ABSTRACT
It was a warm, summer, Thursday night. I turned on the TV and heard the hosts of Music Idol exclaim: ‘Here she is: Neveeeenaaaaaah Tconeva!’, as a young brunette appeared from back stage smiling at the camera in close-up. She proceeded towards centre stage accompanied by the musical backdrop of a trumpet trio carefully noodling around a short melodic pattern reminiscent of an intro to a traditional dance tune. The camera switched to a wider view and revealed a larger brass band and a small percussive unit. The audience applause died out and, holding the wireless microphone near her mouth, the girl began singing. ‘I-i-i-if I-ai-ai-ai, shuud stai-ai-ai,’ she warbled around the vowels of the familiar English words to the 80s hit ballad ‘I Will Always Love You.’ A few more lines of text came through the television set and, finally, Nevena reached the quintessential moment of the song’s chorus. ‘And, Ai, ai, ai, ai, ai, ai’ revealing a wide vocal vibrato characteristic of Bulgarian tradition singing, ‘will always lav ou,’ she continued with a sloppy English pronunciation. The background brass band accompaniment began to swing in the duple rhythms familiar to most Bulgarians as kouchek, and Nevena slowly swung her hips to the rhythm. The audience, until then quietly concentrating on the introductory section of the song, jumped off their seats and followed her lead with the same hip movement and hands in the air. As I sat comfortably in my parents’ home in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, glued to the TV screen as this performance went on, I thought that this was both the most fascinating and most ridiculous musical arrangement I had ever heard.
