Early Serbian Music

During the Turkish occupation from the mid-fifteenth century onward, the people sang to the gusle, played the tamburitza, zurle, tapan and others, far from the prying eyes of their conquerors. Well-known Serbian players of the gusle sojourned in the Polish royal courts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and later on in the Ukraine and in Hungary. Thus, continuity with the past was maintained and the ground prepared for the renaissance of Serbian music.

Although ecclesiastical eight-part melodies were sung, along with some other church songs, those melodies were created after the models of the fifteenth century.[1] There is a likelihood that church singing in the Ottoman period was done on the basis of the late Byzantine tradition and on the basis of Serbian folk singing. Under the Russian influence, forms of non-liturgical music such as chants appeared in Serbian dramas. In Belgrade, under Austrian rule at the time, a Greek singing school was founded in 1721, and at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the Karlowitz style of church singing was developed in Sremski Karlovci, the see of the Serbian metropolis.

All tracks produced by Ensemble Renaissance

The following people contributed to Early Serbian music

• Ljudmila Gross-Marić 
• Vojka Đorđević 
• Dragan Mlađenović 
• Georges Grujić 
• Ljubomir Dimitrijević 
• Gordana Kostić 
• Stanimir Spasojević