Balkan Meets Berklee
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BALKAN MEETS BERKLEE By Kristina Bijelic A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree of Master of Music in Contemporary Performance at Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus July 2015 Supervisor: Brian Cole TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii AUTHOR’S NOTE iv PREFACE v 1. BACKGROUND 1 1.1 Personal background 1 1.2 Musical background 5 1.3 Vocal technique 8 2. BALKAN FOLK SONGS 11 2.1. Introduction 11 2.2. Musical characteristics 12 2.3. Balkan Meets Berklee 15 2. 3. 1 Gde si bilo, jare moje 15 2. 3. 2 Oj, golube 18 2. 3. 3 Devojče, devojče, crveno jabolče 20 2. 3. 4 Zajdi, zajdi 23 2. 3. 5 Vrbice, vrbo zelena 27 2. 3. 6 Voljelo se dvoje mladih (Žute dunje) 30 3. CONCLUSION 36 APPENDIX 38 BIBLIOGRAPHY 40 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to the following people who helped me and guided me throughout the year at Berklee Valencia: Brian Cole, my supervisor and program director who was never too busy to help in any way he could, and who is simply a wonderful human being. Victor Mendoza, Enric Alberich, and Celia Mur, for their musical and personal guidance, and for their participation in my advising committee. I learned a great deal more from you than you might think. Clara and Marisol, for their constant support and energy, and help in all matters. It was a great pleasure and honour to work with you. The wonderful musicians who played on, and the wonderful engineers who produced, mixed, and mastered my EP—You contributed your amazing talents and knowledge to my project, and I am deeply grateful and humbled by your hard work. Thank you for accepting my requests, and for your infinite patience with me. Thank you for making my music and my vision come to life. All my colleagues, fellow musicians, band mates, and now lifelong friends—Thank you for everything you taught me, which is so much more than music. Thank you for showing me that music and life cannot be separated from each other, and thank you for sharing your lives with me for a whole year. I’ve grown more than I could possibly say. And last but not least, I am deeply grateful to my loving parents, and my friends and family back home who influenced and supported me so much my whole life. I am so lucky to know you. It is because of you that sing what I sing, and it is because of you that I will always sing. Hvala svima od srca. -K.B. July 2015 iii AUTHOR’S NOTE Any materials taken from non-English sources were translated by me. Also, any materials that were originally in the Cyrillic alphabet have been transcribed to the Latin alphabet with diacritics, both in the essay and in the bibliographic information. In terms of my treatment of non-English words, I have used many words in the original language, especially if they are proper nouns, but have created the plural forms to agree with English (eg. one sevdalinka, two sevdalinkas). In the case of a collective plural, I have left it in the original language (eg. Gorani, as opposed to something like “Gora people”). - K.B. iv PREFACE The collaborative project and EP Balkan Meets Berklee occurred to me during Orientation Week in my first few days at Berklee Valencia, in September of 2014. I had just arrived to Valencia at the end of August and was slowly getting used to my new surroundings, as well as meeting my new colleagues with whom I would spend the next year. I distinctly remember a presentation given by faculty about the Culminating Experience Projects. Coming to Berklee Valencia, I knew that my final project would somehow include the Balkan folk song I knew so well and performed so frequently in my home country of Canada, but it was during that presentation that the premise of my project occurred to me. I decided that I would make an EP of arrangements of Balkan folk songs, each with different musicians and engineers, and all in different styles. It only took a few days at Berklee to realize that this would be a unique opportunity to collaborate with amazing musicians from all over the world, all with unique personal and musical backgrounds. I wanted my final project to be a complete collaborating between myself and some of these great musicians and engineers, and would function as a true showcase and tribute to my generation at Berklee Valencia. At first I did not know which songs I would decide on and with whom I would work, but as I slowly started meeting more and more people from across the masters programs, the project began taking a more definitive shape in my mind and eventually in practice. I also wanted to take Balkan folk songs, which on their own have distinct aesthetic and cultural features, and combine them with the aesthetic features of other genres and styles to create new songs which can be appreciated on many different levels: for their historic value and their respect of the traditions from which they came, but also for their versatility and ability to be appropriately combined with other genres; in some cases, combinations that have rarely been made even in modern-day interpretations of Balkan folk music. v In the process that lasted from September of 2014 to June of 2015, I learned a great deal about music and musical collaboration, but I also made lasting friendships and established important personal connections. Some collaborations were accidental, some occurred out of my desire to work with people I already knew, and some friendships came out of professional collaborations that arose out of admiration for each other’s work. Since I only brought half of the elements to each project—a Balkan folk song—it was inspiring and informative to see and experience the elements that my collaborators brought with them. In every case, my collaborators went above and beyond my expectations and contributed amazing musical and production ideas to every song, and made me re-examine and redefine the music of my roots to which I am deeply attached. Any other combination of people would have yielded a completely different outcome, so each song on Balkan Meets Berklee is the unique product of its time, place, and personnel. vi 1. BACKGROUND 1.1 Personal Background I am often asked why, or more often, “how is it” that I sing Balkan folk songs, given that I never lived in any Balkan country, and indeed have always lived in a very cosmopolitan, North American city where English is the official language. I believe it is a combination of factors and important elements in my personal and musical upbringing that have contributed to why I perform the music I perform in the way I do. I was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and never lived anywhere else before moving to Valencia to study at Berklee. My parents had both immigrated to Canada more than 20 years before my birth. In fact, the first member of my family to immigrate to Canada was my mother's uncle, who moved to Niagara Falls, Ontario in 1947, and later sponsored his brother's family (my grandparents, my mother, and her siblings) who arrived in the early 1970s. My grandmother in turn sponsored her family members, who sponsored more family members, and in that way a significant portion of my extended family came to establish themselves in southern Ontario. It is also where many of them married and all of their children were born, including myself. This is a very significant element of my life, because the fact that my family established in Canada many years before the Balkan wars in the 1990s means that we belong to—what the Serbs of Canada call—the stara imigracija, or old immigration. In fact, in Niagara region, Serbian immigration began as early as 1887 with the commencement of the building of the Welland Canal.1 Many of the Serbs who live there today are second and third generation, whereas the vast majority of Serbs who live in the Greater Toronto Area immigrated in the early 1990s due to the war in the Balkans. Since I grew up very closely with my mother's large family and the Serbian community in the 1 Vladislav A. Tomović, Canadian Serbs: A History of Their Social and Cultural Traditions (1856-2002), 1 Niagara region (at the time, my parents and I were the only members of my family who lived in Toronto, where the Serbian community was slowly expanding) I was much more exposed to Serbian culture than other Serbian-Canadian children my age who had immigrated as babies only with their parents and perhaps siblings. For this reason, I had a rather eclectic and paradoxical upbringing: My grandparents never learned English well, and we grandchildren never spoke to them in any language other than Serbian, but yet they adapted certain English vocabulary so profoundly that for the first twelve years of my life, I thought that a "drive way" in Serbian was "drajvej," a backyard was "bekjard," and that a "couch" was a "čestafil," (derived from “chesterfield,” a very archaic Canadian term for couch). Although I only spoke Serbian with my family, it was Serbian devoid of any slang that emerged after the 1970s, and one full of “Serblish” words. Even so, I managed to maintain my Serbian much better than many of my friends in Toronto who only spoke Serbian in their households (of course, with a mix of English) and who did not have grandparents or extended family to speak with on a regular basis.