Dina e Mel

Dina e Mel is a duo who researches and performs minority music, creating new music out of the small fragments that survived long and turbulent history of the Balkans. The result is an album that erases the current borders of the Eastern Balkans and melts together elements of music in unexpected ways.

Dina Bušić and Melita Ivković, Dina e Mel, play together since 2012. Both classicaly trained musicians, Dina (musicologist and singer), Melita (guitarist) from Music Academy in Zagreb, they live in their hometown, Zadar (Croatia). They share the passion for research in music as well as the excitement for searching paths that can help them create new output of authentic, old and undiscovered music traditions.

Their project “Nightingale” builds around almost completely forgotten music of Arbresh that migrated from Skadar Lake (now microlocations in Montenegro) to the area just next to the Venetian city walls of Zadar.

Dina made an ethnological processed research and Melita created a very brave interpretation of the findings, using her wide array of music knowledge with the fragments of music that survived turbulent history full of twists through last 300 years in Zadar.

The people of Arbresh created their own language, a mix of old Albanian, Italian and Croatian (that they included when they transferred to Zadar and started forgetting parts of their native language). Some of the traditional songs that survived are authentic, some of them are shared with Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Turkey, and some of them were original pieces composed by Arbresh musicians.

The result of Dina e Mel’s work and approach is an album that erases the current borders of the Eastern Balkans and melts together elements of music in unexpected ways. Dina e Mel share the respect of the authentic base, but also the courage to build with elements of classical music, Balkan world music, Italian tradition and even their passion and love, fado and bossa nova.