Customer Reviews

May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

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If you have the slightest interest in music, Eastern Europe in transition, and intellectual thought, then you owe it to yourself to read this book. Proper obeisance is made to the academic gods - Ricoeur, Clifford, Bourdieu, Geertz, Gadamer and the rest - and the references are sincere and thoughtful. But most of all you will be enthralled by Rice's personal account of his discovery of Bulgarian music, and of the lives of a wonderful couple who perform that music and became not just his 'informants' but his friends, indeed his family. The book is personal, revelatory, and stimulating. If only all musical scholarship were this good!

Rice makes reading an ethnography a pleasure. All ethnomusicologists seeking to undertake their own writing project ought to read this book first. His accounts about studying with Kostadin make you feel like you were there learning the gaida, too. Rice's model makes a good case for learning an instrument while conducting fieldwork. Particulary insightful is the author's interpretation of the emic/etic distinction as it relates to the ethnomusicologist.