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 I
have been singing since before I can remember, or
at
least, so my mother tells me; when I was still a baby in the crib she
recalls how I would sing myself to sleep every single night, rocking
back and forth to my own music, the closest thing to dancing my toddler
body could muster. In the morning my parents would find that my crib had
rolled clear across the room due to my musical
exertions. Hoping to that my musical enthusiasm would eventually lead
to more than a scratched-up floor, my parents enrolled me in piano
lessons when I was in first grade. While I played piano for years,
singing remained my true passion, and I eventually ditched those
Clementi sonatinas my piano teacher had picked out for me, replacing
them with a book of Duke Ellington standards arranged for piano, which
I, having never actually heard recorded versions, sang at the top of my
lungs with all the honky abandon of a white kid from Minnesota trying to
sing jazz.
After a stint as the singer in a punk rock band in high school, as an
undergraduate at Yale University I finally found my true musical
calling. Because I was studying Russian language, I decided to join the
Yale Slavic Chorus, a women’s a cappella group that sang folk music from
all over Eastern Europe. From the instant I heard the first powerful
sound of Le Mystere des voix bulgares, I fell completely and
irrevocably in love with Bulgarian folk music. Depsite admonitions by
well-meaning choral teachers during my younger years, I always had sung
with a chest voice, avoiding the wimpy falsetto so favored by Western
singers; thus when I heard the powerful belting of Bulgarian divas, my
entire being immediately resonated: this was the music I was
meant to sing! My love for Bulgarian folk music grew into an obsession,
as I abandoned Russian language in favor of Bulgarian and feverishly
spent hours listening to any and all recordings of Bulgarian folk music
that I could get my hands on. After a fairytale initial trip to
Bulgaria in 1995, where I went to and sang at the Koprivshtitsa
festival, I decided that it was absolutely imperative that I spend more
time in this country. Thus, after graduating from Yale, I spent a year
as a Fulbright/IIE scholar studying Bulgarian philology in 1996-1997 and
taking private music lessons from folk singers in Sofia and Plovdiv.
After returning to the U.S. in 1997 and getting my Master's degree in
linguistics from UCLA in 2000, I decided that Bulgarian music, which had
become such a central part of my life, could no longer remain peripheral
to my academic studies. Music was gradually taking over my personal and
professional life; I was directing the women's Bulgarian choir "SuperDevoiche"
at UCLA, as well as singing in a Balkan band "Baksheesh Boys". Thus, I transferred to the
department of ethnomusicology, where I received my Master’s degree in
2002 and where I had the honor to singing study intensively with the
famous Bulgarian folk singer Tzvetanka Varimezova. In 2005, I spent
another year in Bulgaria, this time studying at the Academy for Music,
Dance and Visual Arts in Plovdiv, doing research for my doctoral
dissertation on Bulgarian folk singing as a Fulbright Hays fellow under
the tutelage of folk singer and pedagogue Dr. Svetla Stanilova. Having
learned the requisite campfire chords on guitar as a teenager, I decided
to try learning tambura; I had the pleasure of studying intensively with
tambura master Vlado Vladimirov at AMTII-Plovdiv.
During my year of study, I met Ivan Hristov and Petur Chuhov at a party
in Sofia, where they struck up a jam session. Their combination of folk
and rock immediately attracted both the folklorist and the head banger
in me; I had always secretly dreamed of uniting my two favorite musical
styles, Bulgarian folk and American rock, but was unable to find willing
accomplices for such a project among the folkie-purists in the American
Balkan scene. I enthusiastically joined in Ivan and Pesho’s jam session,
and we have been playing together ever since. After completing my year
of study in Plovdiv, I have remained in Bulgaria to continue playing
music with Gologan and to write my dissertation, which should be
completed in 2007.
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