In the chapter we read from Donna A. Buchanan’s book Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition, Buchanan shows how “the [Bulgarian, BSP] government legitimized its new perspectives by nestling them in a slippery quilt of peasant tradition and socialist heritage.” (Buchanan, 23) This reading reminded me of Meintjes’ article on Graceland; more specifically, I’m curious about how we could use her concept of pieces of music as “polysemic sign vehicles” to consider how nationality, ethnicity, and nationalism work in Buchanan’s case studies. Buchanan notes the example of a six year old girl’s performance of a traditional, regionally-specific song following Lilov’s interview on Panorama, a news broadcast on BTV. Following “an interview conducted at the rally” (Buchanan, 22) in which “Lilov reaffirmed the Party’s connection with Martenitsa,” (Buchanan, 22) “a six-year-old girl in antiquated village dress solemnly performed a lyrical “slow song,” or bavna pesen, from the Rhodope ethnographic region with bagpipe accompaniment in the traditional manner.” (Buchanan, 23) As Buchanan notes, the Rhodopes “carries profoundly emotional historical associations, as Bulgarians widely believe it is a site where villagers were unqillingly converted to Islam at various points during the Ottoman period…those [songs] from the Rhodopes were described to me as particularly poignant.” (Buchanan, 23) In this sense, political legitimization for the BSP was partially contingent upon aligning itself, through deeply-ingrained musical traditions, with a Bulgarian national identity predicated upon a notion of Bulgarian ethnic identity as both locally-specific and “European” by virtue of being both Christian (and therefore not Muslim) and anti-Muslim (because Bulgarian-ness here precludes the practice of Islam). As someone from an Eastern European country whose national identity is similarly both entrenched in post-Ottoman State legitimization and predicated upon this formulation of ethnicity, religion and nation, I’m interested in how these formulations work in terms of a) discursively negating Ottoman, Islamic and middle eastern cultural influences, b) doing so locally to solidify and legitimate ‘the nation’ as an ethnically homogenous group despite the region’s long-standing ethnic heterogeneity, c) doing so to legitimate the nation and the ethnicity as European to an international, European audience, and d) using music as a cultural sign to do so. It seems that in Buchanan’s Bulgarian context, and in my context of Greece, cultivating the notion of a national ethnicity serves local and international political goals. My question is, if we consider this double audience, how can we consider local musical practices in the framework Meintjes introduced us to last week? In what ways is Bulgarian Europeanness and otherness affirmed in the BSP’s use of politically and historically loaded local musics? How would one’s position in relation to these practices shift one’s consideration of them, and how is the BSP directly playing into this positionality? Finally, given that the Ottoman Empire stretched far into the European continent for several centuries prior to its dissolution, how can we consider Turkey in relation to European discourses on what European culture is?