FARMINGTON – The Maine Women’s Balkan Choir will perform at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 8, in Nordica Auditorium at the University of Maine at Farmington.

The choir will sing traditional songs of love, heartbreak, work and daily village life. The choir is made up of about 20 midcoast region women of all ages, walks of life and ethnic backgrounds, who enjoy the powerful and haunting music of the Balkans. The group has been singing together for more than three years.

Those who have heard this group perform have described their sound as wonderfully strange, stirring and dynamic.

One member of the choir says, “The songs we sing come from the peasant traditions of the Balkans. They were meant to be sung while working in the fields with one group singing out to the other, and the women in a neighboring field replying with another verse or another song. Many of the songs are ‘call and response’ style. The women’s voices had to be projected long distances, so they perfected a method of vocalizing that is both powerful and beautiful, very Eastern sounding, really, and a distinct manner of harmonizing that relies heavily on the use of a drone voice. The result is sometimes strange sounding to Western ears but very compelling.”

The choir performs songs from Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia and other countries in the Balkan region as a whole and in smaller vocal ensembles. It also has a trio, Sviata Duma, made up of the three women who founded the choir, Kristen Stockman, Ann Tattengorst and Kim Ries of Ellsworth.

The choir, which sings primarily a cappella, will be joined at the end of the concert by the Bar Harbor Folk Orchestra for several songs accompanied by flute, balalaika, accordion and trumpet, as well as for some singing and easy-to-learn circle dancing after the concert.

Admission is $6 for adults, $5 for seniors and students, $2 for children under age 12. UMF students are admitted free with ID.

The concert is sponsored by The Arts Institute of Western Maine in affiliation with the University of Maine at Farmington.