A ROMA MUSICIAN FROM BULGARIA: BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL By Lozanka Peycheva, Dr. Sc. Institute of Folklore, BAS

The musician who is object of this research is called Samir Kurtov. He shows us how new, unusual sound localizations of the globally spread art music can happen through its usage in the global mobile communications. I know Samir since 1990. A picture of him is on the cover of a book on zurna tradition in south-west Bulgaria that Ventsy Dimov and I wrote some years ago [Peycheva&Dimov, 2002]. With this text I am examining Samir’s place and role in today’s situation. It is an attempt to get closer to the perimeter and the essence of his movements between the local and the global. In ethnomusicology we have the opinion that the musical phenomena, experienced by the individual musician are interesting, as they offer a perspective that helps us understand the musical culture that has created them. According to Bruno Nettl, the individual musician is both agent and recipient of change, and the study of individuals also tells us how they see themselves in their own culture, and how they represent themselves [Nettl, 2005:174, 178]. As Zigmunt Bauman says, the life of modern people is often like a wandering through space and time, and their actions and doings tend to be fragmented, episodic and without consequences [Bauman, 2000:352-353, 371]. Such is the life of Samir Kurtov from Kavrakirovo village in the Petrich region. He is in constant movement, but he never feels that he has achieved his goal in life. For him, almost every place is just a temporary station, almost each communication is episodic and fragmented. The life in which Samir expands his creative energy and professional experience is hard and complex. He has his measures of suffering and dissatisfaction. He is often pierced by the bitterness of many frustrations. In spite of all the difficulties, however, Samir has a remarkable personal authority and emanation. He bears the statute of a great master, the best zurna player in Southwestern Bulgaria, with enviable presence and role in the local life and the local cultural forms, but at the same time the power of his gift has separated him in a way from his local environment.

1

PROFILE A biographical description of Samir Kurtov presents him as a professional musician of Gypsy origin (from the group of Turkish Gypsies), zurna player, born in 1971 in Kavrakirovo village, Petrich region (Bulgaria) [Peycheva&Dimov, 2002]. Samir Kurtov lives and develops his talents, in the boundaries of this spatially limited situation, where locality is dominant. And locality, as Arjun Appadurai says [Appadurai, 2006:271] develops in different way as an aspect or value, as a property of the social life. As far as he is an active person, who belongs to the situated community of relatives, neighbors, friends and foes, Samir Kurtov is a “local subject” (Appadurai). Although socialized and localized in the Kavrakirovo village, Samir has the energy and talents that pull him out of the frames of the local community and lay the foundations for the expansion of his individual boundaries beyond the inherited origin. The zurna player is bearer of bright individual features – original personality; talent and creativeness; will to overcome the technical problems, that the zurna makes him face; ability to penetrate in the deep worlds of the music and devote himself intensively; passion for development; good instinct for realization. All this helps him to act sup-locally – often invited to perform away from Kavrakirovo, Samir transfers his locality in a “global” world. He regularly goes in and out of Bulgaria, his professional possibilities are expanding with his inclusions in different places and sectors of the contemporary cultural reproduction (sages, media, amateur creativity, family feasts).

THE INSTITUTIONS According to Douglas North the main purpose of institutions in a society is to lessen the indefiniteness, by laying the foundations of a stable structure of human relations [North, 2000:16]. There are no well established specialized institutions to back up Samir, by imposing influence on the conditions of his professional collaborations and realizations. Samir’s “working place” and “office” are in his very home. Only the traditional institutions of family and lineage support him and the elemental forces of his natural musical gift. Therefore, Samir’s professional arrangements are temporary casual, unpredictable, slipping out of preliminary planning and ordering. He is often awaken in the midst of night by “clients”, stimulated by the desire to get intoxicated and hypnotized by the zurna music. This happens, because there are no agencies to

2

provide protection of the musician’s personal space and act as a mediator, offering Samir’s musical services. In such occasions, Samir follow a bunch of simple rules: to feel and respect the client’s wishes, to be “officially” patient, to understand the public [Peycheva&Dimon, 2002:7879]. These rules come out of his personal experience and help him control his role in the unforeseen affecting situations. They are his tool for dealing with unpredictable emotions, the whims of his clients, which he has to meet because of his professional statute.

THE CONTEXTS The transformation of the “local” Samir into a “cosmopolitan” includes the establishment of his presence as professional musician in places and situations, which are beyond the local boundaries of Kavrakirovo village. The typical real projections that give us a picture of the pre-modulation of local worlds into cosmopolitan scenarios and of the constant change of perspective from local to global contexts are related to: 1) playing outside the territory of Bulgaria in Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia; 2) sound-recording projection by Samir’s music in the musical industry; 3) theoretical exhibition – our books and articles, our role in his career and his out-coming of the rural and local tradition; 4) virtual representation of Samir and his world in an anthropologically analyzing representation of experts from Japan; 5) virtual traces and images of Samir in Internet. With his various activities, Samir gets engaged with contexts, which go beyond the existing boundaries of the local environment and community. At the same time, the contextcreating actions of the zurna player, support his locality, because he is bound by a closed, chronically poor local environment and the local lifestyle is part of his existence. The musician identifies himself with the social life and ideology of the situated community, with the emotional structure and communal spirit of the local, while he constantly gets out of them and overcomes them by his real sporadic movements between different cultural spaces and by the symbol worlds of trans-local cultural industries (musical, media). In this way, Samir’s actions create his lifeexperiences which Arjun Appadurai defines as inter-contextual, noting that a good theory of globalization from socio-cultural point of view would probably need something that we don’t have at present – a good theory of the inter-contextual relations [Apparudai, 2006:285].

3

THE COMMUNICATIONS Although they are an established guild, the zurna players from Southwest Bulgaria have no static and stable formations, but on the way to the inevitable professional collaborations, they have built up a network of versatile communications and relationships. In the little world of zurna players, which share common professional values and criteria, Samir is distinguished with his individual glory and influence. Samir has succeeded to establish himself among the other zurna players from Southwestern Bulgaria and his audiences, as “the best” musician in the local-dialect trajectories of Pirin Macedonia, as the one, who has “discovered the secret of zurna”. Samir is the figure that is distinguished from the other zurna players as a moving core, because of his talents and abilities for virtuoso performance, with his constant dramatic searches and original inventions in the labyrinths of zurna music. Entangled in a complex set of relationships, Samir has built up various forms of collaboration with other zurna players. He plays both in local partnerships with his father, uncle, cousins and mates, and in trans-local experiments with zurna players from Greece and Turkey. In the context of competitive professional practice the other zurna players are very sensitive to Samir’s achievements. Under the power of his mighty influence, they find new capabilities of the zurna instrument by learning from him, copying his newly invented techniques and secrets of zurna playing. However, they still sometimes dispute about his pretence to be the first, and have tendencies in their measures.

THE MUSIC AS BUSINESS In Samir’s life there is no guaranteed existence-minimum, which makes him play also for economical reasons. According to the norms of the local zurna tradition, Samir is a professional musician, who can be hired by clients. In the time of global localities, such autonomic professional form is defined by Ulrich Beck as “the model of self-hirer”. Beck says that selfhiring needs a strong identifying of oneself with both the needs of the others and the labor, which leads to constant labor on oneself and for the others [Beck, 2002:229-230]. As a “contractor for himself”, or “self-hired contractor” [Douglas, 2004:56] Samir manages his own self and his own working abilities. In this way he becomes the autonomic creator and inventor of his professional life, he works for the profit, not just to earn his wage.

4

For Samir music is a specific business, which brings him goods – the service that the zurna player offers earns him his living. Therefore it is natural, that for the good of his musical business, Samir would prefer to play for those clients that offer the best price for his musician labor.

VOCATION AND IDENTITY Samir’s vocation is to be devoted to the local zurna musical tradition of Southwestern Bulgaria. Such supremacy of the communal tradition in an individual’s life is argumented by Zigmunt Bauman: In order to know what we are, to understand ourselves, we should follow and consciously embrace this tradition, in which each of us has been born; and to remain ourselves, to keep our identity untouched and impenetrable, we should support that tradition with our whole heart [Bauman, 2000:363]. At the same time, Samir’s professional routes and movements require the breaking of relations with the inherited local forms of life, where there is still some stability of the cultural space. Moved by the urge of his unique gift, Samir seeks to set his potential free, and gain independence from the known understandings of reality, by running away from the certain, static, limited, isolated and contained in its local limits world. Samir’s life is a center of intensive tension, in the amplitudes between freedom of choice, the chance to be as you want to be, and the lonely uncertainty of the rightfulness of a choice among all possibilities. The musician has built up his own personal identity, in which the dominant factor is the professional, rather than ethnical self-identity. He believes that he is the best zurna player, not only in Kavrakirovo village, but also in Southwestern Bulgaria. The basis for this comes not just from his deep feeling for the power of his gift, but also from the acknowledgement by all other zurna players from the region. Those players, whom I have spoken to, would answer to my question “Who is the best zurna master among you?” with the well-known name: “Samir”. Samir’s leadership in mastery, his identity of elevated and notorious musician are socially acknowledged and respected in all three micro-regions of zurna tradition in SouthWestern Bulgaria – Petrich, Razlog and Gotze Deltchev regions. The inner confidence in the power of his talents communicate with Samir’s clearly explicit confidence that he is a valued musician in other countries as well (he has admirers in Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Finland, USA, Japan).

5

In fact, Samir constructs his individual identity as part of the local group of zurna players in Kavrakirovo, but also as someone above their level, by the power of his individual talents. He is at the same time close to and distanced from his musician partners. Close, because he needs them to be able to reliably and creatively interpret his inherited musical style in his birth environment. Distanced, because the music vibrates in him with greater intensity than in his partners. Since the time that we first met, in 1990, I’ve always had the sharp feeling that Samir is an exceptionally sensitive musical medium. It is a fact that during our many talks in these years, he has passionately been focusing mainly on the music, and has astonished me with his insatiable desire to talk that much about music only. He has told me about specific technical problems, which he has overcome, in the mastering of the instrument, about the inheriting and innovating of the local style, about the inevitable repertoire changes in the zurna music. From our earliest talks come some phrases that express his deep, integral inner feeling of music: 1) “Music is my disease.”; 2) “I can’t sleep because of music. I would often dream of music and wake up to play it.”; 3) “Nothing attracts me more than the music.” This strong feeling of unusual intensive emotional devotion to music has always been present in Samir’s life and professional experience. It is constantly fed up and has grown into his way to feel the meaning of life.

CONCLUSION After a series of many living and professional events, after their experiencing and comprehension by Samir, it still seems that he cannot express the fullness of the energy of happiness, which the musician has experienced in his various intoxicating contacts with different audiences. Although he realizes his power to form and model the experiences of his audiences and leave strong traces in their emotional memory, Samir feels under-valued and outcast by some levels of the institutionalized public media discourse. In the musician’s tales, one can see the pain of his limited local position in the community/society pyramid and the impossibility to localize himself steadily in the frames of the normative system of Kavrakirovo village. On the other hand he cannot reach the ideal image, corresponding to his vocation to be a musician. In the dynamics of the pulsations between the inner and outer, between the local and global, one’s own and the other’s, faith and disbelief, poorness and richness, dependence and

6

independence, Samir Kurtov seeks and finds places and forms of expression for his individuality, creative sensitivity and unique musical gift.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun. 2006. Svobodnata modernost: kulturni izmerenija na globalizacijata. [Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization]. Sofia: LIK. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Givot vyv fragmenti. [Life in Fragments]. Sofia: LIK Beck, Ulrich. 2002. Shto e globalizacija? Zabludite na globalizma – otgovori na globalizacijata. [What is Globalization?…]. Sofia: Kritika I Humanizym. Douglas, Mary. 2004. Kak misljat instituciite. [How Institutions Think]. Sofia: “41 Т” ЕООD. Nettl, Bruno. 2005. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Conepts. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. North, Douglas. 2000. Institucii, institucionalna promjana I ikonomicheski rezultati. [Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance]. Sofia: LIK. Peycheva, Lozanka&Ventsislav Dimov. 2002. The Zurna Tradition in Southwest Bulgaria. Sofia: Bulgarian Musicology, Researches.

7