guslar

▪ Balkan singers

plural  guslari  

      any of a group of popular narrative singers of the Balkans who perform a traditional music that dates from the 17th century. Guslari are among the few performers continuing the oral tradition of epic poetry in the West and serve as transmitters and interpreters of a repertory of song and epic.

 The greatest concentration of guslari are Bosnian. The epics, which often incorporate supernatural motifs, most often have as their subject the region's wars involving Turks, Serbs, and Hungarians; they may describe battles that took place as early as the 14th century or events in the period of Turkish rule (the mid-15th through the late 19th century). Most are told from the Muslim (Turkish, Bosnian, or Albanian) perspective. Because the epics are transmitted orally, great variation in content is inevitable and expected; because the epics are long, sometimes requiring many hours for completion, a good deal of improvisation in the telling of details may be involved. The style, however, is consistent, the unit being a 10-syllable line with a word boundary after the 4th syllable (i.e., no word extends from the 4th to the 5th syllable). The guslari perform largely in cafés and accompany themselves on a gusla (sometimes spelled gusle; a stringed instrument). After about 1950, guslari were sometimes enlisted to serve ideological purposes; short epics describing the heroism of South Slavs (e.g., during World Wars I and II) were composed and frequently performed at official events.

Bruno Nettl

 

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