Free sheet music for Balkan songs

Music transcribed by Michael Gordon

Dedicated to Tom Deering

Here are sheet music and lyrics for more than 50 songs from the southern Balkans that I’ve transcribed over the years. Most are from the repertoire of Balkanarama, the Seattle dance band I helped start in 1997. The charts are PDFs that include lyrics and translations, with links to hear the songs on YouTube. They are available to musicians anywhere for free. I’ll add more as time permits. Enjoy!

Players whom I greatly respect say the best way to learn this style of music is by ear. They’re probably right, but the world is full of musicians who like to see notes on paper, including our band when we learn a new song. I hope these charts will inspire people to explore Balkan music in live performance and on YouTube, and to find opportunities to experience in person the union of Balkan music, song and dance as a living art form, not just as notes on paper. The East European Folklife Center, which runs wonderful Balkan music, song and dance camps on the east and west coasts of the U.S. every summer, is an excellent place to start.

This collection includes music, lyrics and English translations for songs mostly from the southern Balkans: Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Greece and neighboring countries. Among these are a number of songs of the Roma, the people once called “Gypsies” (a term now considered a slur) who migrated from northwest India to Europe starting about a thousand years ago. Rom performers have long been an important part of traditional live music in the Balkans, both within their own communities and as hired performers at weddings and other events, and in recent years have discovered global audiences for their music.

Caveat emptor: The charts here are NOT the original or official scores for these songs. They are just my transcriptions of recordings originally found on vinyl, cassettes, CDs and now YouTube. Many versions of these songs exist, and the version known in your village might be different from the version known in my village. Or I might just be wrong, so if you see errors or potential improvements in the notes, chords, lyrics or translations, please mention them in comments and I’ll take a look.

The images of music and lyrics shown in the blog posts are medium-quality previews. Click on the “View high-resolution PDF” link below each image to see, save and print a high-resolution version.

Lead sheets are PDFs created in Finale and show notes, chord progressions and, if there’s enough space, lyrics and translations, which otherwise are shown on a separate lyric sheet. Think of these charts as no more than a starting point. While the transcriptions hint at ornamentation, they don’t attempt to capture all the nuances of the original performance. Listen closely to musicians from the Balkans, live or on YouTube. These lead sheets do not include improvised parts, including introductory taqsims and instrumental solos during songs – you’re on your own for those.

(Please comment if you see any charts where the chord placement over the lyrics looks wrong. I think it’s a Finale bug.)

Lyric sheets, available for some but not all songs, are PDFs created in Microsoft Word and include the words and chords, but not notes, for singers and/or rhythm players. Singers will need to listen to recordings of the songs to understand their prosody (how the syllables fit the melody), hence the YouTube links. English translations of highly variable quality are shown for almost all songs; if you can improve them, please do in the comments.

Lyrics for songs in languages that use non-Latin alphabets are transliterated to the Latin alphabet using commonly used diacritics. In my village of Seattle, we use â for the Bulgarian unstressed vowel. (Alas, diacritical marks are absent from blog posts like this, including song titles – no se puede in WordPress.) Guides to the orthography and pronunciation of Balkan languages are available elsewhere online and are not included here.

The charts credit song authors and source recordings to the extent of my imperfect knowledge. Some of the songs are traditional folk melodies with no known author. Communist-era recordings did not always credit composers and performers accurately. Some modern artists have written new lyrics for traditional melodies and claimed them as copyrighted compositions. If you have more accurate information about authors or original performers, please mention it in comments. I can remove copyrighted songs at the request of their legal owners if they object to this iota of unofficial free publicity.

The songs are in the keys in which our band plays them, which is not always the same as the source recordings. We transpose songs as needed to make them comfortable for our SATB vocalists. If another key works better for you, go for it.

Some of the charts use the name “Macedonia” to refer to the former Yugoslav republic and “Greek Macedonia” to refer to the Macedonian regions of Greece. FYR Macedonia has agreed to use the name “North Macedonia,” so we’ll try to use that term going forward, though it’ll take us time to update existing charts.

My grateful thanks to all who, wittingly or otherwise, have enabled me to assemble these charts, particularly the lyrics and translations: Carol Silverman, Mary Sherhart, Kultur Shock, Amir Arslanagic, Anton and Mina Kirilov, Jana Rickel, Laura Blumenthal, Sava and Ben Hruska, Martha Forsyth and Jane Sugarman. I’ve taken the liberty of showing some lyrics and translations from my precious hard copy of Rromani Songs from Central Serbia and Beyond, by Dusan Ristic and Suzanne Leonora (can’t find a link to purchase it, alas) and my well-thumbed 1994 second edition of Balkan Folk Songs, edited by Carol Silverman (ditto).

Personal footnote: I’m an American of mostly British Isles descent with no family connection to the Balkans. I fell in love with Balkan music and dance in Los Angeles during the 1970s, where I performed as a dancer with Aman and a musician with Avaz, Kárpátok, the dance band Nama and the Balkan women’s choirs Nevenka and Slaveja. During the communist era I traveled in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, once spent a month playing Hungarian folk music in Hungary, and later visited Greece and Macedonia. In 1996 I moved to the Seattle area, where my wife, Eva Moon, who sang with Nevenka, Slaveja and Kárpátok, and I played a few impromptu duets at Friday night Balkan dancing. (The first time we showed up, Bruce asked us, “Have you ever done this before?”) Drummer Zuki, a former Washington state baton twirling champion, and saxman Ferko, who used to play Zappa covers, started jamming with us. We began calling ourselves Balkanarama in 1997 and have played at dances, parties, weddings, festivals and nightclubs in the Pacific Northwest ever since, now with Krk (the man, not the island) on six-string bass. We’ve released three CDs, two of which are available at CD Baby: Nonstop, Black Sea (an out-of-print curiosity), and Balkanarama Live.

This Balkan sheet music archive is free – I have no right to profit from any of these songs – but if you’d like to support our band’s other activities, you can hit our “Donate” tip jar, follow us on Facebook or join our email list, all in the right-hand column of this page. Thank you!

Nota bene: Balkanarama is the name of a band in Seattle, a traveling music event in the UK, and a hostel in Mostar, Bosnia. To be clear, this sheet music is from the band in Seattle, not the UK event or the Mostar hostel. We’re pretty sure we used the name first, but the world is big enough for all of us.