The music of Macedonia!! Macedonia shares a common heritage in popular music with many other countries and regions. The traditional music of the Macedonians brings together a mixture of multiple styles from Turkish, Albanian, Roma and other Balkan music idioms.
Macedonian folk songs are often historical in nature, with lyrics detailing great heroes and warriors, though love songs are also common. Rhythms from this region tend to be very complex, and Macedonian music exemplifies this trait. Old-fashioned musicians also have a distinctive characteristic of stretching out the beats to add tension to the notes.
The gaida bagpipe was the most common folk instrument, but has now become an instrument for concert recitation, drawing on recent legends like Pece Atanasovski, leader of the Radio Skopje ensemble, as the source of modern tradition.
Macedonian folk orchestras consist of a clarinet or saxophone, drum kit, bass guitar, accordion and guitar, sometimes with modern synthesisers and drum machines. These orchestras are very popular, and include virtuoso musicians like Skender Ameti on accordion and Miroslav Businovski on clarinet.
Newly-composed folk songs, often with a ballad-like tone, are also popular, especially Vaska Ilieva and Aleksander Sarievski. Local rock and roll bands like Leb i Sol have included folk elements in their compositions, with their lead singer and guitarist Vlatko Stefanovski making an international career partly based on his skill in reproducing traditional rhythm and tempo.
Calgija is an urban style which is played by bands (calgii) with a def (tambourine) and tarabuka (hourglass drum) providing percussion for the ut (lute), kanun (zither), clarinet and violin. Though modern musicians have updated the calgija into a spectrum of hard and soft, classical and pop sounds, some traditional musicians remain. Perhaps the most influential of recent years was Tale Ognenovski, who plays a wide variety of traditional and modern sounds.
Macedonia has a large Gypsy minority, many of whom are professional musicians. Long oppressed and forced into certain lower-class and disreputable occupations, Gypsies are, in many places, the only local professional performers. Gypsy orchestras typically contain electric guitars and other modern instruments. Popular Gypsy musicians include Esma Redzepova, Ferus Mustafov and Stevo Teodosievski.
