THE MUSICAL FORM BUILDING THE IN THE FOLKLORE CHOIR SONGS OF KRASIMIR KIURKCHIISKY

The composer Krasimir Kiurkchiisky is one of the prominent figures in the 20th century Bulgarian musical culture. While leaving a rich legacy in a variety of classical genres, he never severed the intonational, metro-rhythmic and tonal connection with the Bulgarian folklore. In the genre “folklore choir song”, Kiurkchiisky is considered the ultimate innovator, with an enormous contribution in this direction. His adaptations are mainly harmonization, but the harmony is so unconventional, that often these feel as composed, only because of the unconventional way they sound. In these works, he almost always searches for ways to enhance the musical form in a variety of ways. The intensive support for the process dynamics on all levels of the compositional logic, related to the musical form building, is one of the most fundamental indicators for the individuality in the Kiurkchiisky’s creative style. In his desire to stay as close as possible to the authenticity of the original image, the composer avoids the addition of his own melody structures. As a result, in his works, the formally structured composed episodes that enhance the form are rarity. Sources, combining measureless and measured episodes, typical for the performance manner of some popular entertainment songs, inspire in the composer’s mind more active development and complication of the musical form, accumulation of voice polyphony, compaction of the choir music structure and reinforcement of the phonism of the techniques that are used. Expanded samples are the foundation for some of the most representative of Kiurkchiisky’s choir works, as these are by themselves inherently bi- and tri-partite and these touch the boundary layer of the interaction and evolution in the Bulgarian folklore song, characterized not only by the unfolding of the ambitus and the tonal interactions, but also by the unfolding of the form and the search for the dramaturgical anonymous composer construction, as an emanation of the aestheticization. Kiurkchiisky follows the natural line of the folklore source, reinforcing with its harmonic language or diluting by the polyphonic expression, the accumulated in the origin dramatism. Considering the approach used to create the form, generally, his songs could be classified in two big groups: 1) Songs, in which the form is built exclusively on the basis of the melodic essence – usually, the small verse forms; 2) Songs, in which the construction follows the poetic and philosophical message and the evolution of the original. There is no clear distinction between these two groups, but as a rule of the thumb, in the expanded – measureless, with mixed metric structure and some of the measured Kiurkchiisky’s songs for folklore choir, it can be observed that there is a search for the culminating moments in concordance with the poetic culmination and the integral construction of the musical form following the dramaturgy of the text.