The Crooked Bow: The Art of Gusle and the Oral Tradition among the Serbs

and the romantic revival of interest in folk traditions developed in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which served as an impetus
for people like Vuk Karadžić to begin collecting.11) The versification in
Serbo-Croatian deseterac (as opposed to Macedonian or Bulgarian)
tends to be stichic, line by line, and there is a tradition of fairly long
songs.12) It is fairly uniform wherever it occurs, and the chief differences
can be traced to the underlying prosodic systems of the dialects
themselves.13) Roman Jakobson stated six metrical constraints in dese-
terac, five of which occur with little deviation and form every line, or
sometimes groups of lines, within a given song: 1) isosyllabism – each
line contains ten syllables; 2) there is a compulsory syntactic pause
between the lines; 3) a compulsory word-boundary divides each line
into to colons – the first of four syllables and the second of six; 4) there
is a bridge at the end of both colons; 5) within the line at least one of
the boundaries of each word-unit must occur before an odd syllable.14)
Within this set of rules, or perhaps because of it, very often in-line rhyme
and assonance are common features of recurrent phrases, and the
underlying principle might be because of the combination of aesthe-
tically pleasing sounds.15) Naturally, as much as this structures the con-
tent of the song significantly, it also provides room for endless variation.
This is where the research of Parry and Lord becomes important in
showing how a guslar composes the text of his song.
Firstly, it is important to emphasize and question the concept of
improvisation within the guslar tradition. Parry and Lord describe an
epic song as a dynamic structure, and an inquiry of their undertaking
may be viewed as an inquiry into the dynamics of poetic construction:
“The poem is, by this definition, a song; the performer is, at the same time,
its composer; whatever he performs, he re-creates; his art of improvisa-
tion is firmly grounded upon his control of traditional components.”16) 17)
Lord goes on to explain that a singer of tales composes by means of
formulas and formulaic expressions, and builds songs by the use of
themes.18 ) He emphasizes throughout his book that every performance
is unique, and that it bears the signature of the performer; also, that
the element of speed is of essence, as he is composing on the spot,
and “his art consists not so much in learning through repetition the
time-worn formulas as in the ability to compose and recompose the
phrases for the idea of the moment on the pattern established by the
basic formulas.”19) For the true oral poet, the moment of composition is
the performance, and singing, performing, and composing are facets
of the same act.20) Parry and Lord made great distinctions between
literate and illiterate poets, and indeed held the illiterate ones in higher
esteem because of the authenticity by which they learned their art, and
assumed that the manners in which they learned and composed was a
genuine continuation of the oral tradition among the south Slavs. They
emphasize the learning process as an important step in becoming a
good guslar, as truly it seems that complete absorption of the tradition
is the most effective way of internalizing the aspects to the point that
composition under such specific formulas becomes more natural than
foreign. In the first stage of a singer’s education in the art of epic song,
he watches others sing and learns the stories, the names of heroes and
faraway places, and begins to understand the rhythm of the singing and
can even repeat commonly-repeated phrases, which Parry and Lord
refer to as ‘formulas.’ The second stage is application and imitation,
where the singer learns to play the gusle and imitates the technique of
composition and singing of his teacher, who could be his father or other
relative. Through their conversations with various guslars, Parry and
Lord established that there was no set way any of them learned to sing,
but that it was certainly a combination of much listening and much
practicing on their own until they developed their own techniques
from having listened to so many different guslars. The third stage be-
gins when a singer is competent enough to sing a song to a critical audi-
ence. He likely knows many parts of many songs, but to be able to sing
one song from beginning to end is an important step in his becoming
a guslar, since he now has an audience who is very familiar with the
tradition and how they believe a song should sound, and can judge
him based on that. This added factor of the audience will be addressed
later on. After much practice, a singer’s training period comes to an
end after he has a large enough repertoire to furnish entertainment for
several nights, and he has sufficient command of the material that he
can shorten, lengthen and embellish at will.21)
The audience is thus important in the process of the song compo-
sition, since it is the audience who will dictate the length of the song
as well as the degree to which the singer will ornament or expand the
material. The audience will accept the singer more and more as his
talent and aptitude grow. The writer and ethnomusicologist Radosav
Medenica, said: “The audience [...] for the guslar is much more im-
portant than for an actor, or an assembly for a speaker. For with the
guslar, the contact with the audience is much closer and tighter. Other-
wise, if it is not an experience for both the guslar and the audience, if it
does not carry them and does not connect them on the higher sphere
of spiritual-ethical ideals, the song stays on aesthetic dilettantism, that
is, a rusty guslar and a rusty song, as Vuk would put it.”22) The audience
has always had a strong influence on a guslar, not only on the dynamic
or style, but also on the content. Considering that a gusle performance
was an audience’s “artistic incarnation of their ideals,” according to
Medenica, they accepted those who adapted to that picture, but the
others “who did not agree with their spirit and outlook on the world
and life,” they discarded, proving themselves to be inexorable censors.23)
In fact, the subject matter greatly varied depending on the singer
and the audience – namely, which religion and ethnic group was in
question. For the Serbs, the episodes and characters are those con-
cerning, for example, the Battle of Kosovo, and folk heroes like Kra-
ljević Marko. For the Muslims, it is heroes like Bećiragić Meho or
Djerzelez Alija. As writer and professor Vlajko Vlahović put it, “when
a Muslim sings, their heroes win, but when a Christian sings, then
theirs win.”24) A guslar would change his story, or choose his repertoire
carefully, depending on his audience. Quoting Medenica, “Thusly did
this one Muslim guslar at a certain kermis among Catholics – and
after all the insistence that he sing – sing only one short excerpt [...]
Before Muslims he cuts down all the heterodox and they perish, but
when he sings to Christians, the Turks and their heroes perish, so he
therefore pleases his listeners as he does not want disharmony in the
collective experience of the song between himself and the audience.”25)
Regardless of the religious denomination of the guslar and the
heroes he praised or destroyed, all epic songs have several elements in
common. Considering the evidence presented above, the emphasis
placed by Parry and Lord on the uniqueness of every performance and
the importance a particular audience had on a song, there are certain
stable elements that can ensure a kind of ‘instability’ within a song, and
indeed these stable elements are the means by which improvisation
is even possible; any variations that occur in songs are variations of
the individual songs, but the elements of which they are constructed
are stable.26) These stable elements are what Parry and Lord referred to
as “formulas.” There are many different formulas that a guslar might
employ: The first is the obligatory instrumental introduction, followed
by the vocal pretpev (literally “foresong”) where the guslar sets the tone
of his song by establishing it as serious, funny, ceremonious, and so
on.27) Lines often start with an exclamation such as “ej” or “oj”, not only
attract the attention of the listeners, but also to contribute to the
syllable count of the line.28 ) The sheer fact that an epic song is sung
and not recited or told in prose, entails that some of these features are
constructive and practical, whereas others are simply aesthetic and
serve to ornament a song; often, both purposes overlap.29) Many
linguistic features are common in gusle songs but not in everyday
speech, but there are also many features in everyday speech that are
common or exploited in songs. For example, in order to achieve the
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11) Benjamin A. Stolz, “On Two Serbo-Croatian Oral Epic Verses: The
‘Bugarštica’ and the ‘Deseterac,’” The Bulleting of the Midwest Modern
Language Association 2.1 (1969): 154.
12) Stolz 155.
13) Stolz 157.
14) Foley 19.
15) Foley 20
16) Lord xiv.
17) The word “pesma” in Serbian means both “poem” and “song.” – K.B.
18 ) Lord 4.
19) Lord 5.
20) Lord 13.
21) Lord 21-26.
22) Golemović 21.
23) Golemović 22-23.
24) Golemović 28.
25) Golemović 28.
26) Golemović 161.
27) Golemović 163.
28) Golemović 162.
29) Golemović 70.