Svetlana Spajić, 2025
Since early childhood, I have been fascinated by our folk singing. The long-sustained tremolo of the accompanying voice in my grandmother’s village of Donja Badanja in the Jadar Valley (where right now there are clashes because of the opening of the Rio Tinto lithium mine) was rediscovered in the shape of potresalica (which you are listening to in the video of the Svetlana Spajić Group) on the slopes of Manjača Mountain in the region of Bosanska Krajina, where one of the biggest primeval forests in Europe lies — I arrived there in the late 90s.
A similar shaking, thundering voice, even deeper and more primordial, I discovered in the early 2000s in the severe karst of northern Dalmatia among the Serbs in the village of Žegar. It took years of practice to learn it, with the help of Obrad Milić and Dragomir Lujo Vukanac, the local masters of the singing forms. No less fascinating than singing were the nature and landscapes in which bare stones prevailed, carved and ornamented in thousands of forms: holes, abysses, scrapes (škrape), caves, pits, and sinking streams stirred my imagination and thoughts and compelled me to touch them all with my voice and walk through them further.
The echoing of the voice in this severe landscape I recognized in the singing vocabulary of the mountain villagers: all the glissandos, fade-out effects, and different forms of sustained or ornamented strong or subtle tremolos. It is there, in the largest world ocean of karst (or „krš“ and „kras“, as we say in Serbian), that I understood the same immense fascination that Jovan Cvijić, a giant of geographic science and “father of karst geomorphology” from my same birthplace of Loznica, felt.
Often, I flew across the Alps in Slovenia, Austria, and Switzerland. That was my most common way to observe and contemplate them, usually with my neck hurting as I tried to reach them through a small plane window. There were also a few blessings when I could go into them and meet with local singers: twice in Austria, where we sang spontaneously in a small village tavern, and once in the Swiss Alps, where I sang with several village groups and devoted revivalists of the ancient yodeling forms. Pristine singing, aiming at the white, shiny peaks endowed with crystal snow, then reflecting on the silver-blue surfaces of the fresh lakes, then radiating again towards the sky. I promise that one day I will learn it, at least one piece — I even found a small tutorial for a beautiful ancient non-tempered rendition of it to start with!
The Dinaric Mountains in my imagination are a huge being that re-emerged from the depths of the sea, an ancient whale thirsty for waters that can never soak in enough, thus trying to engrave each drop of it into its huge, soft muscles and limbs.
The Alps in my imagination are a huge being that re-emerged from the depths of the land, an ancient dinosaur playing and touching with its gills, fins, and scales the clouds and the sky.
These two constantly sing together, in both consonant and dissonant intervals, and have no problem with it.
Text and photos by Svetlana Spajić.
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