out the rhythms of a Bulgarian unequal meter (Hristov 1913, 33). These examples suggest that Hristov sees command of unequal meter as largely involuntary, insofar as Bulgarian folk musicians seemingly cannot help applying it to three-beat meters, whereas musicians enculturated to European classical norms are unable to perceive or notate Bulgarian unequal meter correctly.

[3.5.7] Hristov’s belief that European classical influence has removed unequal meters from the musical repertoires of Bulgaria’s fellow Slavic nations also entailed a risk that Bulgarian music could lose its defining metric characteristics, since as noted above, he attributed the survival of Bulgaria’s distinctive meters to rural isolation during the period of Ottoman rule. For example, when discussing moderate-tempo ${}_8^6$ meter, which he distinguishes from the fast ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 6}}$ or ${}_8^2$ meter common in Bulgarian folk dance, Hristov ([1925a] 1967​, 79) asserts that “the appearance of this meter in our folk music is already a sign of the influence of the new (Western) music. In all likelihood, the interesting rhythmic characteristics that we have surveyed, which we do not find in the music of other countries, will gradually be erased under the influence of the new culture if we do not take care to preserve them and to see that they are applied in the new Bulgarian art music.”

[3.5.8] Occasionally, this concern with foreign influence leads Hristov to propose revisions to existing folk music practice. The piece shown in Example 21, for instance, is Hristov’s (1913, 12–13) correction to a widely used arrangement of music for the dance paidushka. Hristov (1913, 10) argues that the original version of this arrangement must have been written by “some foreign Kapellmeister,” because it uses a time signature with three equal beats instead of this dance’s proper time signature of ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ or ${}_8^5$, and because its eight-measure phrases do not align with the ten-measure cycle of dance movements. Accordingly, in the recomposition in Example 21, Hristov adjusts the time signature and note values and adds pairs of measures at several points to extend the phrases from eight to ten measures (Hristov 1913, 10–12). Hristov may have come to reconsider these alterations, since the score in Example 21 is one of the few musical examples omitted from the 1925 version of the study. The revised text retains his comments about the erroneous time signature and phrase lengths (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 43), however, so he seemingly remained confident in the utility of his theory for identifying the foreign origins of musical material.

[3.5.9] The introduction to Hristov’s 1913 study concludes with an exhortation to folklorists not only to collect Bulgarian folk music systematically, but to compare the collected materials with the musics of Bulgaria’s neighbors, for “only then can reliable academic studies of our folk music be done. Then only will it become clear whether our folk music is original [and] what this originality consists of” (1913, 5). Hristov thus saw his comparative method as principled and scientific, an essential component of the scholarly project of identifying the characteristics of traditional Bulgarian music. The comparisons with Turkish, ancient Greek, European classical, and Slavic musics that I have surveyed show that—similar to nationalist linguists selecting and codifying practices of verbal communication to serve as the norm for a national language (see Haugen 1966; Kamusella 2001, 240–41)—this effort was also animated by political considerations. In particular, several aspects of Hristov’s theory are tied to demonstrating the historically conditioned uniqueness of meter in Bulgarian folk music in connection with a national identity that depended to some extent on contrast with other nations.

4. Systematic Variety in Bulgarian Rhythms

[4.1] In addition to the features of Bulgarian music that distinguish it from other traditions, for Hristov an essential component of Bulgarian identity lies in the collective forms of metric and rhythmic organization that occur in the music. For example, he asserts that “in our music five to fourteen primary elements (chronoi protoi) form a series of similar meters which, for all appearances, rest in the psyche, in the blood of the nation; through them the nation expresses its rhythmic and tonal sensibility” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 49n). Note that, although Hristov singles out certain meters as especially characteristic, it is the presence in the repertoire of the full range of meters from ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ to ${}_{16}^{14}$ that defines the metric dimension of Bulgarian musical identity. The importance of metric variety is apparent from Hristov’s careful tabulation of every Bulgarian meter, and he also applies the concept to other dimensions of rhythm, devoting considerable attention to the variety of phrase lengths that occur in Bulgarian songs during the discussion of ${}_4^2$ meter (Hristov 1913, 34–40).

[4.2] The 1925 revision emphasizes rhythmic variety even further: one of the new sections at the end of the text lists brief transcriptions of music and verse in order to demonstrate that “each number from 4 to 14 is found equally as a basis for the formation of verse, meter, or phrasing” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 90). Specifically, for each number n from 4 to 14, Hristov adduces one example each of an n-pulse meter, an n-measure phrase, and lyrics or other verse with n-syllable lines; the examples for n=11 are shown in Example 22.⁽⁴⁹⁾ This and other additions to the revised edition may be intended in part to address aspects of rhythm, especially phrasing, that were important to theorists of European classical music during Hristov’s time—for instance, several of Hristov’s added sections have parallels in the chapters on phrases from Wiehmayer’s (1917) treatise on rhythm, as suggested by the comparison of headings from the two texts in Example 23.⁽⁵⁰⁾

[4.3] Beyond demonstrating that Bulgarian music includes numerous rhythmic forms and that many of these forms contrast with rhythmic organization in European classical music, Hristov is also concerned with presenting Bulgarian rhythmic variety as systematic, in the sense that every meter and phrase length possible within the parameters he sets should occur in the repertoire. For instance, he notes that, whereas a ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ meter in which each measure consists of an eighth-note beat followed by a dotted-eighth-note beat is common in Bulgarian music, the existence of a five-pulse meter with the dotted-eighth-note beat on the downbeat is questionable, and he directs transcribers to search for this “second type of 5/16 meter ( )” (Hristov 1913, 13–14). As Donna Buchanan (2000, 68) remarks, Hristov’s brief discussion of long–short ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 5}}$ meter is ambiguous; Hristov includes the untitled and unattributed instrumental melody shown in Example 24, but in the 1925 version of the study he refers to this melody as a “possible example” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 45), leading me to wonder whether he composed it himself.

[4.4] Similarly, Hristov identifies the short–long–short rotation of beats in ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ as “theoretically possible,” while acknowledging that it does not occur in Bulgarian music (1913, 6, 14); two decades later, he continued to hold out hope that this metric type might exist, stating that ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ meter “with a triple part in the middle has not been found so far in songs, but it is possible and perhaps will be discovered ( )” (Hristov [1933] 1970​​​​​​, 172). This optimism was arguably justified: in 1913 Hristov predicted that “future research will show whether [${}_{16}^{13}$] meter actually exists, since so far neither a song nor a dance with such a meter is known” (1913, 28). In 1925 he triumphantly reported the discovery of melodies in ${}_{16}^{13}$ by his student Svetozar Kukudov and his contemporary Vasil Stoin, filling the gap between ${}_{16}^{12}$ and ${}_{16}^{14}$ in the list of Bulgarian meters (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 64).

[4.5] The completist attitude that informs Hristov’s research agenda likely reflects an awareness of his own role in creating a national theory of meter, and also ultimately relates to his beliefs about musical and social order. In a draft of a letter to the Czech composer and theorist Alois Hába, Hristov writes that Bulgarian folk dance music

appears exotic, but it is not barbaric [варварска], because in it the regularities are evident in a fundamental pulse of metric elements that cannot be divided into smaller parts— = 400 M. M. . . . From combinations of such duple and triple rhythmic elements ( ) [in Bulgaria] a series of metric forms are created as a basis for corresponding dances. (Hristov [1930b] 1967​​​​, 233–34)

In this restatement of his definition of Bulgarian unequal meter, Hristov presents the rhythmic order of his theory as evidence that Bulgarian folk music “is not barbaric.” Since he considers Bulgarian folk music to be closely connected with the Bulgarian nation, this framing seemingly implies a relationship between musical and social organization, whereby the traditional music of a “barbaric” nation necessarily lacks order or systemization.

[4.6] This perspective is comparable to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories of racial essentialism in music, such as the white supremacist connection between tonal systems and race proposed by François-Joseph Fétis (see Christensen 2019, 158–208; Yust 2024) and the analogies of music with racial inequality and hierarchy that Philip Ewell (2020, [4.5]) identifies in the theory of Heinrich Schenker. The allusion to barbarism just quoted is the only statement to this effect that I have encountered thus far in Hristov’s published writings, but he was likely aware of some form of the “racial science” that such theories draw on.⁽⁵¹⁾ For example, Rudolph Westphal, whose approach to ancient Greek rhythmics influenced Hristov (see [3.3] above), wrote that multiple European peoples descended in separate stages from Aryans who originally lived in eastern Iran; Westphal further claimed that among these nations it was the Slavs, and above all the Russians, who had preserved the ancient Aryan linguistic and cultural heritage most faithfully (Westphal 1879, 111–12; Frolova-Walker 2007, 249–50).⁽⁵²⁾

[4.7] In this context, Hristov’s attention to the systematic aspects of Bulgarian meter may represent in part an attempt to secure the Bulgarian nation’s membership in Europe on racial grounds. Hristov believed that the Bulgarians’ Slavic predecessors were “of Indo-Aryan origin” (Hristov [1930a] 1967​​​, 135), and when he insists that the entire range of unequal meters “rest[s] in the psyche, in the blood of the nation” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 49n), he may be holding up the meter of Bulgarian music as evidence that Bulgarians remain members of an essentially Aryan race by virtue of their natural sense of order, akin to the myth that only Aryans had the capacity to found civilizations (see McMahon 2019, 50, 53–54). This line of thinking could serve to reconcile the difference between meter in Bulgarian and European classical music (as presented in Hristov’s theory) with Bulgaria’s aspiration to acceptance in the European political arena by portraying the Bulgarian nation as a branch of the most prestigious European racial line—one less affected by the decline that other white Europeans had supposedly suffered as a result of urbanization.⁽⁵³⁾

[4.8] In the absence of further evidence about Hristov’s views on race, this interpretation of his comment about barbarism remains speculative. Yet Hristov’s use of the word “barbaric” also suggests a more localized variation of the racial positioning sketched in the preceding paragraph, insofar as that particular word invokes Bulgaria’s relationship with its national competitors in southeastern Europe. As Daskalov (2013, 168) explains, during the nineteenth century, Greek ethnicity and language were associated with commercial, educational, and cultural prestige, and some Greeks regarded Bulgarians as uncivilized “barbarians” by comparison. Serbian nationalists used the same word to disparage Bulgarians, especially during the 1920s (Ristić 2017, 59). Associating the fallacious social/ethnic concept of barbarism with musical characteristics allows Hristov to employ music theory to refute these prejudices. That is, the systematic rhythmic variety in Bulgarian folk music ostensibly proves the Bulgarian nation to be inherently orderly or civilized, and thus consistent with western European values and deserving of recognition by the European powers.

5. Hristov’s Influence

[5.1] The foregoing sections have highlighted ways in which the content of Hristov’s theory of Bulgarian meter is inseparable from his nationalism: The theory offers practical support for the project of documenting Bulgarian folklore, and thereby defining the Bulgarian nation, and Hristov’s claims about the nature and characteristics of Bulgarian meter are shaped by his beliefs about Bulgarian ethnogenesis, society, and the political need to distinguish Bulgarian identity from that of other nations. This context is significant in part due to the impact of Hristov’s theory.

[5.2] In addition to the 1913 study, Hristov published articles and books disseminating his approach to meter in the 1920s and 1930s, and his work was quite influential in Bulgarian musical folkloristics. While some details of their theories and compendia differ, most twentieth-century Bulgarian researchers writing about meter follow Hristov’s basic understanding of unequal meter and his style of discussing each meter in turn (e.g., Stoin 1927, Djoudjeff 1931, and Dzhidzhev 1981).⁽⁵⁴⁾ Hristov’s comparisons with forms of rhythmic organization in Turkish, ancient Greek, and other musical cultures and his interpretation of this line of study in relation to the origins of Bulgarian folk music also continue in the work of his successors (see, e.g., Vlaeva 2003).

[5.3] Teaching made up a substantial part of Hristov’s professional activities, and he authored several grade-school music textbooks.⁽⁵⁵⁾ Later Bulgarian textbooks on folk music feature the theories of unequal meter that succeeded Hristov’s (e.g., Dzhudzhev 1970; Kaufman 1977), and changes in Bulgarian society during the twentieth century created conditions under which these theories could have affected the thinking and practices of Bulgarian folk musicians. In particular, Bulgaria’s adoption of state socialism after the Second World War led to the elimination of some traditional contexts for making folk music and to the institutionalization and regulation of folk music performance in order to present an idealized vision of Bulgarian society (Rice 1994; Buchanan 2006). As a result, a conservatory system for teaching Bulgarian folk music developed, with students learning to perform from staff notation that follows Hristov’s prescriptions for writing rhythms.

[5.4] On an international level, the trailer in Video Example 1 illustrates the extent to which Béla Bartók’s ([1938] 1976, 43, 47) enthusiasm for unequal meter—including his compositional use of the phenomenon and his popularization of the term “Bulgarian rhythm” in recognition of Hristov’s and Stoin’s work—remains a point of pride in Bulgaria.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Indeed, Bartók effectively fulfilled Hristov’s ([1925a] 1967​, 33) prophesy that Bulgarian folk music would “soon attract the attention of the universal scholarly musical world, as well as of modern contemporary composers looking for new compositional elements.” Curt Sachs also mentions western Europeans’ difficulty “perceiving and comprehending the ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ of a Bulgarian folksong” in his article introducing the concept of additive rhythm (Sachs 1952, 389; see also Sachs 1936, 24), and Constantin Brăiloiu’s ([1951] 1984, 133) introduction of the term “aksak rhythm” to the western ethnomusicological lexicon as a replacement for “Bulgarian rhythm” represents a continuation of debates about the Bulgarianness of unequal meter (see also Brăiloiu [1949] 1984, 17).⁽⁵⁷⁾ Bulgarian metric theory is certainly not the only influence on subsequent research on unequal meter, but features resembling Hristov’s definition, including the orientation toward a continuous fast pulse, the grouping of pulses into duple or triple beats, and the generation of different meters by combining these beats, continue to appear in recent theories of unequal meter (e.g., Arom 2004; Gotham 2015).

[5.5] The political motivation for many of Hristov’s claims does not mean that these claims cannot be accurate, but given his influence, it is worth considering ways in which Hristov’s theory may have limited the conception and performance of meter in Bulgarian music. As Buchanan (2000, 81) has observed, in their efforts to define the nation and preserve repertoire threatened by modernization, Bulgarian folklorists including Hristov focused their work primarily on the music that they considered to be the most traditional and most characteristically Bulgarian. As a result, some genres, localities, ethnicities, and religions—such as, respectively, instrumental music, urban music, and musics of Romani and Muslim communities—were underrepresented in folk music collections and ethnographic studies.⁽⁵⁸⁾ Hristov’s theory likely contributed to this selectiveness by delineating specific rhythmic features that should be regarded as “truly” Bulgarian, a stance that recalls similar attempts to “purify” the Bulgarian language by eliminating foreign influences in the course of literary standardization (see Todorova 1990, 442–44, 447).

[5.6] Hristov’s desire to maintain the consistency and simplicity of a unique Bulgarian system of meter may also have discouraged him and subsequent transcribers from recognizing unequal metric patterns with beat durations in a ratio other than exactly 2:3. That is, while the metric patterns that Hristov’s theory generates appear to represent the majority of Bulgarian unequal meters more closely than previous approaches did, the repertoire may still include some unequal meters that the system cannot accommodate due to beats with a different ratio or timing that is not tied to a constant fast pulse.⁽⁵⁹⁾ Indeed, until at least the late 1930s, most Bulgarian music folklorists did not have access to the phonograph technology that Hristov recommended, and thus made their transcriptions live or from memory (Buchanan 2000, 60–61). Under these circumstances, even the most talented and conscientious transcriber might have convinced themself that the rhythm of an unfamiliar song conformed to Hristov’s metric principles or represented a missing link in the repertoire of meters.

[5.7] The attempt to reduce variation in transcriptions represents another source of constraints on the properties of unequal meters. Todorov (1981, 48) notes that one of Hristov’s contributions is the principle “that a given meter is characteristic for a particular dance, and every transcription of the dance regardless of the source should always be in that meter.” This premise is the basis for Todorov’s criticism of the two rŭchenitsa transcriptions in ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ and ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 8}}$ in Example 7 above, since Hristov established that ${}_{16}^{\mathrm{ 7}}$ is the rŭchenitsa’s defining time signature.⁽⁶⁰⁾ In light of the facility with which some Bulgarian musicians adjust the durations of motivic material to accommodate different meters, though (see Rice 1994, 198; Buchanan and Folse 2006, 88; Kaufman 2005), as well as the fact that on occasion some Bulgarian folk dancers knowingly perform the “wrong” dance for a given piece of music, the strict identification of each dance type with a single notated meter may be overly prescriptive. As such, while the transcription errors and inconsistent notational conventions that Hristov (1913, 4) laments likely account for some of the variability in the rhythmic notation of early Bulgarian transcriptions, it is also possible that Bulgarian performance practice used to allow for greater metric flexibility than present-day norms would suggest.

[5.8] An awareness of the ideological commitments that I have described and the possible effects of Hristov’s metric theory could inform a reimagining of Bulgarian meter from a different perspective. While such a project is beyond the scope of this article, it might involve replacing Hristov’s imperatives—to facilitate transcription, to differentiate Bulgarian music from neighboring styles, and to construct a numerically complete system—with other priorities, such as reflecting the embodiment of meter in dance movements. A reformulation of Bulgarian metric theory might also have productive consequences for theories of unequal meter more generally by, for example, interrogating the utility of equivalencies implied by applying a single time signature to every metric cycle with the same number of pulses, as in the use of ${}_8^7$ for gesturally distinct Bulgarian and San dances that Bernacki (2024) discusses. To be sure, any such innovation would not aspire to supersede existing conceptions and notation of meter in Bulgaria, and should build on recent research on the nature and possibilities of meter by Bulgarian scholars such as Botusharov (2004), Kaufman (2005), and Kirilov (2015, 35–45; 2021, 56–60).

6. Hristov’s Complexity

[6.1] Interpreting nationalistic thought inevitably involves simplification. The polarizing logic of ethnic nationalism, which dictates that cultural, historical, and scientific knowledge must support the interests of the nation–state, may make every piece of information that an analyst encounters seem like it fits into a nationalistic narrative. By way of conclusion, then, I will note a few aspects of Dobri Hristov’s life and work that transcend the argument I have presented above. First, Hristov’s metric theory is not his only significant scholarly contribution. Within the field of musical folkloristics, Hristov also studied the tonal content of Bulgarian music, publishing one of the first theories of the numerous scales that the repertoire includes (1928). Moreover, in this article I have barely touched on his other professional activities as a composer, an educator, a choral director, and a scholar of Bulgarian Orthodox church music.⁽⁶¹⁾

[6.2] Biographical details also cast some of Hristov’s arguments about meter in a different light. For instance, notwithstanding his heated rhetoric about Serbian folklorists’ encroachments on Macedonia, Hristov appears to have been on friendly terms with at least one of his Serbian counterparts, Kosta Manojlović. As Stefanka Georgieva (2017, 42) describes, Hristov collaborated with Manojlović in planning and promoting a concert in Sofia by the First Belgrade Choral Society (Hristov [1926] 1970), of which society Hristov was made an honorary member. A greeting card and family photo of Manojlović are also preserved in the archive of Hristov’s personal papers (Yapova 2002, 105).

[6.3] Similarly, the extent of Hristov’s familiarity and engagement with Turkish music arguably calls into question his attempts to minimize this tradition. As alluded to above, he draws examples from published Turkish music, recounts interviews that he conducted while traveling in Turkey, and refers to numerous usuls and makams in his writings about Bulgarian music. This interest in Turkish music may be explained in part by Hristov’s childhood musical experiences. In particular, Hristov ([1932] 1970​​​​​, 357–58) writes that from a very early age, he was deeply affected by his mother’s singing, and that she “spoke Turkish and loved to sing sad Turkish songs” despite Hristov’s father’s objections to the Turkish language.⁽⁶²⁾ Hristov’s advocacy for the Bulgarian nation thus does not appear to have prevented him from respecting some of the musics and musicians on the other side of his country’s borders.

Daniel Goldberg
University of Connecticut
875 Coventry Rd., Unit 1012
Storrs, CT 06269
daniel.goldberg@uconn.edu

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—————. 2012. Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora. Oxford University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/heb32815.0001.001.

Smith, Anthony D. 2001. Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History. Polity.

Smither, Howard Elbert. 1960. “Theories of Rhythm in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries with a Contribution to the Theory of Rhythm for the Study of Twentieth-Century Music.” PhD diss., Cornell University. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/theories-rhythm-nineteenth-twentieth-centuries/docview/301878335/se-2.

Stoin, Vasil [Стоин, Васил]. 1927. Българската народна музика: Метрика и ритмика [Bulgarian folk music: Metrics and rhythmics]. С. М. Стайковъ.

Sugarman, Jane C. 1999. “Imagining the Homeland: Poetry, Songs, and Discourses of Albanian Nationalism.” Ethnomusicology 43 (3): 419–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/852556.

Todorov, Todor [Тодоров, Тодор]. 1981. Българската музикална фолклористика до 9.IX.1944 [Bulgarian musical folkloristics until September 9, 1944]. Българска академия на науките.

Todorova, Maria. 1990. “Language as Cultural Unifier in a Multilingual Setting: The Bulgarian Case during the Nineteenth Century.” East European Politics and Societies 4 (3): 439–50. https://doi.org/10.1177/0888325490004003003.

—————. 1995. “The Course of Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism.” In Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter F. Sugar, 55–102. The American University Press.

Toncheva, Elena [Тончева, Елена], ed. 2005. Добри Христов и българският XX век [Dobri Hristov and the Bulgarian 20th century]. Институт за изкуствознание, Българска академия на науките.

Velichkova, Ts. [Величкова, Ц.]. n.d. “Напредък” [Progress]. Енциклопедия дарителството [Encyclopedia of the donation]. Accessed June 7, 2024. http://daritelite.bg/napr%D0%B5dak-2/.

Venelin, Yuriy Ivanovich [Венелин, Юрий Иванович]. [1837] 1889. “Двѣ писма от Юрий Ивановича Венелина до Василия Априловъ” [Two letters from Yuriy Ivanovich Venelin to Vasil Aprilov]. Сборникъ за народни умотворения, наука и книжнина 1, part 1, Наученъ отдѣлъ: 176–90. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uva.x030527436?urlappend=%3Bseq=190%3Bownerid=27021597768539224-200.

Vlaeva, Ivanka [Влаева, Иванка]. 2003. “В търсене на музикалната ни идентичност: За някой източни музикално-теоретични системи в изследванията на Стоян Джуджев” [In search of our musical identity: On several Eastern music-theoretical systems in the studies of Stoyan Dzhudzhev]. Българско музикознание 27 (4): 188–97.

—————. 2008. “The Bulgarian Ideas and the Meter-and-Rhythm Theory.” In Vienna and the Balkans: Papers from the 39th World Conference of the ICTM, Vienna 2007, ed. Lozanka Peycheva and Angela Rodel, 76–87. Institute of Art Studies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

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Westphal, Rudolph [Вестфаль, Рудольфъ]. 1879. “О русской народной пѣснѣ (On Russian Folk Song).” Русскій Вѣстникъ (Russian Messenger) 143: 111–54. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:%D0%A0%D1%83%D1 %81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BD %D0%B8%D0%BA_1879_143_sent_okt.pdf.

—————. [1880] 1968. Allgemeine Theorie der musikalischen Rhythmik seit J. S. Bach auf Grundlage der Antiken. Reprint, Dr. Martin Sändig oHG. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.a0014348676.

Wiehmayer, Theodor. 1917. Musikalische Rhythmik und Metrik. Heinrichshofen’s Verlag. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000006238384.

Yapova, Kristina [Япова, Кристиа]. 1999. Добри Христов и идеята за личността и общността [Dobri Hristov and the idea of the individual and the community]. Рива.

—————. 2002. Архивът на Добри Христов: Каталог [The archive of Dobri Hristov: Catalogue]. Матом.

—————. 2014. “Christov, Dobri.” Grove Music Online. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.14982.

Yeomans, Rory. 2019. “Racial Politics as a Multiethnic Pavilion: Yugoslavs, Dinarics, and the Search for a Synthetic Identity in the 1920s and 1930s.” In National Races: Transnational Power Struggles in the Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840–1945, ed. Richard McMahon, 295–338. University of Nebraska Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjsf4cz.14.

Yust, Jason. 2024. “Tonality and Racism.” Journal of Music Theory 68 (1): 59–88. https://doi.org/10.1215/00222909-10974705.

Zaharieva, Svetlana [Захариева, Светлана]. 1995. “Музкално-фолклорно изследване и национализъм: Поглед към миналото с мисъл за настоящето” [Musical-folkloric studies and nationalism: A look toward the past with thought about the present]. Българско музикознание 19 (1): 19–38.

—————. 2000. “Неравноделността: Национална крепост на българската музикално-фолклорна наука (върху текстове на Добри Христов)” [Unequally grouped meter: National fortress of Bulgarian musical-folkloric science (on texts by Dobri Hristov)]. Българско музикознание 24 (4): 87–108.

Footnotes

* This article stems from study of Hristov’s work that I undertook while preparing a translation for Music Theory in the Plural, a project led by Anna Yu Wang, Chris Stover, and Edwin Li (MTO Issue 30.4). Previous versions were presented at the Music Theory in the Plural conference in 2022 and at the 2023 meeting of the Society for Music Theory. The notes that accompany my translation of an excerpt from Hristov’s text in Goldberg 2024 anticipate in brief some of the observations in the present article. Readers should also refer to Clifton Boyd’s (2024) insightful commentary on the translation. I am grateful to the editors of Music Theory in the Plural for their support and for encouraging me to adopt a political perspective on Hristov’s writing; to Dave Fossum, Nevin Şahin, and two anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback about specific points in this article; and to Nataliya Rashkova for first recommending that I read Hristov.
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1. Influential texts in the study of nationalism include Gellner [1983] 2006, Anderson [1983] 2016, and Hobsbawm [1990] 2012. For an overview of the field, which also questions the prevailing emphasis on modernism, see Smith 2001. For an example of more recent work on the relationship between language and nationalism, see Kamusella 2021.
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2. See, e.g., Walden 2019, Fairley 2022, Peiris 2022, and Abrahamyan 2023, as discussed in [1.8] below.
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3. Except in quotations, I use the term unequal meter throughout the present article, even when discussing texts that employ a different term such as irregular meter. I intend unequal meter both as an abbreviation of the phrase meter with sequences of unequal durations and as a reference to a commonly used Bulgarian term for this type of meter, неравноделен, which could be translated as unequally divided or unequally grouped. On the translation and conception of this term, see Botusharov 2004. English-language writings on metric theory arguably have yet to offer a complete account of the nature of unequal meter and the range of forms it can take. For a theory that addresses many of the issues relevant to such an account, see London 2012.
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4. On the evolving tradition of Bulgarian folk ensembles that Ensemble Bulgare belongs to, see Buchanan 2006.
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5. For a biography of Hristov, see Krŭstev 1975. More recent biographical summaries include Botušarov 2000 and Yapova 2014.
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6. For an overview of canonic figures and events of the Vŭzrazhdane, see Pundeff [1969] 1994.
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7. When citing texts that were published posthumously, I provide in italics the likely year of writing, if known.
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8. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. The word народ, which I translate here and in subsequent passages as nation, could also be rendered as people. Buchanan (2006, 34) and Detchev (2009, par. 10) indicate that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this word was often understood in the former sense.
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9. Zaharieva (1995, 21–22) interprets the political perspective that Venelin articulates here as a departure from a Herderian “idealized-romantic” conception of nationalism.
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10. Cooley (2013, 356–57) distinguishes the field of musical folkloristics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the comparative musicology that originated in the late nineteenth century, claiming that even when folklorists engaged in cross-cultural comparison, a home nation remained at the center of their research, whereas comparative musicologists sought to generalize about all music. For a perspective on Bulgarian musical folkloristics in relation to comparative musicology as well as ethnomusicology and musical anthropology, see Botusharov 2024.
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11. On the system of Chrysanthine neumatic notation, which was introduced in the early nineteenth century, see Khalil 2009, 38–44. This notation was also used to transcribe Greek and Turkish folk music; see, e.g., Chaldæaki 2024.
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12. Compare Lyondev’s (1967, 171) transcription and my rhythmic annotation with Petŭr Dinev’s annotated transcription of the same melody in Katsarova 1967, 11.
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13. The program of cultural development that encompassed this initiative as well as Bulgaria’s recently established national museum, national library, and scholarly society, among other organizations, was largely crafted by Ivan Shishmanov. Shishmanov saw cultural institutions as a means of promoting a scientifically and humanistically informed manifestation of Bulgarian nationalism and of presenting Bulgaria to the world as a “cultured nation” (Daskalov 2005, 407).
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14. Shishmanov was also a musician; he played violin (Balareva 1967, 456) and wrote a dissertation on interval perception supervised by the pioneering German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (Schischmánow 1889).
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15. I address Hristov’s efforts to apply analysis of metric characteristics in determining ethnographic borders in [3.5] below.
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16. For a discussion of Shishmanov’s influence on the development of Bulgarian musical folkloristics, see Rashkova 1999.
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17. Exceptions to the pattern in Example 6 are a measure containing a total of four eighth notes under the first ending, a single measure of $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{2}{8}$ instead of two measures under the second ending and at the end of the transcription, and a measure with three eighth notes at the end of the second line when another measure of $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{2}{8}$ would have been expected. The regions where Konev collected Examples 5 and 6 are in present-day North Macedonia.
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18. Todorov does not discuss the fact that measures 4 and 10 in the first melody of Example 7 contain eight sixteenth notes, while many of the measures in the second melody contain only seven sixteenths. In the original transcription, the second melody includes several more phrases.
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19. For further discussion of the metric discrepancies among early Bulgarian transcriptions, see [5] below.
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20. On the early history of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, see Pundeff 1969. Velichkova (n.d.) provides information about the grant that Hristov received. Todorov (1981, 61–63) discusses several less extensive and less widely known attempts to codify Bulgarian rhythmic notation that preceded Hristov’s.
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21. To be clear, Hristov was not opposed to developments in audio technology; for instance, he called for the Bulgarian state institutions that supported ethnography to provide music folklorists with “the most sophisticated possible phonograph” to aid in transcription (1913, 5). Here Hristov appears to be taking a cue from Shishmanov, since the latter likewise singles out school and the military in the course of decrying but ultimately accepting the inevitability of cultural change in Bulgaria (Shishmanov 1889, 2–3, 63; see also Mishkova 2014, 22–26).
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22. Following Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 58, I have corrected engraving errors from the original version of the notation in Example 10.
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23. For an overview of Turkish music, see Bates 2011. Needless to say, Turkish folk music is far more extensive than Hristov believed; on its repertoire of meters, see Markoff 2001, 114–16. Hristov’s assertion that Turkish art music is borrowed from other cultures may be partly inspired by the perspective of some early twentieth-century Turkish nationalists, such as Ziya Gökalp, who rejected Ottoman music (see, e.g., Feldman 1991, 98–99). I am grateful to Dave Fossum for drawing my attention to this possibility.
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24. Also see Buchanan 1996, 212–17, on the extent and nature of the rejection of Turkish elements in Bulgarian culture. The full version of Ensemble Bulgare’s The Eighth Wonder also depicts this perspective: upon learning that Bartók is traveling to Istanbul, Bourchier scoffs, “Why would a young man like you waste his time going there?” (Dimitrov 2016a).
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25. A more common translation of the word племенен, which I have translated here as racial, is tribal. However, Detchev (2009, par. 24) notes that nineteenth-century Bulgarian authors often used племе when translating the word race into Bulgarian, and this meaning is consistent with the context of the quoted phrase insofar as Hristov goes on to allude to the physiognomy of groups of people that supposedly contributed to the Bulgarian type. Here Hristov may again be following Shishmanov, who reviews work on skull measurements by anthropologists including Paul Broca to conclude a study of the Proto-Bulgarians (Shishmanov 1900, 748–53; see Detchev 2009, pars. 38–39).
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26. My dating of posthumously published writings by Hristov is informed by Yapova’s (2002) notes about the collection of Hristov’s manuscripts held by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. When a likely date cannot be identified, only the year of publication is listed. Hristov 1967a appears to have been written during the first half of the 1930s (Yapova 2002, 62, 68).
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27. Hristov (1913, 23) cites an unspecified “printed notated collection of Turkish songs” as the source for at least one of his examples.
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28. According to Yapova (Yapova 2002, 56), the revised manuscript consists of a printed copy of the 1913 study with handwritten changes and additions. Based on comparison with other texts, Krŭstev (1967b, 8n, 345n11) suggests that most of the revisions were made after 1928. Although this conclusion is plausible, I refer to the manuscript by the year that appears in a note in the text itself and include that year in citations (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 94). When quoting passages that are identical in the 1913 and 1925 versions of the study, I cite the earlier version. Some of the passages from the 1925 version that I quote in translation in the present article also appear in Goldberg 2024.
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29. On the Delphic paeans and the history of their reconstruction, see Pöhlmann and West 2001, 62–85. For a summary biography of Pachtikos, who published a collection of Greek folk songs that Hristov also cites, see Romanou 2018.
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30. Krŭstev (1967b, 15) also notes that Hristov’s library included a heavily annotated copy of Melgunov’s book.
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31. Indeed, in another essay, Hristov (1967b, 199–200) cites Melgunov and Westphal’s work as the basis for “[his] claim that the Aristoxenian theory of meters finds a living practice in our music . . . which in all likelihood is a legacy from that remote time (2500 years ago).”
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32. The argument I have outlined here, that Bulgarian and ancient Greek music share a common ancestor, appears to be Hristov’s mature position on the relationship between the two musics. His statements on the subject vary, however, ranging from the claim that ancient Greece was a direct part of a line of musical transmission from older cultures to Bulgaria (Hristov [1905] 1970​, 31) to denial that Bulgarian music’s similarities with ancient Greek or Arabic music have any historical basis at all (Hristov 1921, 189). Considering that Hristov’s writings span several decades and some of them appear to be incomplete drafts, such inconsistencies probably should not be judged too harshly.
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33. Hristov’s allusion to Orpheus invokes another ancient culture that Bulgarian nationalists laid claim to at times, as some ancient Greek sources identify Orpheus as Thracian, and the region of Thrace lies partly within the borders of present-day Bulgaria; see Marinov 2015, 75–87.
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34. In some respects, Hristov’s position that the value of Bulgarian music stems partly from its retention of “primitive” characteristics resembles a line of argument that nationalists of various affiliations began applying to their preferred folk musics more than a century earlier, inspired by passages such as Charles Burney’s speculation regarding a supposedly ancient and natural pentatonic scale (Gelbart 2007, 111–52). Indeed, in a pedagogical exposition of scales, Hristov (1921, 35–36) echoes the association of the pentatonic scale with both Chinese and Scottish music that Burney established, and asserts that this scale was the tonal basis for all music during the oldest era of musical prehistory. See also Boyd’s (2024, [5]) discussion of Hristov’s description of Bulgarian music as “primitive.”
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35. For a summary of Westphal’s treatise, see Smither 1960, 143–85. On Aristoxenus’s rhythmic theory, see Rowell 1979 and Gibson 2005.
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36. Compare Melgunov’s phrase “первымъ, основным временемъ” (Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907, 5) with Hristov’s “основен (първичен) елемент” (Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 37). Later in the sentence Hristov also uses the word време in place of елемент.
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37. A version of the same chart appears in Melgunov, Korsh, and Kashkin 1907, 45.
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38. The diagrams shown in Example 17 are accompanied by similar representations of five- and seven-beat meters with the time signatures $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{5}{8}$, $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{15}{16}$, $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{15}{8}$, $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{7}{8}$, $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{21}{16}$, and $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{21}{8}$. Wiehmayer’s treatise draws to some extent on Westphal’s work. For a summary, see Smither 1960, 254–290. Mirka (2021, 32–34, 83–85) also discusses components of Wiehmayer’s theory.
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39. For discussion of Panchev’s arguments, see Motsev 1949, 125–28, and Todorov 1981, 69. On Riemann’s metric theory, see Caplin 2012; on his attempts to address music outside of the European classical tradition, see Gelbart and Rehding 2011 and Martin 2022, 171–74.
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40. See also Buchanan’s (2006, 37–39) description of striving for full acceptance into Europe as a persistent theme of Bulgarian politics and identity. In his responses to Panchev, Hristov ([1931b] 1967​​​​​​; 1967b) counters the accusation of ignorance by surveying recent German, Russian, French, and Czech rhythmic theories and mentioning numerous historical theorists.
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41. Hristov ([1925a] 1967​, 33) gestures toward this international relevance in the first paragraph of the introduction to the 1925 version of his study of meter.
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42. Hristov’s patriotic songs include “Ohrid sin” (“Ohrid Blue,” 1913) and “Da slavim egeiskiya kedŭr” (“Let’s Praise the Aegean Cedar,” 1933), which refer to Lake Ohrid in present-day North Macedonia and the Aegean shore of Thrace in present-day Greece. His symphonic poem Tutrakanska epopeya (Tutrakan Epic, 1917) celebrates the Bulgarian and German victory in World War I that captured from Romania the town of Tutrakan in the Dobrudja region, the southern part of which changed hands between Bulgaria and Romania several times during Hristov’s life. On these and other nationalistic compositions by Hristov, see Mangova 2005, 227–29. Hristov’s narrative program from Tutrakanska epopeya is quoted in Krŭstev 1975, 160.
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43. The character representing James Bourchier in The Eighth Wonder expresses the same belief about Macedonian music and the Macedonian region. When Bourchier begins to describe Macedonian music, Bartók asks, “Macedonia? I thought we were talking about Bulgaria,” to which Bourchier sternly replies, “Macedonia is a part of Bulgaria, young man, just like any of the other provinces,” going on to blame the Western powers for dividing up Bulgarian territory (Dimitrov 2016a). This position is consistent with the historical Bourchier’s views; see, e.g., Bourchier 1920.
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44. Hristov (Hristov [1930a] 1967​​​, 123) faults several Serbian composers and musicologists, including Stevan Mokranjac, Kosta Manojlović, and Vladimir Đorđević, for transcribing Macedonian music inaccurately. On transcriptions of Macedonian music by these three figures, see Atanasovski 2012, Atanasovski 2017, and Ranković 2020.
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45. In this regard the stakes, motivation, and rhetoric of Hristov’s work conform to the dynamics of Eastern European nationalist ethnography as characterized by Ernest Gellner (1998, 131–32; see also Zaharieva 2000, 88–89), who portrays these dynamics in a conflict between the fictional nations of Ruritania and Bragadoccia. While this channeling of imaginary peoples is an evocative technique for making his point, Gellner’s flippancy is potentially offensive in light of the real conflicts that nationalist ethnography often relates to.
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46. Zaharieva (2000) and Peters (2003) offer differing perspectives on Bulgarian and Serbian polemics about meter. Zaharieva (2000) characterizes Hristov’s nationalism as “defensive,” in contrast with the nationalism of his Serbian opponents, which she regards as “chauvinis[tic]” and associates with Serbian nationalism during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. Peters (2003) concludes that neither Bulgarian nor Serbian folklorists of the early twentieth century were entirely correct, insofar as the characteristics of Macedonian music do not clearly delineate an exclusionary ethnic identity, but rather reflect elements of shared cultural identity. See also Marinov’s (2013) position on the continuity of Bulgarian, Serbian, and Macedonian languages.
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47. Hristov ([1921] 1970​​, 41) refers to the song “I az byah edna na maika” as “well known.” A version of the melody transcribed in 1948 in Kotel (Dolapchiev 1948) matches Hristov’s notation in $\genfrac{}{}{0ex}{}{7}{16}$ and is accompanied by a note attributing the lyrics to the Bulgarian poet, folklorist, and politician Petko Slaveikov. Petkova-Marchevska (2014, 99) identifies the piece “Bugarske narodne pesme” for men’s choir, published in 1896, as the arrangement by Marinković that Hristov quotes.
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48. In Example 19, I have followed Hristov [1925a] 1967​, 69, in correcting engraving errors from the notation in the 1913 version of the text.
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49. Hristov’s formatting in Example 22 indicates that he interprets all three transcriptions with a 4+3+4 grouping.
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50. Some of the topics that Hristov added to his study of meter also appear in his later writings on Bulgarian folk music (e.g., Hristov 1928; [1931] 1970​​​​; [1933] 1970​​​​​​).
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51. On Bulgarian discourse about race in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Detchev 2009, Promitzer 2006, Promitzer 2010, and Todorova 1995, 84–85.
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52. As is well known, narratives of the Aryan descent of Europeans were often aligned with racist ideology in the service of national interests, configuring tropes about supposedly inherent characteristics and dispositions of particular groups of people in various ways depending on the author’s agenda (see Pereltsvaig 2015, 19–29; McMahon 2019).
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53. An argument to this effect was put forward in Serbia in the first decades of the twentieth century by the anthropologist Niko Županić, who posited that despite their mixed racial background, south Slavs were “more Aryan” than were other groups of people from southern Europe (Promitzer 2010, 163; Yeomans 2019, 302–12). This position would potentially have put Hristov at odds with the tendency among some writers in interwar Bulgaria to downplay the Slavic component of Bulgarian ancestry (Iliev 1998, 7–8), but Hristov’s characterization of other Slavic peoples as having lost a sense of unequal meter that Bulgarians still possess (see [3.5] above) seems to imply that he viewed Slavic ethnicity as a substantial component of Bulgarian identity. On anti-urban tropes in racial science, see McMahon 2019, 53. In Bulgaria, the racial hygienist Stefan Konsulov advocated for state control of procreation to reverse the degeneration of the Bulgarian nation that he believed had been fostered by urban culture (Promitzer 2006, 226–31). As noted in [3.3.6] above, Hristov’s concerns about the decline of Bulgarian folk music likewise align with an urban–rural divide, but since Konsulov’s ideas were not widely popular during the 1920s (Promitzer 2006, 231), Hristov may not have been aware of them.
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54. For discussion of some of the differences among twentieth-century Bulgarian metric theories, see Vlaeva 2008 and Ognenska 2003.
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55. See, e.g., Hristov, Radev, and Mirchev 1911, 40–42, which includes a brief section on the meters of common Bulgarian folk dances, and Hristov 1921.
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56. On the context and accuracy of Bartók’s engagement with Bulgarian meter, see Rice 2000 and Buchanan 2000.
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57. A later essay on unequal meter by Bulgarian folklorist Todor Dzhidzhev can be read as a retort to Brăiloiu, in that Dzhidzhev (1981, 30–66, 82) discusses Romanian unequal meters at length and concludes that they derive from interactions with Bulgarian music.
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58. In recent decades, a considerable amount of research has sought to address these types of exclusions. For example, on the contributions of Romani musicians to Bulgarian music and the discrimination that Roma continue to face, see Peycheva 1999, Peycheva and Dimov 2002, and Silverman 2012.
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59. For more on this point, see Goldberg 2020, Bernacki 2023, and Boyd 2024, [6].
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60. On the impact on Todorov’s work of ideological factors from the period after Hristov’s lifetime, see Kumichin 2014.
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61. On Hristov’s work in these areas, see, e.g., Toncheva 2005 and Yapova 1999.
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62. According to Krŭstev (1975, 20), Hristov’s mother was Gagauz. For more information about the multi-ethic environment that Hristov grew up in, see Kukushev (2005).
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