Urbanization
The pre-Communist world of the Balkans was one of freedom and privately-owned farms and villages, where men were shepherds and women worked in the home. Goods were generally bartered, not sold. Eighty percent of Bulgarians and 75 percent of Yugoslavians lived in villages between 1920 and 1944. Rural Bulgarians dropped to only 35 percent in the years following World War II (Rice, 1994; Porter, 1994) . Celebrations all over the Balkans revolved around holidays, whether Christian ( Djurdjevdan , or St. George's Day), Muslim ( Bajram ), seasonal rituals ( koleda , celebrating the sun's return; Kukerovden , a fertility ritual) or rites of passage (weddings; funerals). Music permeated all of these events – shepherds passed the time by learning the gajda (bagpipe) or shepherd's flute, women sang while they wove or harvested, and there were literally hundreds of songs for religious and secular holidays (Rice, Porter and Goertzen, 2000) . Instruments were homemade from animals, plants and trees. Due to the slower pace of life, weddings often lasted a week, and the music and dancing never stopped. In Roma weddings, musicians often played for 30 hours straight.
All of this began to change with the advent of Communism, whose aims included modernizing, homogenizing and controlling the people. With the exception of Poland and Yugoslavia , all of eastern Europe was forced to collectivize its agriculture. This turned generations-old family farms over to the state, leaving families with no personal stake in the land, no initiative to work it earnestly, and no heritage to leave their children. Mechanized agriculture rendered many useless. Consequently, many peasants migrated to the city to work in the new factories (Creed, 2000) . This shift devastated the traditional way of life and the traditions based on it. Demoralized villagers no longer had the urge to play music.
Men working in factories did not have time to be musicians, make instruments or host week-long weddings (Rice, 1996) . Widespread education, while one of the achievements of the Communists, meant women were now in school instead of learning songs, so the tradition largely died out within one generation. For Croatian folk festivals of the 1960s, such songs were taught to singers by professionals unfamiliar with their original context (Ceribasic, 1998) . The songs they performed were ubiquitous in villages in the 1930s, only 30 years before. In most countries, they were learned in professional music schools. One ethnomusicologist returning to the remaining Bulgarian villages found the shepherds reading newspapers instead of playing shepherd's flutes (Rice, 1994) .
Long-time friendships and traditional female roles were broken as women relocated. They left gatherings, working bees and the songs that went with them behind in villages that were increasingly dilapidated and deserted. The only remaining ritual or tradition was a shortened form of the wedding, and the only unit left for learning music, aside from the classroom, was the immediate family. There was rarely time. The fertility and harvesting rituals performed each year had no relevance in a world of concrete.
Soon this was not an issue, however, as the rituals and their songs were indicative of a “backwards way of life” and subsequently banned by the Communists, along with all religious practices and music. Industry and party had replaced village and god. Even if the people had the time or will to sing, there were very few “legal” songs left. Suddenly the traditions venerated only a decade before had come to symbolize a parochial, outdated way of life considered an “obstacle to change” (Marosevic, 1998) . It was to be discarded in favor of modernity and industrialization. And the music, seen as “muddy” and simplistic, was to be replaced by songs that elevated the people and brought them forward into the new age the Communists envisioned – a country devoid of classes and regionalism, ethnic impurities, and ultimately, dissent.