In returning to Bulgaria after 15 years abroad, Biliana Voutchkova brought more with her than just her talent on the violin. She brought a new type of music to the stage of the country that knew her as a child.
New music, as she calls it, is her personal strength, and to be able to take this and present it to people who have never had the chance to hear it is what spurs her on. Also called experimental music or extended technique, the genre started about 100 years ago, and could be considered the classical music of 300 years from now.
It uses the same instruments – string, percussion, wind – but presents them in a completely different manner, somewhat unconventional, and possibly somewhat subversive to the traditional ear. Such names as John Cage, George Crumb, Tan Dun and Frances-Marie Uitti would figure among the better known.
For Voutchkova, this started after she received a Jasha Heifetz Violin Scholarship to the University of Southern California at age 19 in 1991. She left her home town of Sofia, and moved to start a new life.
“I left because I felt like I had reached the top of what I could achieve here (in Bulgaria),” she says to The Sofia Echo. “I was 19, I wanted more than I could get here musically. There was nothing more to do here.” We are at the Sofia tea house Chaina, and she has just ordered iced green tea with mint and a slice of home-made banana bread.
From the US, with love
Now that she has “learned and lived all around”, she says that there was much to be brought back.
How she ended up residing again in Bulgaria had no forethought. She, her husband (Bulgarian) and their two children would take an almost-annual holiday back to their native country. Last year, in 2006, they just never returned to their home on the island of Dominica.
They had moved to Dominica a few years before, after having lived in the United States for a number of years. They had left the US, despite the entire family having American citizenship, because they “just wanted to get away from everything”, she says, later commenting that neither did she favour raising her children there.
But it was in the States that her musical career took off: in addition to classical, which she still plays today, she discovered new music. Cage, Crumb, Ligeti – the starters of this type of music – are huge in the States, but she does not know if people would even recognised those names in Bulgaria. Though now accepted as legitimate composers creating legitimate music, Voutchkova says that it has not always been such.
There, first in California, next in New York City and then in Boston for her final six years in the States, she came into contact with musicians who thought like her, for example, cellist Agnieszka Dziubak (aka, Aga) and pianist Sarah Bob, both of whom have collaborated with Voutchkova on her album Faces. Everything for its release “came through” right after she and her family left the States in 2005 for Dominica. As to the name, she says that she “just wanted to put a lot of completely different styles that show the different faces of (her) persona”. There was a thought to include improvisations, but she decided to save that for another time, instead recording pieces by Claude Vivier, Kaija Saariaho, Zoltan Kodaly and Joseph Maneri.
Combining talents
Dziubak and she met when they were playing in various chamber music combinations, and from there, formed Duokaya in 2003. “We shared very similar beliefs in what we want to do, in life, in music. Later, she moved to Berlin and I moved to the island. It is great that we are just a duo because otherwise we would have fallen apart,” Voutchkova says.
When Dziubak was in Bulgaria in 2006, the two women and trumpeter Rossen Zahariev formed TriniTy, which specialises in new music, improvisations and sometimes, experimental performances. The trio themselves play a variety of instruments, many of which are indigenous. TriniTy was born as a project with Dziubak and Zahariev when they were touring Europe, which was followed by a recording session for Bulgarian National Radio. “This project was just so satisfying,” Voutchkova says, “that we just wanted to go on. The music is purely improvising — we just close our eyes and play.” On October 17 to 19 2007, there will be a new music festival called Here Now, held at Sofia’s The Red House Centre for Culture and Debate, where Voutchkova will perform.
“There is so much music that has never been heard,” she says, “and I want to play it. I want other people to play it. ... Unfortunately, there is a lot of new music being created now, and not all of it is very good. The time has not passed yet to forget about what is not valuable and to leave only the valuable. What happens now with this music is that the artist at home must go through and play what s/he thinks is valuable,” but this takes a lot of time, and “there is much that I would not want to play again.”
Too known, but not enough
As for being back in Bulgaria, given her name recognition from when she was a child, she was easily able to enter into the musical sphere here. “It’s just a circle of people that, between ourselves, we do all sorts of things, all sorts of combinations, but it’s all the same people,” Voutchkova says. “We’re eager-to-go-foward people, eager to go into the unknown. Maybe even more, because (new music) has not been done (in Bulgaria), it’s more exciting. As a small little society, of which I am a part, they’re so ready, so thirsty for what there is to come.”
She sees new music as more distinct from other genres, saying that it draws a specific type of people. The artists who interpret such music, too, are of a different sort. Voutchkova describes herself as on a “narrow, specific path” in terms of what she wants to do with her music, with success made more challenging by the fact that violin, in Bulgaria, is still “very connected” with classical.
“I think that there are many talented artists in the country. A lot of them have left, but there is still a lot of talent. I think that the quality and talent (of Bulgarian musicians) will create some things that are not created,” she says. But, “I do not see (new music) as ever serving as popular as commercial (music) anywhere.”
This is not a bad thing, though, just sometimes frustrating, when, after she has worked to arrange a performance – Voutchkova does all her own PR, venue research, show organising, financing – the turn-out is low. Since returning, she has realised that what could be done at the moment is not as much as she had envisaged. Apart from the tentativeness that accompanies trying to organise a show (at the last minute, for instance, it might turn that the venue is in fact not available), she says that there is not a huge difference between Bulgaria and the US, apart from one: in the States, people come from all over, and “no one looks at your background, but at what you can do. This is somehow not the case in Europe” – and, there are “definitely more ready opportunities in other countries” than in Bulgaria.
Words vs actions
If she were not a musician, Voutchkova says that she would have been a freelance writer, because she cannot imagine having a specific timeframe or a person telling her what to do. Or maybe do something related to the environment. “It’s ridiculous, we’ve been doing such ridiculous things to this planet – and it is giving us every sign there is that what we are doing is bad,” she says. “Somehow, I feel luck that (Dominica) is still a nature-land. They are facing the same problems, but they’re a few years behind (Bulgaria).” It is hard for her to understand how people who call themselves “nature lovers” go to the mountains and dig a hole and bury their trash, if they dispose of it at all. Or, how there is so much construction in pristine areas, the result of what she calls “super greedy” persons. “I do not think that they see the connection between what they are doing,” she says. “I feel like I’m part of this little growing community that is trying to do something.”
And this, too, is connected to music, because it is part of a changing world, and needs to be talked about. “It is very difficult for some people to accept the fact that I do not do what I used to do,” she says, referring to her classical music years. She needed to explore, and found new music. And in finding new music, she found herself.
