The lyrics are a straightforward ode to mothers and all the things they do for their children: “I love my mother / And my mother loves me,” the song begins. “She feeds me / And while I sleep peacefully / She washes and mends my clothes…”

“I went to [Melita] and I said, ‘Look at this. This is three and a half notes. What are we going to do with this?’” Bušić recalled. “I mean, it’s so simple. It’s a melody that can be sung really everywhere… It’s a children’s song.

“But look, that’s all that existed from the Arbanasi except for two or three more songs about Skanderbeg. And we had to put it on the CD,” she said.

“I said to Melita, ‘Make something!’”

Leaving the basic melody untouched, Dina e Mel created a complex, dissonant arrangement that brings out the tension in the song. In this way, today’s Arbanasi mothers and children can still cherish and repeat the singsong lyrics (“Dear mother, I love her deeply”) as they eat or get ready for bed. At the same time audiences with a sophisticated ear for classical music can appreciate its artistry.

This was Ivković’s homage to classical composers’ treatment of folklore. “To very simple compositions, they gave the most layers,” she said.

Composers throughout time have taken inspiration from what’s generally thought of as “folklore;” melodies recorded from everyday musicians have been treated with intricate and creative musical renderings. This historical practice in Soviet-era Poland was vividly portrayed in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2018 Oscar-nominated fiction film “Cold War.” In it we see ethnomusicologists record village residents and adapt their tunes into multi-part choral harmonies which are sung by world-class musicians and meant to represent what is authentically Polish.

A bit closer to Zadar, Bosnian sevdalinka artist Damir Imamović’s research has posited that Yugoslav folklorists collecting songs for the genre in the post-war period adapted their collected songs to meet the standards of the new socialist republic’s sound — radio-friendly compositions that met western musical standards and erased the genre’s eastern and oriental influences.

In the hands of different artists, Zadar’s Arbanasi songs could have been used to tell a narrow or nationalist narrative. Instead, Dina e Mel worked to emphasize and celebrate the cross-border linkages across the Balkans and the Adriatic that they discovered in Bušić’s tapes and shaped their new arrangements using musical sources and inspiration from across the region.

The album’s title track “Bërbili” (“Nightingale”) is an example of the surprising cross-border influences they discovered in Bušić’s corpus. Originally sung to her by her grandfather’s kum, Bušić later realized that it’s a tune with a storied past. Entering the Balkans through the Turkish song “Üsküdar’a Gider İken,” the song has been adapted into practically every Balkan language.

Bulgarian director Adela Peeva’s film “Whose is this song?” traces the song’s history and cultural transmission and uncovers Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, Greek, Serbian, and Bosnian versions of the song. The Arbanasi version appears to have been previously unknown outside Zadar.

Forgotten songs of the Zadar Arbanasi

A musical project aims to preserve Dalmatian Albanians’ musical heritage by creating it anew.

Emily Gray

Forgotten songs of the Zadar Arbanasi

A musical project aims to preserve Dalmatian Albanians’ musical heritage by creating it anew.

Emily Gray