guslar

guslar, the traditional name in the Bosniak-Croatian-Serbian language for an epic singer who performs long narrative tales while accompanying himself on a one- or two-stringed instrument, known as a gusle (gusla). The guslar bows the instrument while holding it vertically between his legs as he sings. (Although there have been female epic singers in the tradition, they are comparatively rare and not often called guslari.) Traditionally, the term was strongly associated with epic singing in Serbia and Montenegro, but it also was widely attested in the historic regions of Bosnia (now, like Herzegovina, part of Bosnia and Herzegovina), Croatia, Dalmatia, and Herzegovina. Well into the 20th century it was not uncommon for songs to narrate historical events dating to the 14th century—e.g., the Battle of Kosovo.

The guslar tradition is almost certainly older than that and may well share an origin with other epic singing traditions in cognate Indo-European languages; the paucity of written evidence, however, prevents decisive claims regarding historical origin. It is also impossible to confirm that the metre is originally Indo-European, though some scholars have noted a distant similarity to metres in Russian and Greek. The music of the gusle is largely chromatic, with singers favouring a descending line, sometimes microtonal, but careful research has shown that a variety of melodic types, playing styles, and singing styles are attested within the parameters of the traditional art; the range of variation occurs according to regional micro-traditions and individual performance preferences. The metre of the singing is decasyllabic (10 syllables per verse), with a word boundary regularly occurring after the fourth syllable and with the final two syllables typically held longer (thus, the traditional form entails that 10 linguistic syllables are sung against 12 musical pulses).

There are many song cycles in the tradition, including well-known epics narrating battles, bride capture, and weddings along the boundaries of Christian and Muslim cultures in the Balkans over many centuries. Supernatural themes, songs of banditry, songs of a hero’s return, and a variety of other traditional subjects are attested, as are historical songs, which can—while using the traditional language—treat events as recent as conflicts in the 1990s.

Like much 21st-century folklore, the contemporary guslar’s art enjoys many uses and purposes, ranging from traditional performance to exhibitions at popular festivals to private domestic gatherings; on the analytic side, technical research on the part of folklorists, linguists, and musicologists continues to the present day, by way of both archival and living examples. Since at least the time of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the guslar has attracted the interest of literati curious about possible comparisons to legendary singers such as Homer and Ossian. In the 1930s two American researchers, Milman Parry and Albert Lord, famously documented on aluminum records the performances of guslari throughout the region of what was once Yugoslavia (the collection is now at Harvard University). In modern scholarship, the term guslar can function as a kind of cover term for epic poetry more generally, even when the gusle does not accompany the singing: it was possible in certain regions of northwest Bosnia, for example, to sing long narrative epics to the accompaniment of the tambura (a plucked two- or three-stringed instrument with a variety of local names but comparable to a Turkish lute), while performers in other regions preferred to sing without any accompaniment at all.