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.

a choir of three women singing for a wedding

Within Georgia, the most significant musical differences coincide with the ancient and long-enduring division of Georgia into eastern and western kingdoms. In the east, the many centuries of control by Persia are reflected in the assimilation of a Persian melismatic vocal style to essentially Georgian musical forms, while in the west the older native forms persist largely intact. But even within the traditional east and west, local regional identity, based on geographical and historical divisions, remains very strong, and the regional musical traditions are remarkably distinct for so small a country. the State Ensemble backstage before a concert Georgian folk music was an entirely oral tradition before the 1880s. Many song transcriptions now exist, but European musical notation remains inadequate to capture the unique Georgian intervals and scales (discussed below), and even now, in professional ensembles as well as village choirs, most songs are still learned by ear. In the absence of a truly accurate system of notation, recordings are a vital resource in understanding and preserving this music. The early field recordings of Georgian folk songs, starting in 1907, provide only a snapshot in time of a music that had developed along a fluid but irreproducible course over many centuries, but they are the oldest documentation we have for the folk music.

Bolnisi Church, built 479 - 493 AD

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.

Many of the intervals and chords you hear us sing on our album might be a little disconcerting on the first (or tenth) listening, and, if you're familiar with our first album, you may notice that we sound different now. Our model for Georgian singing, in vocal timbre as well as in tuning, has shifted from the highly polished but rather homogenized sound of the professional urban singing groups to a more region-specific, less European-influenced sound. Some of the professional ensembles in Georgia have themselves been moving in the same direction. Georgika, a professional ensemble of young Georgians who are also exploring traditional tuning One ingredient of the more traditional sound we're after is a unique sense of where the steps of the scale ought to be: Georgian singers consistently sing intervals and tune chords in ways that are at odds with historical European practice. The goal of this trio is now to sing this music the way we hear non-Western-trained Georgian singers doing it, whether in present-day villages and regional ensembles or on old field recordings. We believe that those singers know what they're doing and that the intervals they sing are not arbitrary but grow from the fundamental structure of the music.

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.

Carl and Alan taping eminent Gurian singer Vazha Gogoladze as he sings one voice part of a trio at a time

You don't have to know the theory to enjoy the music, but here's a brief and incomplete sketch: In general, in music with true three-part polyphonic independence and a small melodic range, fifths will be more important than octaves. The fifth will replace the octave as the unit of structural stability and pitch equivalence, and the scale will repeat at the fifth instead of the octave. We can usefully speak of such music as being built around the "quintave" rather than the octave. In a scale based on the quintave, furthermore, the tendency will be to subdivide the fifth not into whole and half steps but into four intervals more nearly equal in size, blurring or erasing the sense of major and minor. Those intervals produce a lowered second, a near-neutral third, and a raised fourth -- which, when projected by a fifth, results in a raised eighth degree, a wide octave. The effects of this tendency vary by region in proportion to the tradition of true three-part polyphony, but some form of quintave tuning is common to almost all Georgian music. traditional tuning still thrives in Svaneti song notes top of page

 salamuri flutes, two chunirs, a panduri, and a chonguri

Malkhaz Erkvanidze (with members of the Anchiskhati Choir) playing the chonguri

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.

members of the Rustavi Ensemble playing a bass panduri and a panduri

Islam Pilpani playing the chunir

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.

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!"

a mixed trio from the Gurian village of Tav Surebi

Tsminda Sameba ("Holy Trinity") church,  near Qazbegi (14th century)

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.

members of Mtatsminda, the Tbilisi University ensemble, singing with a 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 set of twenty long odes by Chakhrukhadze, a contemporary of Rustaveli at the thirteenth-century court of Queen Tamar. 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").

The poet Shota Rustaveli towers over Georgian literature like Homer and Shakespeare rolled together. He lived toward the end of Georgia's thirteenth-century Golden Age, a time when a rich, politically stable, and territorially expansive Georgian kingdom dominated the Caucasus region. The great ruler of that time was a woman, Tamar, the Georgian equivalent of England's Good Queen Bess. Rustaveli dedicated his epic poem of courtly love and knightly adventure, "The Knight in the Panther's Skin" (Vepkhistqaosani), to Queen Tamar, and the first four verses of this song consist of that famous dedicatory quatrain. (The English version given here is adapted from the 1912 prose translation by Marjory Scott Wardrop.) As with most Gurian trios, of which this song is a preeminent example, any real text comes wrapped in lots of nonsense words, and a single line of poetry is more than enough material for an entire verse of music.

Queen Tamar: fresco  from Gelati Cathedral

at school with Anzor Erkomaishvili

Musically, Meh Rustveli follows the (not so obvious) rules of highly polyphonic Gurian counterpoint. The parts have certain landmark pitches; between those points they may move with considerable freedom, which is what makes it possible to mix and match different variants without prior coordination -- they all work. Anzor Erkomaishvili first taught us this song, by the exhilarating but brain-straining process described in the note to Shavi Shashvi. He chose a few of his favorite variants from old recordings for us to learn; since then we have added a few more that we picked up here and there, just to tickle him.

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. dancers at a party 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. future Kartuli Ensemble director Greg Salmon (far left) and Yale Russian Chorus director Guy Brewer (center) with Georgian choirmaster Edisher Garakanidze (second from right) outside Sioni Cathedral in Tbilisi in 1982 Georgian folk music has been attracting the interest of forward-looking composers at least since Stravinsky, and the quintave tuning system we have been exploring in the past few years has already fired the imaginations of several microtonally inclined American composers. (Our Tsangala turns away from the bright major-mode version familiar to most urban, piano-conscious Georgians, and looks instead to the traditional neutral-tuned versions to be found on recordings of village choirs.) Who knows, Georgian music may in the end prove a greater threat to the piano than cutlery.

Romeo Pirtskhelani and his family performing with a chunir and a changi (harp)

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.

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.

a village in eastern Kakheti

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.)

Islam Pilpani teaching us Tsmindao Ghmerto

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.

drinking a vakhtanguri toast

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 Meh 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. Over time we have been given, by Anzor Erkomaishvili and others, enough background in the grammar of Gurian counterpoint to be able to build on it ourselves. Carl -- functioning as our lotbari, or master of all parts -- assembled a version of this Vakhtanguri in his head from a number of favorite recordings, new and old, and taught it to the rest of the trio. But, with as many different variants as we learned, it's unlikely that the song can come out the same way twice.

Harira      [nonsense syllables]

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.

Noko Khurtsia  (1905-49)

Gandagana      (To and Fro)

1. The river carried along a chip of poplar wood.
    Be still, water, and show my beloved's reflection.
2. Girl, girl, merry girl, come here by the riverbank.
    Give me a drink from the water jug, sate me with your kisses.
3. Last night I saw you in a dream: your eyebrow was raised,
    You stood at the window, your hair in a braid.
4. The hen was driven to the other side, but it cackles on this side.
    When I see a handsome boy I tremble like the sea.
5. I had a toy apple, it rolled toward you.
    If you hate me and love another, may you be torn up by your roots! 

traditional Georgian dancer

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.

Orovela      (Plowing Song)

1. [no text]
2. Go out and come back, my plow,
    Sing the bass, little wheel,
    Cut into the ground,
    Cut the roots of the weeds.
3. My cherished plow,
    With your crooked neck,
    You are the bringer of bread,
    And the protector of barley.
4. [no text] 

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.

Hamlet Gonashvili  [photo: A. Mamulova]

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).

Zar      (Bell)

The Zar is a dirge from Svaneti, a ritual song still performed at funerals by the men of the deceased's village. The only word in the song is "wai," an exclamation of grief. Women do not join in the Zar, but instead perform a series of rhythmic wails and screams, often nearby and at the same time as the men are singing. After the Zar has been sung, and the body has been taken by procession to the grave site and buried, family members of the deceased will not sing at all for up to a year. (An American ethnographer we know traveled to Svaneti in 1992 to study singing practices. She got there at the height of the separatist war in the Georgian region of Abkhazia. In an act of collective mourning for the war dead, no one would sing, and she eventually changed her topic to the study of rituals, including funerals.) 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.

members of the Latal Village Ensemble

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.

Didi Khnidan Gagitsani      (I've Known You a Long Time)

1. I've known you a long time.
    God keep you from harm.
2. You are strikingly beautiful.
    Your head and neck are especially nice.
3. Who raised you up such a beauty,
    To be the assassin of me and my heart?
4. God bless the parent
    Who gave birth to you!

In the sequence of toasts that are the inseparable accompaniment to the drinking of wine at a Georgian table, the toast to the memory of the dead (whether specific persons recently deceased or "those who have gone before us" in general) is traditionally followed by the toast to children, who represent life and hope for the future. We learned this song from Anzor Erkomaishvili, who has undoubtedly been singing it since he was three years old. A culture that successfully carries forward an ancient tradition of singing has to be vigorous about training its young: Georgian children barely old enough to talk are taught to sing, and almost immediately they are expected to be able to hold onto a part by themselves while their parents or siblings sing thorny counterpoint. On several occasions, in the home of one eminent singer or another, we have been treated to a performance of Didi Khnidan Gagitsani by the great man's very young children or grandchildren. This little Gurian trio contains, on a manageable scale, the entire toolbox of quintave counterpoint and interchangeable variants that those children will need when they grow up and take on pyrotechnic extravaganzas like Meh Rustveli and the Guruli Vakhtanguri -- thereby carrying the ancient art of Georgian folk music into the future.

children singing on a school picnic

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