Българският пикник в снимки 

Bring the family to Troy Daze and experience all family-friendly fun! Troy Daze is located at the Troy Civic Center (3425 Civic Center Drive, Troy, MI 48083).

Чудна градина!  

Out on November 1st, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming release of Sound Portraits from Bulgaria: A Journey to a Vanished World, an astounding collection of traditional Bulgarian singing and playing, recorded in 1966-1979 by documentarian and musicologist Martin Koenig. At age 27, Koenig arrived in Bulgaria for the first time with letters of recommendation from Alan Lomax and Margaret Mead, determined to study the folk dances of rural communities throughout the country. As an introduction to this music, we've put together a sampler Dances of Sound Portraits from Bulgaria which highlights many different dances Koenig encountered and recorded while he was travelling. 

As he traveled, absorbing the culture and speaking with the people he encountered, Koenig became captivated by the earthy and ancient, yet very much alive, music he heard all around him. He recorded the music he was exposed to, and took photographs of not only dancers, but the village singers and musicians as well as those going about their daily lives around these hotbeds of creative expression. He made multiple trips to Bulgaria over a 13-year period, preserving the sounds of a way of life that has largely vanished due to industrialization, technological shifts, and emigration, telling the story of a rich rural lifestyle that was changing rapidly during the middle of the last century. 

Koenig writes in his introductory essay, this music and culture “should not be forgotten, as it reveals a dimension of strength and beauty in the human spirit that we, in our longing, may not even know we are missing.” Much of this music went unheard for over 50 years, but now Smithsonian Folkways is sharing it with the world. The collection is housed in a large format art book featuring intimate and candid photographs taken during his travels that chronicle the beauty and complexity of life for the musicians, dancers, and artisans he met, as well as recollections by Koenig, and notes on the music by several leading American and Bulgarian scholars in both English and Bulgarian. We've been working hard to make this collection as beautiful as can be, and we can't wait to share it with you. 
 
The reedy bagpipes, ecstatic and drone-centric singing, and odd-metered rapid-fire dances featured on Sound Portraits from Bulgaria paint a vivid picture of a multi-faceted culture that sat at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.  One piece included here, recorded by Koenig and his colleague Ethel Raim in a classroom in downtown Smolyan in 1968, is the haunting folk tune “Izlel e Delyu haidutin” as sung by Valya Balkanska. In 1977 this recording was chosen by Carl Sagan to be included on the famed Golden Record that sits inside the Voyager spacecraft, currently being hurdled at forty-thousand miles per hour outside our solar system.  

Pre-order your copy today.