David Salkowski

This project analyzes the relationship between social modernization and aesthetic modernism in interwar Bulgaria by considering music as a point of integration between structure and subjectivity. The upheavals of the 1920s-1930s in the newly-sovereign nation evince multiple paths to modernity, from communism to agrarianism to fascism. I argue that the sounds of this era, from urban popular music to modernist chamber music to workers’ songs, at once aesthetically refract these as-yet-undetermined paths of modernity and serve as the site for the construction of an urban public sphere. While Bulgarian folk and popular music have long been the subject of international scholarly inquiry, and Bulgarian art music has contributed to the European canon, this will be the first study to consider these threads together at a moment when such distinctions were fluid and still forming. “The Social Life of Music in Interwar Bulgaria” will draw upon archival sources in Sofia to connect the vibrant modernist milieu to the incipient civic life of the capital. In a largely agrarian, fairly egalitarian country with an ambiguous relationship both to global capital and international aesthetic trends, music illuminates the porous boundary between the modernist “coterie” and the “crowd” of modern mass culture.