A grandmother's kitchen in Milwaukee. An ornament in a melody that traveled from Sarajevo through a tunnel under an airport during a siege, through a family's displacement, through a granddaughter who did not know she was carrying it until a musician in Chicago asked: where did you learn that?
The ornament is a mordent — a rapid alternation between two adjacent notes that lasts less than a quarter of a second. In Bosnian sevdalinka singing, the mordent is not decoration. It is the place where the grief lives. The note bends toward the note beside it and returns, and in that bending is the entire weight of the song. Western music notation cannot transcribe it accurately. The interval is not a half step. It is not a quarter tone. It is the distance between the note the singer intends and the note the body remembers.