"I was talking about eastern European music at a Breton/ French dance in Bideford festival last month and was advised to read "travel with Gypsies- Princes among men" for the musical anthology of this sort of music. I got so enthusiastic I managed to order 2 copies by mistake - must get round to readibg one!"

I don't know this book, although reading the Amazon blurb didn't altogether endear me to it. There is a superb book by Tim Rice (not the composer) called May It Fill Your Soul, which not only gives a very cogent impression of Bulgarian music, but raises issues which relate to traditional music generally. I'd recommend it to anyone.

"I've got a CD which seems to combine two previous recordings: 'A Harvest, a Shepherd, a Bride: Village Music of Bulgaria' and 'In the Shadow of the Mountain: Bulgarian Folk Music' (Elektra/Nonesuch CD 979 195-2)."

That was the CD I was thinking of when I mentioned Nonesuch. It probably won't have all the tracks from the original LPs, but thank God they've included the Valya Balanska. As you say it belongs right up there as one of the greatest pieces of singing ever recorded. It was one of the pieces of music which was included in the human lifepack in the Voyager Spacecraft - in case Voyager might run into alien civilisations.

No little green men been reported in Bulgaria as yet.