Meter in Bulgarian Folk Music
Nathan Bernacki discusses the concept of meter in a Bulgarian context, noting the discrepancies between emic and etic conceptions of meter and the way that academia has influenced its categorisation.
Shop Diaphonic Singing from Dyakovo, Bulgaria
Nathan Bernacki’s analysis of a long, strophic, rhythmically flexible cycle sung by two women from Western Bulgaria.
Meter in Bulgarian Folk Music
by Nathan Bernacki [PDF View] There is a specific set of criteria professionally-trained folk musicians use to differentiate meters in a contemporary Bulgarian context: sub-division, beat, and tempo. My field experiences in Bulgaria have shown me that these terms are generally understood, but sometimes in more implicit ways (e.g preference for demonstrative over verbal communication […]
Shop Diaphonic Singing from Dyakovo, Bulgaria
by Nathan Bernacki [PDF view] Context Tri Mi Zvezdi (My Three Stars) is a harvest song sung on breaks from field-work during the hottest part of the day. This recording is from the village of Dyakovo in the Shop region of Bulgaria, sung by Ruska Bozhilova and Anka Balabanova for track 7 of World Library […]
Emic and Etic Conceptions of Cycles
The concept of “emic” and “etic” cultural data, deriving from the terms “phonemic” and “phonetic” and referring respectively to culturally salient knowledge and empirical information, has a long history in the humanities. The idea of a strict emic/etic binary is difficult to uphold, given that the views of cultural insiders can change over time, and […]
Visual Representations of Cycles
On this page, we explore how visually representing musical cycles in various ways can enrich our understanding of them. How can we visually represent cycles? What do we learn by representing cycles in a visual format? What limitations does each visualisation have for our understanding of cyclic phenomena? Aural phenomena such as music are necessarily […]
Research Team
Principal Investigators Dr. John Roeder (Professor of Music Theory) As a music theorist and analyst, I describe ways that people conceive of music, and how music is heard to organize time coherently, expressively, and meaningfully. I concentrate on music of special relevance today: recent works by contemporary composers in the Western art-music tradition, and the […]
Conference Presentations
(click titles for abstracts, and see the media page for some presentation recordings) Bernacki, Nathan. 2022. “A Beat Level Analysis of Dance Music from the Pirin-Macedonia region of Bulgaria.” Presented at the Seventh International Conference on Analytical Approaches to World Music, Sheffield, UK [and online], June 14, 2022. Peiris, Eshantha. 2021. “Text-Music Relationships in Un-texted Music of […]