The Three Seasons – Prague Spring, World Youth Summer, and ‘Sofia Autumn,’ or: The Anti-Event, the Avant-Garde, and the Beginning of Bulgaria’s New Folklore Wave

Abstract

This article deals with the events of 1968 in Bulgarian musical culture. Departing from recent Bulgarian discourses that have emerged in the new millennium and often regard Bulgarian responses to the Prague Spring as nearly non-existing, a closer look at music and the arts reveals a more detailed picture. Here, ‘1968’ is especially interesting since it saw the beginning of a Bulgarian New Folklore Wave that challenged existing compositional models for adapting folk music. Furthermore, right before the military intervention in Czechoslovakia in August, the Bulgarian capital Sofia became a center of international attention for hosting the 9th World Festival of Youth and Students. Finally, a look at a series of infamous party meetings held at the Union of Bulgarian Composers in November 1968 reveals that unknown protagonists managed to destroy paper evidence that could have shed a better light at the events of this year.