CPR Performance Archive

GIVING VOICE 11 - SVETLANA SPAJIC (SERBIA) [April 2009]
DEDICATION TO THE SETTING SUN

SATURDAY 25 APRIL, 6PM

For eighteen years Svetlana Spajic has been researching the ancient, orally transmitted vocal traditions and peculiar expressive idioms of Serbian and Balkan non-tempered, a capella singing, its unique vocal techniques and ornamentation. But Svetlana is not just and foremost a singer of traditional ethnic music, but a phenomenon whose imposing stage and artistic presence reveals deep, obsessive and elemental dedication and effort to restore contact with the greatest themes in the history of Western civilisation: Eros and Thanatos.

“I will try to meet the audience with the world of Serbian oral tradition which vanishes literally every day in front of my eyes and pay tribute to some of those great spirits who formed me singing; and so, in dedication to my Setting Suns – my old friends and teachers from the remote Serbian villages.

Are we capable of passing over their oral tradition today? How? And what if this effort is in vain, simply because we don’t live in the same world? We will try to answer, and might raise instead hundreds of new questions… again.

But it doesn’t matter.

What really counts is that, in their quiet, grandmothers will hear from us our love and effort.”

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Giving_Voice_Brochure_PDF.pdf
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