The Georgian people, inhabiting a land the size of West Virginia wedged between Russia and Turkey, speak a group of languages related to no other outside the Caucasus Mountain region. Georgia is an island musically as well, exceptional in having an ancient, deep-rooted tradition of polyphony (music in several independent voices), while all the cultures that surround it, and all the cultures that have occupied or passed through it, are firmly monophonic. Georgian polyphony appears to be truly autonomous and original, and its rules of counterpoint and tuning derive from nowhere else. Three-part singing in Georgia was probably in full flower by the ninth century, substantially preceding the modern development of polyphony in Europe. The density and complexity of the polyphony you hear on our album is traditional — none of these songs is a setting of old material in a modern idiom.

Georgian liturgical music, on the other hand, has been documented since the Middle Ages. Georgia formally embraced Christianity in the fourth century, before the Roman Empire did. Between the fifth and eighth centuries, scholars in several Georgian monasteries — in Greece and Palestine as well as in Georgia — began composing music for the liturgy. Certainly by the twelfth century, and possibly as early as the eighth and ninth centuries, the Georgian liturgy was being sung in three-part polyphony. Those settings were written down and preserved. Some of the manuscripts still exist, but their musical notation (marks placed above and below the syllables of text) can no longer be understood.

Neither those assumptions nor all of the conclusions we draw from them are universally shared. In spite of decades of musicological study, traditional Georgian tuning is a puzzle that has not yet given up all its answers. In our own search we have drawn inspiration from old recordings and from contemporary Georgian scholars; the tunings we use on our album seem to us consistent both with actual village practice and with an emerging theoretical model worked out by one of us (Stuart) and by a fellow Georgian music specialist, Guy Brewer.

The chonguri is a long, four-stringed, fretless lute that can be plucked or strummed. The highest string is an unfingered half-length drone string. The chonguri in its present form emerged around the middle of the eighteenth century in Samegrelo; its use has long since spread to the rest of western Georgia. Like the other Georgian string instruments, the chonguri is chiefly used as support for vocal music, though some virtuoso solo pieces exist.

The panduri is a strummed three-stringed fretted lute from eastern Georgia. The characteristic flat-fifth tuning of the panduri is the result of frets that divide the octave into seven roughly equal steps, producing a low major second, a high minor third, and a high fourth, all of which are consistent with quintave scales, but also a low fifth, which is unique. The fifths can be, and often are, slightly improved at the expense of the unisons between strings.

The chunir is a three-stringed fretless viol, skin-faced and open-backed, about the size of a banjo but bowed like a cello — except that the bridge is flat, so all three strings are always heard. Unlike the panduri and the chonguri, which are used throughout eastern and western Georgia respectively, the chunir belongs exclusively to the music of the northwestern mountains.

A Mravalzhamier needs an identifier like "Benia's" because this traditional song of congratulation and good wishes comes in dozens of musical settings from all over Georgia. Some have additional text in the same vein, but most, like this version, use only the word mravalzhamier, stretched out, broken up, and sometimes injected with stray vowels. A Mravalzhamier would customarily be sung at the banquet table, as part of the elaborate ritual of toasts and accompanying songs (see Guruli Vakhtanguri for another of these), but it's surprising in how many other contexts it can come in handy.

The late Benia Mikadze was the leader of the Imeretian regional ensemble Sanavardo, and into his eighties he was a formidable champion of folk music. When Anzor Erkomaishvili invited Benia to appear on his folk-music TV show, he introduced him with the usual platitudes, ending with "And now it's my honor to welcome Benia Mikadze." Benia, tiny, gaunt, white-bearded, leaned into the microphone, pointed a challenging finger at Anzor, and, without saying a word, sang out the first note of a Gurian toasting song — a song that required Anzor to come in with the next voice just one note later. Anzor is not your average talking head, and after just a millisecond with his mouth hanging open he came in correctly, and our friend Malkhaz Erkvanidze from the Anchiskhati Choir (who were all waiting in the wings to sing with Benia later in the show) hustled on stage a moment later, just in time to supply the third voice. It made great TV.

Both Malkhaz and Benia came from the Imeretian town of Samtredia, in an area where the music carries influences from both Guria and Imereti — regions whose styles are closely related anyway. This Mravalzhamier setting, either Benia's own invention or at least a version he adopted as his signature song, leans musically toward Guria. Malkhaz, whose father sang in Benia's ensemble, transcribed it when he was an ethnomusicology student. Years later we came across Malkhaz's transcription by roundabout means, learned it, and casually launched into Benia's personal Mravalzhamier the next time we were at table with the Anchiskhati Choir. Malkhaz froze, his fork halfway to his mouth, the look on his face almost as good as the one on Anzor's when Benia suddenly began to sing.

Though some songs are many hundreds of years old, folk music in Georgia is still a living form, and new songs in the traditional styles are being created even today. Chkimi Toronji, whose plaintive, melancholy tone is characteristic of a whole genre of traditional "heartbreak" song, was composed around 1931 by a husband-and-wife team, Beglar and Kionia Akobia, with words by Beglar's uncle, Pavle Akobia. The Akobias came from Zugdidi, so the text is in Megrelian, the language of the western Georgian lowland region of Samegrelo. Megrelian differs from Georgian about the way German does from English: there are many obvious cognates, but the languages are not really mutually intelligible. (Megrelians grow up speaking both.) Though Carl once met the Akobias' daughter, we actually learned this song from an old Melodiya LP by the choir of the Megrelian village of Tsalenjikha. The accompanying instrument is the chonguri.

The medieval liturgical music composed in Georgian monasteries comes in two styles: eastern ("Kartli-Kakhetian" — see Jvarsa Shensa) or western ("Gurian"). The differences between them parallel the differences in the folk music of east and west: in the east, more triadic chords and greater importance of the middle, more melodic voice; in the west, fewer triads and greater independence of the parts. In addition, chants in the western Georgian style (also called the "Gelati School" after the principal medieval monastery identified with it) fall into two modes, simple and mixed, where the relative independence of the lines is again the issue.

Movedit da Vsvat, a chant for the Eucharist, is an example of the western Georgian mixed-mode style. In keeping with the long tradition of written rather than orally preserved liturgical music, we learned this from a book, Kakhi Rosebashvili's 1976 collection of Georgian hymns in the Gurian style (Kartuli Galoba: Guruli Kilo). Rosebashvili recorded and transcribed the parts as remembered by older singers, notably Artem Erkomaishvili, the great-uncle of our friend and mentor Anzor Erkomaishvili. But Rosebashvili's transcriptions are piano-ready and therefore no help in deciding questions of tuning. We tune the liturgical music the same way we do the folk music: the same methods of counterpoint construction apply, bringing with them the same imperatives of tuning by quintaves instead of octaves, and scalar motion by intervals that lie between a half and a whole step.

1. Black-eyed girl, woman, darling,
2. Why must you kill my heart? Woman, darling,
3. Either give me my knife, woman, darling,
4. Or call me your own. Woman, darling,
5. Black-eyed girl, woman, darling.

The eastern Georgian regions of Kartli and Kakheti share most of their musical repertoire, though their styles of performance are distinctive. This ballad contains both styles: the triplet meter of the choral section suggests Kartli, while the melismatic, highly ornamented, Persian-influenced vocal style of the solo is typical of sun-parched Kakheti, famous for its vineyards.

Much of the folk repertoire from Guria, in the steep hills and hollows of southwestern Georgia, is characteristically sung by a trio: strictly one voice to a part, so that each singer can improvise and embellish freely. As with most Gurian trios, there's not much text in Shavi Shashvi, and what little there is goes by in three quick bursts. But some of what may sound like nonsense isn't: "ali!" is what you say to urge a dog on, and "am! am!" is what Georgian dogs say instead of "bow wow!"

To explain how we learned this and several other songs on our album, it's necessary to introduce Anzor Erkomaishvili, the director of the renowned professional Rustavi Ensemble, based in Tbilisi. Anzor is also the most visible and best-connected advocate of Georgian folk music around, partly through his weekly TV show, "100 Georgian Folk Songs," which he uses to spotlight the work of musicians old and new. (He put Kavkasia on the show and made us overnight celebrities.) Anzor is a scholar and a fierce preserver of the old singing traditions, and himself the last in a long line of famous singers: the Erkomaishvili Brothers were giants of Gurian trio music before the First World War.

We sort of knew one version of this particular and essential Gurian trio before we went to Georgia. But when Anzor learned that we intended to perform Georgian music in America as a trio, he said, "Forget that Shavi Shashvi you know — I'm going to teach you the version my grandfather and his brothers sang." And so he did. Though he was seriously ill at the time, we were summoned to his bedside. At first he could barely lift his head from the pillow to sing us our parts, but note by note, line by line, voice by voice, he pieced together the song in our heads. The process took all day, including a break for a grand dinner, during which Anzor — still lying down but within reach of the table — prompted us to deliver the string of ritually required toasts in the proper traditional order, while those fragments of Shavi Shashvi already lodged precariously in our heads began to dissolve away in wine. Then we went back to work again. As the hours passed and we gradually wilted, Anzor got steadily stronger, till he was sitting up and gesticulating to correct us, while his wife and his elderly mother hovered anxiously nearby, trying to restrain him. But we couldn't leave till he had heard us sing Shavi Shashvi flawlessly from top to bottom.

Part of what Anzor was really teaching us — while we thought he was just teaching us another variant of a song we knew — was the grammar by which allowable and cool new variants are constructed, and the version we now sing incorporates some moves of our own.

Svaneti, in the harsh environment of the high Caucasus Range, supports a sparse population of rugged, self-reliant people, isolated from the culture of lowland Georgia. For centuries, the Svans fought a perpetual low-level war against the Muslim inhabitants of the north slopes of the Caucasus (see Riho for one instance of this). All over Svaneti, villagers built clusters of single-family defensive towers in which to hide during raids; most of those towers still stand, giving Svan villages their characteristic odd medieval high-rise look.

The accompanying instrument is the chunir. Stuart's first chunir teacher was Islam Pilpani: farmer, carpenter, and unrivaled master musician of Svaneti (as well as regional chess champion). Islam leads the regional folk ensemble Riho, which draws singers from the regional capital Mestia and the villages around it and includes almost all the people who have been our mentors for Svan music.

This Easter hymn and its companion piece, Kriste Aghsdga, are in the simple mode of the western Georgian "Gelati School" style. We perform these hymns the way they are done by the Anchiskhati Choir, a tight-knit, highly motivated band of a half-dozen young conservatory graduates who serve as the choir of the venerable Anchiskhati Church in the old quarter of Tbilisi. As musicologists and as singers they are leading and shaping the revival of the western Georgian style of the sung liturgy, specializing in the simple mode. We met them by attending service at their beautiful fifth-century church one Sunday morning and listening to them. They befriended us immediately; in fact, the service was barely over before they had cornered us against the ancient stone wall outside, already trying to figure out what crazy Gurian trios we knew.

In the years since that first meeting, our warm embrace by the Anchiskhati singers has led to passionate debate over everything from theology to the authentic tuning of Georgian music. They don't entirely endorse our tuning approach, and we're curious to hear what they think of our new album. Still, they have had a profound influence on Kavkasia's repertoire, tuning practice, and even vocal timbre — and they know more of the words to "The Sound of Music" than we do.

An eminent painter we knew, scandalized to hear that we weren't learning any poetry as part of our Georgian language lessons, taught us the mysterious first stanza of this song, not as lyrics but as spoken verse. As a memory aid he illustrated each line with a fast charcoal drawing — road, wind, butterfly, dress, cross. We repaid him by teaching him "I'm a Little Teapot," complete with gestures.

We learned the other stanzas and the musical setting on a weekend hunting expedition to the easternmost tip of Georgia. Our hunting friends had brought along very little water and not nearly enough spare tires, but they had wine sufficient for ten times our number, and plenty of musical instruments. Camped out under the moonlight, they sang lots of songs, but this one they sang over and over again: the arid, treeless expanse of sunflower fields in the middle of which we had broken down turned out to be the Shiraki Plain.

This is a work song with a text consisting entirely of nonsense syllables — but exactly prescribed syllables that you can't switch around, any more than you could sing "la la fa" in an English madrigal. There are naduris of all flavors from all over Georgia, each of which originally accompanied the nadi, the shared work, such as harvesting, traditionally done by a community's farmers on each of their lands in turn. As in most work songs everywhere, a soloist sets the pace for song and work. Out in the fields this song undoubtedly went on for much longer than we do it. We have heard a group of farmers from the region of Imereti do a naduri that lasted more than ten minutes, and even that was just their concert version.

You wouldn't think so from the title, but the short naduri we do actually comes from the region of Lechkhumi, in the highlands of north central Georgia. At the time we recorded it, we thought it was native to the neighboring lowland region of Samegrelo, because that's what the choir of the Megrelian village of Chorotsku told Carl when he visited the village and sang it with them. (We had learned the song from the Melodiya LP recorded by that choir.) But after the release of our album we discovered that this naduri is generally believed to have originated in Lechkhumi, even if it migrated to Samegrelo long enough ago to be considered local repertoire there.

The highest village in Svaneti is Ushgul, higher than any village in the Alps inhabited year-round. From Ushgul, sometime long ago, all the young men set out on a raid through the mountains against a village of Muslim Balkarians on the north slopes of the Caucasus. Only one man returned. The cryptic Svan text of Riho commemorates that event. Sustaining the Svan reputation for toughness, the person who translated the text for us assured us that the song is not a lament, but a celebration of the heroism of the survivor.

The music of Svaneti is another heroic survivor: the ancient musical forms are better preserved in Svaneti than anywhere else in Georgia, and the importance and seniority of Svan music are clear to other Georgians singers. The music of no other region has so successfully withstood the influence of piano temperament and other unfriendly modernization. Riho shares with Zar a primordial language of tightly confined vocal lines, simple repetitive movement, and uncompromisingly non-Western scales.

If you're not sure what "duckaboo" means, neither are we. It's our attempt to translate kwatito, which doesn't mean anything in Georgian, though kwati means duck in Gurian dialect. Whether for that or more mysterious reasons, every occurrence of kwatito in this little Gurian trio sends Georgians young and old into giggles: a disconcerting thing for a singer the first time it happens. As for how a duckaboo could belong to a musical instrument, space limitations sadly prevent us from giving a full explanation here.

Anzor Erkomaishvili taught us Piruzi before dinner at his house on the very last evening of our first long stay in Georgia — one for the road, in a way. The whole time we were working on the parts with him, a small child in his household marched from room to room irrepressibly chanting "kwatito!"

Kriste Aghsdga, an Easter hymn in the simple mode of the western Georgian "Gelati School" style, shares with Aghdgomasa Shensa and the hard-to-place Tsmindao Ghmerto a three-fold iteration of its brief material, evoking the Trinity. The three voice parts used in all Georgian liturgical music (solo passages never occur) are also considered to represent the Trinity — whether only in retrospect or as the conscious plan of the medieval monastic composers of these settings. The liturgy is not complete until the three voices meet as one, signifying the union of the Trinity; any chant that ends on an open fifth is unresolved, signifying that the service will continue.

Only the liturgical pieces on our album begin with all three voices together, while all the folk songs, except for the handful that have an instrumental lead-in, begin with a solo, even if a very brief one. That's a practical necessity in folk music: without a conductor, you need either a soloist or an instrument to pitch the song and set a tempo (and, at an informal setting like a dinner table, even to let all the singers know what the next song is). In the liturgical music, the three parts do start together, but within the context of a church service all these pieces would immediately follow a text chanted by a priest — who then effectively serves as the introducing soloist.

We learned this ballad from our friends in the Anchiskhati Choir, who first sang it for us at parties, and from an old recording by Benia Mikadze and his ensemble, Sanavardo. Like much of the secular repertoire inherited from Sanavardo by the Anchiskhati Choir, Utsinares comes from the area around the town of Samtredia, where a nominally Imeretian song like this one can have a lot of Gurian shadings. The accompanying instrument is the chonguri.

In spite of the religious tone of part of the text, this is not sacred music: only the liturgy itself is sung in the Orthodox service, and no instruments are permitted in church music. Instead these lines are drawn from the Tamariani, a 19th-century epic poem by Simon Gugunava. The first two verses comprise one rhymed quatrain, from the solemn dedicatory introduction to the poem. The last two verses form another quatrain, drawn from much later in the same poem, after everybody already knows who Shalva is. The "Shalva" quatrain turns up in several other songs that need a dose of text, and one whole Gurian song is actually entitled Shalva Chemo Siqvarulo ("Shalva, My Darling").

At many banquets we have attended, when the first four or five hours at the table have gone by and people's spirits are high and their feet are restless, a dance song, like this one from the Kartli region of central Georgia, can propel a few lively souls — and by no means always the youngest or the thinnest — in a rapid circle around whatever open floor remains next to the line of crowded tables laid end to end. Men and women spiral around each other, never touching. The men prance and caper like gallant roosters, sometimes on the knuckles of their toes like Tsangala, while the women glide gracefully around with such tiny steps that they seem to have wheels for feet. As for the singers left at the table, deep in wine and singing and clapping faster and faster, it's a good thing for them the parts to this song are simplicity itself — though at full speed the words are another matter.

Tsangala has been rattling around the collective repertoire of Americans who sing Georgian music longer than any other song on our album. All three of us in Kavkasia came out of the Kartuli Ensemble, a larger amateur group founded in 1985, which in turn was born out of the Yale Russian Chorus, a university group that has performed mostly Russian choral music since 1953, and which added a handful of Georgian songs to its repertoire in the late Sixties. The first small hint that there might be life for Georgian music in North America out from under the shadow of Russian music came in 1980, when five members of the Yale Russian Chorus (including Stuart) performed a specially prepared all-Georgian set at an annual student-run recital, called "Sheep's Clothing," devoted to avant-garde music — an event where the usual fare involved music majors in tuxedos dropping dining-hall cutlery into the grand piano. The three Georgian songs, of which Tsangala da Gogona was one, were performed without introduction or explanation; they caused a sensation.

Liturgical music in the eastern Georgian or Kartli-Kakheti style, of which this Easter chant is an example, has been especially susceptible to modern straightening out of the tuning for European-classically trained ears. As explained in the introductory notes, any reconstruction (including our own) of how this music was tuned between the years 900 and 1900 is at best informed speculation. The earliest Georgian liturgical transcribers with European training are commonly said to have made gross errors in their notation of accidentals, or even failure to notate them.

Late-twentieth-century common practice, in church and on the concert stage, is to perform the Kartli-Kakheti liturgical music in something close to European Just intonation, but we ourselves, along with our colleague Guy Brewer, are trying to find a more historically plausible system of tuning. If the assumption governing our own performance of this piece is right — that the liturgical music should properly be tuned like the secular music that surrounds it — then any transcriber working with only the twelve tones of the piano keyboard would indeed be forced to make one wrong choice of accidental after another, or give up accidentals entirely. (Modern transcriptions of Georgian music are replete with arrows to show microtuning.)

Like many of the ancient songs of the high mountain region of Svaneti (see Mirangula and Riho), Lazhghvash has a cryptic text, in this case suggesting maybe a sacrifice — or at least a dedication — of livestock. It's cryptic even to Svans, to whom the primordial songs of their ancestors, songs often connected with pre-Christian rituals, have come down without a user's guide. (The "golden fleece" mentioned may or may not have a connection to Jason, whose Argonauts sailed to the land of Colchis on Georgia's Black Sea coast.) Even the nonsense words are freighted with unspecific meaning, and are assumed to be corruptions of what used to be text or significant names.

It's relevant to this progressive mystification of meaning that Svan, while distantly related to Georgian, is not formally a written language — though some of those powerful old names are not the kind of thing you would casually commit to paper even if you could. (Why don't we sing the verse about the ram? Because that's how the people who taught it to us do it, though they carefully give you that verse when you ask them for the words.) Many Svan songs, Lazhghvash among them, can be performed either by two groups of singers antiphonally, or by voices alternating with a chunir solo, the way we do it.

1. O morning breeze!
2. Blow over the threshing floor.
3. Blow over the village.
4. I will make lots of bread.

The text of this lyrical harvest song invokes the good will of the forces of nature that govern the task at hand and that can thereby determine the prosperity or ruin of the farmer. For the work to succeed, the breeze is needed to winnow the chaff once the threshing has separated the grain from the husks. Kalospiruli comes from eastern Georgia; the vocal style of the solo, full of the cascading ornaments that can also be heard in Gogo Shavtvala and Orovela, is characteristic of Kakheti. The refrain consists entirely of nonsense syllables.

This text is familiar throughout Christendom as the Greek Trisagion. A different musical setting, in the eastern Georgian liturgical style, is a much-recorded mainstay of the traditional Georgian repertoire. So far as we know, however, this version from Svaneti is a rarity not recorded by any Georgian ensemble. It's also something of a mystery: We learned it (over dinner) from Islam Pilpani, who presented it to us as Svan liturgical music. That would already set it apart from anything else we know: the best-known sacred songs from Svaneti, Lile and Kviria, are firmly pre-Christian and invoke respectively the sun deity and the fertility deity, so the idea of a Svan setting of the Georgian Orthodox liturgy made us pay attention.

But the text is actually in Georgian, not Svan, though the numerous vowel sounds interpolated into the middle of words — "tsminda-yi-wo" instead of the Georgian "tsmindao," for example — are characteristic of Svan singing practice. The musical style, meanwhile, suggest that this is a Svan adaptation of a hymn originally from Guria. So the exact origins of this particular Tsmindao Ghmerto may be in doubt, but its sturdy simplicity is not. (And you can learn it over dinner.)

A vakhtanguri is a highly ritualized personal toast: two men at a banquet intertwine their arms and drain to the bottom a matched pair of special wine vessels (usually large ox horns) to symbolize the bond between them. A toasting song in celebration of that ritual of friendship is also called a vakhtanguri, and vakhtanguris come in many musical forms. The text of the fourth verse in our version, Carl's own invention, finds the spirit of the vakhtanguri in the fierce emotional bond we have with the many singers in Georgia to whom we are linked through music.

This song permits that kind of textual innovation and personalization — impossible in a song from eastern Georgia — because in trios from Guria the text is secondary and largely interchangeable. Where words are needed, almost anything in the "high shairi" meter (trochaic hexameter, like Longfellow) will do, and some favorite lines get recycled in song after song. The focus remains on the musical setting, and on the opportunities it gives for improvised variations. So, like Me Rustveli and most other Gurian trios, this Vakhtanguri takes its few teaspoons of text and washes them down with a gallon of exuberant scat. The most striking form the scat takes here is a yodel, called krimanchuli, in which the top voice splits across a vocal break, creating an ostinato in two registers, and thereby a virtual fourth part. Krimanchuli is a distinctive feature of music from Guria, where a great krimanchulist is a star.

Harira is a round-dance song from Samegrelo in four sections, each of which would have a different step pattern. If it were actually being sung to accompany dancers, each section would no doubt be repeated many more times than in this condensed concert version. Apart from the nonsense syllables, there is no text, though the soloist in the last section may improvise some chatter — in Megrelian, of course. In that last section, the dancers stop in a circle and clap while a solo dancer (or a succession of them) takes over the center and puts on a show.

This is a case where no living teacher can equal an old master. Noko Khurtsia, a legendary Megrelian singer, recorded in the 1930s what many people consider the definitive Harira. That Khurtsia's version is still accessible now is thanks to an enormous labor of love performed by Anzor Erkomaishvili: In the late 1980s Anzor personally waded through Georgian folk-music archives, listening to everything from formal studio recordings of the 1930s back to a treasure trove of field recordings made between 1907 and the First World War. From all that material Anzor produced for Melodiya a box set of LPs, entitled "The First Records in Georgia," and an extensive series of LPs devoted to individual artists. The value of that resource, for us or for any other singers or scholars of Georgian folk music, is beyond description — as a library of wonderful old "new" variants of songs, or as a record of how intervals were tuned by Georgian singers before they or anybody else had heard Tchaikovsky on the radio.

In the mid-20th century many old songs or fragments of songs were strung together in suites and medleys for concert use. The most popular of those arrangements have, in just a few decades, become "traditional" numbers in their own right. The modern form of Gandagana was created as music for a dance company, and the name comes from the motion of the dancers across the stage. The original ballad came from Achara, the southwesternmost part of modern Georgia. Achara was under Turkish control for many centuries, but Acharan traditional music remains very similar to that of neighboring Guria. Songs with a meter in 3, however, are common in Achara and rare in Guria.

As for the text, the somewhat discontinuous couplets of the last two verses suggest that these may be lines originally borrowed from different sources or improvised for the sake of the rhyme. (The mysterious line about the toy apple turns up just as unexpectedly in a famous Gurian work song.) The accompanying instrument is the chonguri, and Gandagana is also popular as a chonguri solo.

The meaning of the word orovel is not settled, though it is associated with plowing songs in both Georgia and Armenia, whose languages are entirely unrelated; the word may evoke the name of an ancient god of plowing. Most work songs, like Megruli Naduri on our album, set a rhythm for communal work. But plowing is solitary stuff (if you don't count the oxen), and as a result this famous Kakhetian solo approaches the limit of pure, pulse-free, lyrical recitative. When Orovela moved from the field to the concert stage, an accompanying drone was added: two pitches, the first a fifth below the soloist's second note, the second, halfway through each verse, a step lower. Many great recordings of that simple arrangement exist, most notably that of the Rustavi Ensemble's legendary soloist Hamlet Gonashvili. We have chosen to return to the earlier form of the song, as it might be sung by a solitary plowman in his field — a plowman, however, who had studied with the greatest masters of Kakhetian ornament of his time.

Carl's first teacher of ornaments was Hamlet Gonashvili himself, though Carl never met Hamlet, who died in 1985. But Carl had Hamlet's recording of Orovela: to understand what was going on in the cascading loops of ornament, Carl put Hamlet's LP on a turntable and spun it by hand, slowing the ornaments down until he could hear the precise pattern of the vocal turns. Only several years later did Carl find a living teacher; using his Hamlet technique, he sang for Levan Abashidze, director of the Tsinandali Ensemble and a renowned specialist in Kakhetian singing. Since Levan had the advantage over Hamlet of being alive and in the room, he responded, "That's good, but you should do it like this:" and he sang something that was utterly new to Carl, a figure that sounded like it looped around in spirals. It took Carl another year of working on his own, back in the U.S., before he got his voice to produce what he had heard Levan doing — a year of relentless vocal trial and error, mostly done while driving a long commute (the industrial-age equivalent of solitary plowing).

The role of the Zar in daily life remains so significant and so specific that until quite recently Svan choirs hesitated to perform it out of context on a concert stage. When they did, they were heckled with remarks like, "If you don't stop, it will be somebody's funeral!" But it is clear to most Svans that the Zar represents, in distilled form, the tonal language unique to Svaneti, and that it deserves to be heard as music. It has only one word of text and a musical structure of extreme simplicity, but among ourselves we often call this Zar "The Hardest Song in the World." The reason is tuning: this song lies at the extremity of the quintave tuning system described in the introduction. For native Svans, born to this music, tuning this way is as natural as breathing; for us, born in a softer land and emigrants to Georgian music as adults, it's like breathing the fierce, intoxicating air of another, more ancient planet.

The musical form of the song varies slightly from village to village; the version we sing is from Latal, near Mestia. We learned it from a concert recording of the Latal Village Ensemble, since even the staunchest singers we met in Svaneti seemed reluctant to put themselves through the Zar without cause.