Chapter 02
Gusle, Epic Poetry and the Individual Singer
4 min
The gusle creates a tonal floor
The gusle usually has one string, bowed while the player holds the instrument vertically. Its carved body and ornament can attract visual attention, but the essential musical task is functional. The fiddle gives the singer a tonal reference, a rough continuous texture and a means of separating or intensifying narrative units.
Pitch may hover within a narrow range. To a listener expecting harmonic change, the accompaniment can sound static. Follow the consonants and line endings instead. The voice rises, tightens or relaxes according to textual pressure. A repeated bow figure can make a new name, challenge or image feel weightier.
The instrument and voice form one performance system. An instrumental gusle solo removed from singing can demonstrate timbre, but it does not explain epic art. The words carry genealogy, conflict, humour, moral judgement and memory.
Epic singers learn plots, characters, metrical patterns and formulaic language. They do not necessarily memorise every line as a fixed literary text. In performance, familiar verbal structures help the singer compose at speed, expand a scene and respond to the occasion.
Avdo Međedović of Obrov near Bijelo Polje became central to Milman Parry and Albert Lord's study of oral-formulaic composition in the 1930s. His version of The Wedding of Meho Smailagić reached 12,323 lines. The number matters because it demonstrates scale, but length alone is not artistry. Međedović controlled pacing, detail and narrative architecture across hours.
He was a Bosniak Muslim singer from Montenegro. Calling him simply a Montenegrin Homer may advertise his brilliance while erasing the Sandžak, Islamic and South Slavic epic world in which he worked.
Slavko Goranović's performance Gusle, recorded in a mountain hut at Vučje, is about the instrument, folk poetry and an older man's homesickness. It includes modern references to Europe and a European path. Tradition here is not a sealed old text; the singer uses inherited form to speak about the present.
Listen for how Goranović sets a line before the bow settles beneath it. His vocal grain, timing and emphasis are individual. Ethnomusicological work on Branko Perović makes the same point: a strong guslar develops personal style within collective rules.
This individuality complicates the idea that epic song is merely anonymous memory. The repertory can be shared while performances remain authored acts. Credit the singer whenever possible.
Recording technology cuts an epic into excerpts
The Smithsonian excerpt from 1952 lasts just over five minutes. A cassette by a modern guslar may divide material into sides; online video favours short clips. Each format changes how the listener experiences duration.
A full epic needs endurance, breaks and an audience willing to follow names and events. A clip favours an intense episode. Neither is false, but an excerpt is not the complete epic tradition. Catalogue information becomes important because early recordings often leave the performer unspecified.
Petar Perunović took gusle into Serbian immigrant communities in the United States and made early commercial recordings. Migration changed audience and medium without removing the epic function. A diaspora listener could hear homeland history on a phonograph in a city far from Montenegro.
Heroic memory can also become political weaponry
Epic repertory has carried historical memory and cultural identity, but heroic narratives can be mobilised for nationalism and exclusion. The wars of the 1990s made that danger impossible to treat as an abstract footnote. The instrument is not guilty, and every text is not innocent.
Listen to the specific words and context. Who is praised? Who is made enemy? Is the performance historical, commemorative, party-political or satirical? A powerful musical technique does not make a claim ethically harmless.
Vocal craft and verbal meaning belong together here. The force of a performance cannot substitute for understanding what is being said.
Women and other communities complicate the standard image
Public images of the guslar are overwhelmingly male, but women have performed gusle and entered recording history. Their relative invisibility reflects social expectations and archive choices, not a biological rule of the instrument.
Montenegrin epic history also includes Orthodox Christian, Muslim Bosniak and shared regional repertories. Albanian lahuta performance uses a closely related bowed instrument with its own language and histories. Similarity is an invitation to compare, not permission to collapse.
Three examples immediately widen the form: an archival Montenegrin excerpt, a named modern performer and Avdo Međedović's Bosniak epic achievement. Their contrast is more revealing than a row of patriotic gusle clips.
