The fujara is a wind instrument that was developed by shepherds on the mountain slopes of Central Slovakia. It was designed to entertain the performer in solitude while tending to their flock of sheep. This origin of isolation and embeddedness within the lived ecology of hills and meadows helped shape deeply localized modalities of listening and performing. During the decades of socialist Czechoslovakia, the fujara was incorporated into folk ensembles and standardized folklorisms. In order to meet these new expectations, the instrument was technically modified to increase its versatility (Bernard Garaj 2021). The original environment and performing practice of the fujara, characterized by inwardness and a lack of audience-oriented performativity, is now effectively nonexistent.

Michaela Antalová searches for points of continuity for the instrument and its extinct places of origin. A contemporary fujarist, percussionist, and composer, Antalová has curated and performed in projects that reposition the fujara in new contexts, foregrounding its strongest features as well as its technical demands: airy, unsettled tones that provide rich textures and a tight acoustic balance within ensemble music.

Her newest work, Sun’s Daughter, embraces the friction between modern string instruments (Bendik Foss – viola, Tove Margrethe Erikstad – violoncello, Adrian Myhr – double bass) and wind instruments from older traditions: the baroque traverso flute (Hanne Jones Rekdal) and the fujara (Michaela Antalová). The slight divergence of the fujara’s pitch from standardized European scales is resolved through reciprocal tuning adjustments, allowing the fujara to retain some of its tuning idiosyncrasy, reminiscent of its original pastoral coloratura. All instruments in the ensemble are wooden, and wood serves as the ensemble’s unifying conceptual source, both as a corporeal material with acoustic capabilities and as a matter of deep ecology.

The ensemble members interpret and adapt the loosely composed structure of the work, often inspired by Slovak folk tunes, as well as sonic elements from the natural environment, such as in the piece Nightingale. The emotional locale of Sun’s Daughter resides in these acts of listening and adjusting, imagining and translating those imaginations into musical speech. The resulting work establishes a common code for instruments from various musical systems, rich in timbre and diverse in structure, spanning poignant rhythmic vignettes and slow passages, the plucking of strings and the fluttering of wind. Pastoral melodies sometimes emerge unexpectedly from intricate patterns, realigning with musical pasts that continue to sound the present.