Traditional folk music in Bosnia and Herzegovina through historical sound recordings

PROGRAMME

h 16.00, Laboratorio di Filologia musicale 

Bosnia and Herzegovina is country in South-Eastern Europe, located on the Balkan peninsula. It is geographically small, but culturally and historically very rich country. On the place where three majority peoples live - Bosnian Muslims, Catholic and Orthodox Christians, as well as 18 different ethnic minorities, where eastern and western cultures meet, picture of traditional musical practice is diverse, dynamic and picturesque. Folk musical tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina attracted the attention of foreign researchers. Their works contained valuable information about their informants, those who preserved and transmitted various types of music-making, and they remain important sources for the study of the country’s traditional music even today. Foreign researchers generally spent a short time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, returning to their home countries to continue their work. The first extensive scientific research in Bosnia and Herzegovina was conducted by Friedrich Salomo Krauss. He was interested in its traditional folk music in all of its aspects, but he focused on the practice of singing epic poetry to gusle accompaniment.
We may assign the earliest sound recordings of folk music from Bosnia and Herzegovina, which date from 1907, to two groups, the scientific and the commercial. The commercial recordings were intended for mass production and distribution. The term “scientific sound recording”, according to Lechleitner, “denotes acoustic sources which were made during a research project with a specific focus and under controlled conditions. Such sound recordings require exhaustive documentation in order to transmute them from individual recordings to scholarly resources suitable for subsequent research.” Unlike commercial recordings, scientific recordings are accompanied by documentation which contains basic information about the informants (name, age, ethnicity, employment) and the recordings (date, time, recording location, genre and supplementary data) and frequently photographs of the informant and the location where the recording was made. 
This presentation has an aim to present historical recordings of Bosnian music and point to their importance for Bosnian ethnomusicology.

BIO

Jasmina Talam earned her PhD degree in ethnomusicology from the Academy of Music, Uni-versity of Sarajevo, where she currently serves as Professor of ethnomusicology and Head of the Institute for Musicology. In 2018, she was awarded a scholarship from the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture for postdoctoral research. Her recent publication is a book, Bosnians in Sweden – Music and Identity (Svenskt visarkiv and Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien, 2019). Her principal research interests are musical instruments, fieldwork and ar-chival research methods, gender, religious musical practices, and the convergence of minorities and migrations. She is corresponding member of the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture. She serves as ICTM Executive Board Member.