Oral traditional ballads and lyric songs, the genres usually performed by female Muslim singers in Eastern Europe, cast a light on circumstances of everyday living and family affairs from a woman's perspective. At the same time they reveal the compositional patterns that are in some ways typical not only of these shorter forms but also of the longer epic songs customarily sung by men. Thus while on the thematic level women's songs reflect a female experience of the world, on the formal level they are very much a part of a broader tradition of oral performing.

Out of several folk oral tradi…