...in the town square of Koprivshtitsa (копривщица), Bulgaria this past August. I am in that crowd somewhere. I've been inexplicably nostalgic and especially nerdy about Balkan music since performing that Macedonian song on Monday. It's strange. It must be a part of processing and conceiving new ideas. I think I'm trying to figure out how something as specialized and obscure as Balkan music could fit into a social art project. Of course, the broad set of music denoted by the blanket term "Balkan music" usually isn't specialized and obscure to the local people it belongs to-- my favorite music from the Balkans is mostly old, old, old folk music (although there are communist songs, Eastern classical pieces, pop and Arabesque, among others). But it all is non-Western, to say the least, and it's interesting to me that a fair number of Americans have become similarly obsessed with the music and traditions of countries as far away as Albania, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia, Romania, Mali, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Tuva, Indonesia, etc. etc. etc.
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