GUSLE - The Serbian national musical instrument

Steven Wagner - Stevan Vagner, Podrum COLLEGIUM MELODIUM and OLJA IVANOVIC -- Academic painter, present The Serbian gusle (pluralia tantum) ,usually made of maple wood. A guslar is an individual capable of reproducing and composing poems about heroes and historical events to the accompaniment of this instrument, usually in the decasyllable meter. There are records of an instrument named gusle (гоусли) being played at the court of the 13th-century Serbian King Stefan Nemanjić, but it is not certain whether the term was . The gusle has played a significant role in the history of Serbian epic poetry because of its association with the centuries-old patriotic oral legacy. Most of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation and the struggle for the liberation from it. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, many of these epics have been collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. At the beginning and in the middle of the nineteenth century, the first systematic collections of Serbian folk songs, tales, riddles and proverbs were published. They had been collected by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić "fresh from the lips of the people".