The Private Canon: "Ovdoviala Lissitchkata"

This post is part of a series.

The provenance of the mid-1980s world music sensation Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares is somewhat sketchy—apparently a couple of Swiss musicologists began crossing the Iron Curtain to make recordings of the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir beginning in the 1950s, leading to a labor-of-love compilation record released in 1975, later snapped up by a London label, and the rest is history. As the words "state," "television," and "choir" may suggest, these were hardly folk field recordings of the sort Bartók or Harry Smith undertook; instead what they captured, which was no less exotic to Western ears than Balkan shepherds' songs, was a sort of state-approved nationalist modernism, with arrangements of traditional Bulgarian music by composer Filip Kutev, which emphasized the music's native dissonances as much as its tunefulness. The results were arguably closer to Bartók's original concert music than to his folk transcriptions.

The most famous track from the first volume, "Pritouritze Planinata,", is uncharacteristic of the rest in that it doesn't feature the full women's chorus, and instead includes an orchestral accompaniment. And instead of highlighting the signature Bulgarian-chorus sound—voices in tight major-second harmony—"Pritouritze" is a case study in milking as much drama as possible from a single plaintive note, whether wrung out of soloist Stefka Sabotinova or the pan-flutish sounds of a Thracian kaval. Unsurprisingly, its lyrics tell a horrifying tale of a deadly mountain collapse, and answers the eternal question of who will mourn the loss of two young men's lives more, a lover or a mother (take a guess).

It was another uncharacteristic track with a deathly theme on Le Mystère's Vol. 2 that became my other favorite from these collections. "Ovdoviala Lissitchkata" translates roughly as "The vixen has been widowed" or "The fox has lost her cubs," and indeed its lyrics tell another sad tale of senseless grief. But here they fly by at a steady clip, rendered with intense concentration in close harmony among a small group of vocalists, trading off with a fierce accordion part. It's the only track on any of these collections that might be considered a bop, but it's not just the adrenaline-pumping tempo that works on me: It's also the not-so-subtle contrast between the hurtling minor-key fury of the accordion figure and the tamped-down major-key embrace of the vocals, as if a small group of women—or fox cubs—has huddled for warmth against an unforgiving blizzard. The chill wind gets the fatal last word, of course, but not before the amber glow of the vocals has warmed us too.