It’s not only a new month, and for many of us, a year since our lives went on pause for quarantine/lockdown. There are plenty of things to be upset about (we will save the post-punk and moody Smiths tunes for later), but there is a lot to be happy about. For starters, it’s the first week of Women’s History Month—which means a month of celebrating all of the badass self-identifying women in art + music.
We will have a new takeover each week this month, beginning with one of our FAVORITE groups: ROSA.
ROSA is a New York based, all-female vocal ensemble that unites singers from 4 different continents with a mission to preserve and nurture the authentic form of traditional, non-tempered singing from Serbia.
The group was formed in New York, in 2014, by Marija Stojnic, documentary filmmaker and traditional Serbian music vocalist and Aleksandra Denda, vocalist, composer and Berklee College of Music Alumna. The concept of the ensemble was inspired by Marija’s documentary titled Girl Who Opposed the Sun.
ROSA performs songs that belong to one of the most heterogeneous musical traditions in the Balkans, and date decades, often centuries back and have been surviving in rural areas of Serbia and the surrounding countries. Irreducible to the Western tonal system, these songs are impossible to write down with precision and are carried on as an oral tradition.
They’ve performed at numerous and critically acclaimed venues – The Kennedy Center, MoMA, Carnegie Hall, Boston University Theater, The Collective School of Music, Mendocino Festival, Golden Festival, and of course, the International Women’s Day celebration that Left Bank threw a few years back.
In 2018 ROSA performed at a sold-out show at Carnegie Hall titled Sounds of Serbia and Peace First Summit hosted by the philanthropist and Barack Obama’s sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.
Stay tuned this week as ROSA curates a playlist of some of their hits, sits down with Left Bank for an interview, and (what we are most excited about) gives us a live performance. In the meantime, support them by following ROSA on Facebook and Instagram.