Barbara Majnarić is a Croatian singer and researcher of traditional music. She is active in researching vocal traditions through audio archives and field work — recording authentic singers and gathering songs from the Dinaric area of Croatia and Posavina region. Currently, her main interests are older layers of traditional songs, exploring the relationship between songs’ acoustic characteristics, their specific vocal qualities with the site’s landscape. Through active listening, singing and meeting with song’s carriers, she is trying to spot connections between body and voice, and voice and landscape, actively engaging in the local communities whose music she researches.
In artistic practice, her work has been grounded in the “non living” vocal and storytelling forms. Searching for music’s own logic in traditional and contemporary conceptions, she is trying to bring out their overlapping points and trajectories, with a reflection on music’s once applicable ritual function. Tools with which she approaches a song are embodied singing and listening, where listening is perceived not only as listening to a melody or harmony but trying to listen to the sound’s origin, the acoustic environment, and the underlying intention of the song.
