📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 10 August
There is a decent argument that the highest thing that can happen to a songwriter is for people to forget they wrote it. Not to forget the song. To forget that it was written at all, and start treating it as something the country simply always had. That has happened to Valentin Spasov, who was born on this day in 1964, and it happened while he was still around to watch.
What happened on this day
Spasov was born in Sapareva Banya, and the story starts about as locally as a musical career can. He was interested in music from early on, first performed at the town's "Prosveten Lach" chitalishte, played the accordion, became repetiteur for the children's folk ensemble and put together a vocal-instrumental group called "Shans" that actually went out and did concerts. He took gold medals at the sixth and seventh republican festivals of amateur art, finished school in Sapareva Banya, and went on to the Academy of Music and Dance Arts in Plovdiv.
That is where he met Sevdalina, who became his wife and has been the other half of everything since. The two of them started working together in 1988, while they were both still students. After graduating he won a teaching post at the South-West University in Blagoevgrad and a seat in the Blagoevgrad radio orchestra, and conducted the "Razlog" ensemble alongside it. As a staff musician at the radio he wrote instrumental folk music for the orchestra and produced hundreds of arrangements of folk songs for established singers, Kostadin Gugov, Atanaska Dimitrova, Dimitar Kolarov, Tatyana Sarbinska and others. He has written around a hundred and twenty songs, for the duo and for other performers.
The song that got away from him
Then there is "Sine, Sine". It is a song about a mother's love for her son, and in a Market Test survey in 2000 it came second for popularity across the previous decade, behind only "Moya strana, moya Bulgaria". Second in the country. That alone would be a career.
What happened next is stranger and better. The song was translated into several languages and included in an academic edition from the University of Chicago, accompanied by a disc of hit songs from the Balkans and Eastern Europe written during the transition years. The author of that volume, a professor of music and a folklorist of the Balkans, wrote that the song had become so popular it had turned genuinely folk, part of the Bulgarian's own folklore, and described the melody as carrying a kind of enchantment that reaches anyone regardless of nationality. Which is to say: a named living composer wrote a song, and a scholar catalogued it as folklore. Bulgarians had adopted it faster than the paperwork could keep up.
The rest of the output is substantial and unglamorous in the way real careers are. Studio albums from "Ne moga bez teb" in 1993 through to "Mome makedonko" in 2008, their own recording studio, the television programme "Muzikalno kolelo" hunting for young talent in the genre, a school called "Lina" teaching children from seven to fifteen, membership of the Union of Scientists in Bulgaria since 1996, and stage shows including "Za lyubov rodeni" in 2005 and "Dva zhivota, edna sadba", which filled Hall 1 of the National Palace of Culture in April 2006.
Today's name days
Ivaylo and Ivayla celebrate today. It is a distinctly Bulgarian name with a hard-edged history behind it: Ivaylo was the swineherd who led a peasant rising and ended up on the throne, which is not a sentence you get to write about many given names. If you know one, the usual applies. Turn up, bring something, do not wait to be asked.
Why this matters for British expats
If you have been to a Bulgarian wedding, a village fair, a name day that went on too long, or simply had a taxi radio on, you have heard this music. Not this song necessarily, but this world: authored folk, written by trained musicians with conservatoire degrees, performed as though it came down through families. British ears tend to file it as generic folk or dismiss it as popfolk, and both readings miss what is going on. There is a whole professional layer here, academies, radio orchestras, arrangers and composers, and it is one of the more active parts of Bulgarian cultural life.
The useful thing to carry away is the "Sine, Sine" story itself, because it explains something about how this country holds onto music. A song can go from a named composer to something people sing as if it were ancestral within a generation. That does not really happen in Britain any more. Noticing it is a decent shortcut to understanding why the folk material here feels alive rather than preserved.
Worth a look if you haven't already: the Bulgarian name-days guide.
Sources and further reading
The biography here, the birth date and Sapareva Banya beginnings, the Plovdiv academy years, the work with the Blagoevgrad radio orchestra, the discography and the reception of "Sine, Sine", comes from Spasov's Bulgarian Wikipedia entry, which cites the duo's own site and their label biographies. There is no English entry, which for a composer with a song this widely sung is a fair illustration of how little of this crosses over.