The author examines the indigenous diatonic and chromatic modes used in Albanian urban music and classifies them under traditional headings and as part of a newly established grouping, here termed south-western Balkan modes. The core of the work is the analysis of Albanian urban lyric songs, seen as an artistic version of the traditional Albanian urban songs.

This book represents a group of individual musical essays collected under common Albanian themes, with a particular focus on historical identities and traditional musical performance. It shows that, at the beginning of the 18th century, there was a growing interest in representing the Albanian hero Scanderbeg on the operatic stage, as some well-known composers of baroque music began to place a greater emphasis on music’s dramatic power to elicit emotional response. The book also notes that this sense of drama was also incorporated into the vocal forms such as opera.

For most musicians and musicologists in the West, traditional Albanian music remains an obscure subject, even though Albania has produced a monumental cultural and corresponding musical heritage. This book examines the distinct musical culture of southeastern Europe, both monophonic and polyphonic, by delineating its four main musical dialects: Gheg, Tosk, Lab and Urban. The origins, fundamental features, musical styles and genres of the four dialects are discussed. Additional topics covered include an historical and demographic analysis of Albania, the history of Albanian ethnomusicology and the various classifications in Albanian music. Relying heavily on field research and recordings, this text introduces traditional Albanian music to both ethnomusicologists and curious readers.

In some senses, Albania is a living museum of the past. Originally a small herding community in the most inaccessible reaches of the Balkans, the presence of Albanians in southeastern Europe has been documented for over a thousand years. Albanian traditional folk culture, which evolved over centuries of relative isolation, is surprisingly rich. Yet despite recent events this culture remains little known to the Western world. Due to the lasting effects of a half century of Stalinist dictatorship, very few individuals even in Albania know much about their own popular traditions. The Dictionary of Albanian Religion, Mythology, and Folk Culture makes available for the first time a wealth of knowledge about Albanian popular belief and folk customs. Alphabetical entries shed light on blood feuding, figures of Albanian mythology, religious beliefs, communities, and sects, calendar feasts and rituals, and popular superstitions, as well as birth, marriage, and funeral customs, and sexual mores. This unique volume will stand as the standard reference work on the subject for years to come.

The Epics of Gilgamesh, Homer, Vergil, Shahnameh, are sources of our knowledge of religious beliefs. This epic is a welcome introduction to the spiritual world of the Albanians as they fought the crusades. The "Songs of the Frontier Warrior is the first English-language translation ever made of Albanian epic verse. As the product of a little-known culture and a difficult, rarely studied language, the Albanian epic has tended to remain in the shadow of the Serbo-Croatian, or more properly, Bosnian epic, with which it has undeniable affinities. This translation may thus be regarded as an initial attempt to rectify the imbalance and to give scholars and the reading public in general an opportunity to delve into the exotic world of the northern Albanian tribes. The present bilingual edition offers a broad selection of the best known songs. Also included are an introduction, a glossaries of terms and sources, and a selective bibliography.

Since the early twentieth century, 'balkanization' has signified the often militant fracturing of territories, states, or groups along ethnic, religious, and linguistic divides. Yet the remarkable similarities found among contemporary Balkan popular music reveal the region as the site of a thriving creative dialogue and interchange. The eclectic interweaving of stylistic features evidenced by Albanian commercial folk music, Anatolian pop, Bosnian sevdah-rock, Bulgarian pop-folk, Greek ethniki mousike, Romanian muzica orientala, Serbian turbo folk, and Turkish arabesk, to name a few, points to an emergent regional popular culture circuit extending from southeastern Europe through Greece and Turkey. While this circuit is predicated upon older cultural confluences from a shared Ottoman heritage, it also has taken shape in active counterpoint with a variety of regional political discourses. Containing eleven ethnographic case studies, Balkan Popular Culture and the Ottoman Ecumene: Music, Image, and Regional Political Discourse examines the interplay between the musicians and popular music styles of the Balkan states during the late 1990s. These case studies, each written by an established regional expert, encompass a geographical scope that includes Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Croatia, Slovenia, Romania, Greece, Turkey, Serbia, and Montenegro. The book is accompanied by a VCD that contains a photo gallery, sound files, and music video excerpts.

This book asks how a study of many different musics in South East Europe can help us understand the construction of cultural traditions, East and West. It crosses boundaries of many kinds, political, cultural, repertorial and disciplinary. Above all, it seeks to elucidate the relationship between politics and musical practice in a region whose art music has been all but written out of the European story and whose traditional music has been subject to appropriation by one ideology after another. South East Europe, with its mix of ethnicities and religions, presents an exceptionally rich field of study in this respect. The book will be of value to anyone interested in intersections between pre-modern and modern cultures, between empires and nations and between culture and politics.

Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord collected singularly important examples of Albanian epic song while conducting fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania. A complete catalogue of their collected materials, Wild Songs, Sweet Songs is an authoritative guide to one of the most significant collections of Balkan folk epic in existence.

For Prespa Albanians, both at home in Macedonia and in the diaspora, the most opulent, extravagant, and socially significant events of any year are wedding celebrations. Combining photographs, song texts, and vibrant recordings of the music with her own evocative descriptions, ethnomusicologist Jane C. Sugarman focuses her account of Prespa weddings on notions of gendered identity, demonstrating the capacity of singing to generate and transform relations of power within Prespa society.

A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2018 In the tradition of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Geoff Dyer, a Grammy-winning producer discovers a powerful and ancient folk music tradition. In a gramophone shop in Istanbul, renowned record collector Christopher C. King uncovered some of the strangest—and most hypnotic—sounds he had ever heard. The 78s were immensely moving, seeming to tap into a primal well of emotion inaccessible through contemporary music. The songs, King learned, were from Epirus, an area straddling southern Albania and northwestern Greece and boasting a folk tradition extending back to the pre-Homeric era. To hear this music is to hear the past. Lament from Epirus is an unforgettable journey into a musical obsession, which traces a unique genre back to the roots of song itself. As King hunts for two long-lost virtuosos—one of whom may have committed a murder—he also tells the story of the Roma people who pioneered Epirotic folk music and their descendants who continue the tradition today. King discovers clues to his most profound questions about the function of music in the history of humanity: What is the relationship between music and language? Why do we organize sound as music? Is music superfluous, a mere form of entertainment, or could it be a tool for survival? King’s journey becomes an investigation into song and dance’s role as a means of spiritual healing—and what that may reveal about music’s evolutionary origins.