Alma Subašić

Alma Subašić, born on  30 May 1994, is a Sevdalinka performer and has been singing since the age of ten.

Her father’s accordion and the home environment in which Alma grew up moulded her, so that by the age of 10 she was already interpreting the sevdalinka in such a way that many experts from the music world advised her to record her first album immediately so that what she herself said was ‘something she had never heard before’ would be preserved. After the Sevdah Festival in Konjic, where she won unanimously from both the audience and the jury of experts, Alma auditioned for the public broadcaster Bosnia and Herzegovina and recorded the first single “Veni moja ljubavi” for the radio and television archive. She then completed the album entitled “Pjesme u srcu i duši desetogodišnje djevojčice”, which later went into three editions.

This was soon followed by her first humanitarian solo concert in her home town, where she performed with a large orchestra and thrilled the audience.

Not long afterwards, Alma recorded her first original songs, performed at concerts and festivals and won high places in competitions.

At the age of twelve, she performed with the sevdalinka in Lisinski (Zagreb) for the first time and has traditionally taken part in “Sevdah in Lisinski” concerts ever since.

At the same time, she completed both primary school and music school, then high school. As one of the youngest Sevdah performers, she represented Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Sevdalinka, Bosnian tradition and culture all over the world, together with important names of Sevdah, such as Hanka Paldum, Meho Puzić, Zehra Deović and Beba Selimović.

She has recorded a considerable number of Sevdalinka songs for the Bosnia and Herzegovina Radio and Television Archive. She has sung in numerous concert halls: Benaroya Hall Seattle, Beethoven Hall Stuttgart, Atatürk Hall Istanbul, Cultural Centre Toronto, Sava Center Belgrade, Trade Union Hall (mts Hall) Belgrade, National Theatre Sarajevo.

She won the BiH Oscar in the “Discovery of the Year” category and was honoured as best debutante at the Ilidža Festival.

She has represented the Bosnian sevdah and the country’s tradition all over the world (Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Poland, Canada, America). It is said that her voice touches where we are rarely touched in life.

Together with other ethnomusicologists, she is one of the founders of the SEVDAH Foundation: a cultural, research and archival organisation dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Sevdalinka. She is the owner, designer and founder of the Šapa LAB brand, which offers multifunctional furniture for pets and their owners and is recognised as a high-quality and unique brand in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

She has a degree in architecture and works in the field of monument protection. She is a student in the second cycle of the Academy of Music at the Department of Ethnomusicology under the supervision of Professor Tamara Karača-Beljak, where she researches the connection between tangible and intangible heritage – the architecture, the sevdalinka and the specific environment in which it was created. She is a member of the National Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the International Council for Traditional Music.

In 2024, she released the album Sevdah del Alma, produced by BHRT’s music production department. Alma means soul in Spanish, and Sevdah del Alma literally means Sevdah from the soul. So are the sevdalinka songs on this album, chosen for their sensitivity, accompanied by saz, a fusion of saz and violin, piano or the full orchestra. Some of them are rarely performed in this version, such as “Kad puhnuše sabahzorski vjetrovi”, “Omere prvo gledanje”, “Poletjela dva goluba”, “Oj sevdahu što si težak” or “Akšam geldi”, so that through new arrangements with the well-known orchestra of the BHRT music production, a retro sound in a new guise and a subtle musical background, the full emotional expression of their interpretation came to light.

 

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