The audio album “Tradicionalna muzika okoline Niša” (Traditional Music of the Area around Niš) was released on December 4, 2025, by the Centre for Culture and Arts in Aleksinac, as the first publication in the newly launched “Muzička arhiva” (Musical Archive) series. The album brings along 40 vocal and instrumental traditional sound examples from the Niš area, recorded during the final decade of the 20th century as part of field research conducted by ethnomusicologist Dimitrije Golemović. The album is edited by ethnomusicologist Anastasija Živković.
— Album review by Tijana Stanković
Recordings from villages in the Nišava Valley have, at last, been returned to the place from which they originated – contained within a small, compact booklet filled with remarkable richness. Instead of a disc, it includes a USB flash drive in the shape of a business card.
In the past, researchers carried bulky reel-to-reel tape recorders through these same villages – heavy devices that demanded both physical strength and determination. Three and a half decades later, all of this fits into a wallet compartment: a piece of plastic and people memorized with dignity therein.
The edition was prepared and the accompanying study written by Anastasija Živković, an ethnomusicologist, doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, and head of the Aleksinac phonoarchive. Her research focuses on the traditional music and dance of Southeastern Serbia, and alongside her academic work she collaborates with Radio Belgrade 2 on the show “Od zlata jabuka” (Golden Apple).
The dual involvement – both scholarly and media-oriented – is reflected in her approach: the study treats traditional music simultaneously as documentary material and as an art form possessing its own aesthetic weight and intrinsic beauty.
The material originates from the archive of Prof. Dr. Dimitrije O. Golemović, an ethnomusicologist who, over four decades of fieldwork, visited more than six hundred settlements. When deciding how to preserve and present this material, he took an unusual step: he returned it to its place of origin. Several institutions across Serbia were entrusted with specific regions each, tasked with preserving and reintroducing the material to the public. Aleksinac is the first in this sequence, and this book – the initial volume of the “Musical Archive” series – represents precisely that act of reactivation.
Dimitrije Golemović | Source: World Music Association of Serbia
The recordings included here stem from two field expeditions, in December 1991 and August 1996, when Golemović and his collaborators visited several villages in the Nišava Valley – Kamenica, Oreovac, Ostrovica, Jelašnica, and Vukmanovo – alongside interviews conducted in the city of Niš itself.
Recordings were made using reel-to-reel tape recorders and video cameras, resulting in an archive that encompasses both audio and visual documentation of musical practice and everyday life. From this material, Živković selected and prepared forty examples: twenty-four vocal and sixteen instrumental. That period, the 1990s, represents a sensitive turning point – traditions that researchers documented were already transitioning from lived practice into memory, a process further accelerated by subsequent demographic and social changes.
The recordings presented here are among the last traces of a tradition already receding at the moment of its documentation.
Female trio from Ostrovica – Jelica Stojanović (1926), Mira Ilić (1930), and Ruža Jovanović (1941), 1991 | Phonoarchive of the Centre for Culture and Arts in Aleksinac
The backbone of the vocal part is two female trios: Velika Ranđelović, Ruža Mitić, and Ruža Aranđelović from Vukmanovo, and Jelica Stojanović, Mira Ilić, and Ruža Jovanović from Ostrovica – women born between 1922 and 1941, who carried within them the repertoire of an entire community. This “musical postcard” also features Aleksandar and Jela Stojanović, Rada Stanojević, and several voices whose names and faces have not withstood the passage of time.
Male singing appears in only two examples – confirming, as Živković notes, Golemović’s long-standing thesis that women form the backbone of vocal tradition.
Among the instrumentalists, a special place is occupied by Miodrag Živić – Deda Mida (b. 1925) from Oreovac, whose recordings on the duduk – a long pipe with a mouthpiece – reveal an excellent folk artist. The technique of “guttural playing”, during which the player adds a rhythmic pulse to the melody with his voice, skillful register shifts, and original introductions before certain melodies - all this speaks of a performer with a pronounced artistic personality.
Alongside Deda Mida are Božidar Dinić (b. 1940) from Kamenica on the ocarina; Đorđe (b. 1940) and Dejan Đorđević (b. 1973) from Kamenica on the drombulje (jaw harp); Miodrag Tasić (b. 1946) from Jelašnica on the frula (end-blown flute); and Dušan Stanković (b. 1921) from Niš plays the two-voiced bagpipes – an instrument once widespread in the region, now nearly extinct.
Dušan Stanković from Niš, originally from Babušnica, on bagpipes, 1991 | Phonoarchive of the Centre for Culture and Arts in Aleksinac
The sequence of tracks follows the logic of the ritual calendar and the life cycle: it opens with dodole (rainmaking) and kraljice songs (queen's), continues with St. George’s Day and harvest songs, krstonoše (cross-bearers) and patron saint (slava) songs, then moves to sedeljke (gathering) and wedding songs, concluding with Easter and songs used in various contexts.
Within this structure, instrumental pieces are not separated into a distinct block but interwoven among the vocal tracks. This decision is not merely ethnomusicological; it reflects an awareness of the album as a listening experience. The alternation of female voices with the sounds of the duduk, ocarina, or bagpipes creates a rhythmic flow for the listener, rather than a purely archival classification.
Drawing on a rich body of literature on the Niš region – from Vladimir Đorđević, who documented melodies in the early 20th century, through Ljubica and Danica Janković and their work on folk dances, to more recent studies by Ana Hofman and Aleksandra Marković (vocal traditions, 2005), and Mirjana Zakić and Iva Nenić (instrumental music, 2016) – Živković carefully cross-references this legacy with the material at hand. In doing so, she illuminates how melodies traveled along the Nišava Valley, which songs and dances connected neighboring regions, and which remained tied to specific localities.
Dancers from the village of Ostrovica, 1991 | Phonoarchive of the Centre for Culture and Arts in Aleksinac
A few examples stand out: “bosarka” (or “basara”), documented by the Janković sisters and linked to the mountain village of Basara near Pirot, preserved here in Deda Mida’s playing in Oreovac; “Niška Banja”, performed by Dinić on the ocarina – a well-known melody by Niš actor and singer Dušan Cvetković – which, in its transition to rural performance practice, lost a characteristic interval, adapting to a new instrument and environment; and “ruskanje” – distinctive women's vocal exclamations woven into and after sung verses, a recognizable sonic marker of the region.
The edition is deliberately conceived as an archival resource intended for further use. Each track is accompanied by complete recording details: location, date, and performers’ names and birth year. Song texts are presented both in their sung and poetic forms. Track descriptions provide sufficient context for use in comparative research, pedagogy, and choreographic work within cultural and artistic ensembles. Photographs of tradition bearers give a face to what might otherwise remain a mere catalog entry.
It is also worth noting that the reviewer of the edition is Prof. Golemović himself – the donor of the material – thus symbolically closing the circle: the material originated from his hands and returns to the public with his scholarly endorsement.
In this way, the edition does not seek to close the subject; on the contrary, it is designed as a point of departure. In the concluding passages, Živković herself outlines the next step: a precise systematization of the musical and dance traditions of the entire Nišava Valley. The first volume of the “Musical Archive” series lays a solid and reliable foundation for that endeavor.
LINK:
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