BLACK BILE

Black Bile is a solo album by Zoran Dukić conceived as an aesthetic investigation into melancholy within the history of the guitar repertoire. Taking as its point of departure the ancient concept of melas chole (“black bile”), traditionally associated with the melancholic temperament, the program brings together works from diverse historical periods and cultural contexts, highlighting the persistence and transformation of this idea over time.

The repertoire ranges from the Renaissance works of John Dowland, through the Baroque music of Sylvius Leopold Weiss, to significant 20th-century contributions by Claude Debussy, Manuel de Falla, William Walton, and Alan Rawsthorne. Central works of the modern guitar repertoire further enrich the program, including Agustín Barrios’s Choro da Saudade and Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion, presented in an arrangement by Roland Dyens, which extend the dialogue between art music and popular traditions.

The album also features Cinema Paradiso by Stephen Goss, establishing a direct relationship with cinematic language, as well as a personal transcription of Duke Ellington’s Melancholia, reflecting Dukić’s interest in cross-genre repertoire and in expanding the expressive boundaries of the guitar. Black Bile thus emerges as a project of strong conceptual coherence, in which interpretation, curatorship, and aesthetic reflection converge in a consistent artistic statement on melancholy as a central element of musical expression.