root salad Dunja Knebl
With a voice like Nico but happy, says Elizabeth Kinder, talking with the celebrated Croatian folk singer.
T
he celebrated Croatian folk singer Dunja Knebl gave up singing in public when she was 23, which if my maths is correct was sometime in 1969, after several successful outings as a solo artist accompanying herself on guitar and performing in a long-running acclaimed play she describes as “like Hair and against the war in Vitetnam.” She liked the show’s songs – protest songs – as they resonated with the music she’d fallen for between the ages of ten and thirteen, the time she lived in America where her diplomat father was posted. “Burl Ives,” she says, “made a great impact on my singing and made me realise what I wanted to do myself. The songs I heard from him were simple songs, with guitar. When we went back to Yugoslavia as it was then, I listened to Burl Ives and Pete Seeger. I loved the way each song told a complete story with few words and few notes. That impressed me.”
The gimlet-eyed amongst you will be asking “If she gave up singing in public 1969, even refusing pressure to appear for her country in the Eurovision Song Contest, what was she doing delivering a blinding set at last year’s EthnoAmbient Festival per- forming songs from her wonderful album Tamo Doli (Dancing Bear). Her twelfth album in fact? And with a track on our recent fRoots 47 compilation.”
Things changed, she tells me, when she was 47. It was 1993 and war. The year before, she’d discovered a book of folk songs from Medjimuria, an area in North Croatia, a place of Alpine slopes and vine- yards and lakes and orchards cut off from the rest of the country by the Drava River. “I had been singing all my life,” (as a child any visit would always end with food and wine and singing around the kitchen table, which she loved and has always continued to do) “and I found a book of songs from Medjimuria which I’d never heard. I did not know one song. Many of them were so powerful and touching. They were about war, about people unhappy to leave loved ones and the place they loved, the birds, the flowers, and having to fight in another land. The songs came from a time of other wars in my country during the 19th Century, when there was no Croatia, or Yugoslavia, just the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”
The songs had been noted down by a local poet and village choir-master, Florian Andrasec for the ethnomusicologist Vinko Zgnaec a famous song collector. Knebl came across this particular collection by chance in a Zagreb bookshop and it fanned the flames of her early anti-war passion already re-ignited by the outbreak of this latest Balkan conflict. So she went
out in public once more and sang the songs that spoke to the horror of the situa- tion. “My singing was against war. It was a protest at the time.”
Her connection with the music is not just political. “I want to record songs that have been written but never recorded. Bring them to life. The people who lived and composed the songs did not know how to write or read music, but the songs are of such beauty it would be a great pity if they did not survive. They are not simple, they are complicated rhythmically and the music is based on modal scales, dated some centuries ago. These songs are part of my past. It’s inside me. I have a very strong emotional link with them. I feel with the people who made them. I choose to record the ones that I can relate to now. I have the feeling I must do this, no one else is. The most powerful songs are those that are timeless, about emotions that all people feel – at all time anywhere.”
Knebl’s performance of the songs upsets the Croatian folk purists who demand that everything is accompanied by a tamborica (traditional lute) and per- formed in the style of the 1950s. But, she says, they don’t realise that their insistence
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is already non-traditional as some of the songs were originally unaccompanied vocal works or purely instrumental. And so she happily set to work on Tamo Doli with her band Kololira, which includes guitars and percussion and Croatia’s only hurdy- gurdy player, and came up trumps with a compelling, modern and timeless sound.
he songs she sings in her ageless, lovely, distinctive voice that reminds me of Nico (but happy!) have poetic lyrics that allow multiple readings. “The people in Medjimuria are very closed, they don’t like to talk about emotions. They sing words that never openly say ‘I love you’, but that is the hidden meaning. They have a very deep way of expressing emotions. And this means that you can find a meaning for yourself. You don’t have to understand the words if they are really good and the performer is one who can relate to the songs. You can feel what they are about even if you don’t have knowledge.”
And it’s easy to find yourself singing along, though I’ve discovered that others may wish they were at Dunja Knebl’s kitchen table and not their own at the time.
dunjaknebl.com/w2/category/english F 19 f
Photo: Antonia Kavas
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