Page 20 - Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2017. Glasbene migracije: stičišče evropske glasbene raznolikosti - Musical Migrations: Crossroads of European Musical Diversity. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 1
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glasbene migracije: stičišče evropske glasbene raznolikosti
sical ‘dialects’, with the implication that they are variants of a unified na-
tional culture.
In the course of fieldwork in Georgia I visited song masters in both the
north-western and the north-eastern borderlands. When I listened to the
music of Svaneti in the western mountains, it was immediately obvious that
this simple homorhythmic polyphony had little in common with the com-
plex textures of Guria, Mingrelia or Adjara down on the Black Sea littoral.3
Georgian scholars have assigned various labels to it, including ‘synchro-
nised polyphony’ and ‘chordal units polyphony’.4 The labels are unsatisfac-
tory (at least in translation), but they do at least draw attention to the pre-
vailing homophony, within which there exists a kind of dialectic between
independent and interdependent part movement.5 The inclination of the
singers is to a normative organum-like parallelism, coloured by non-tem-
pered tunings. But the individual parts constantly seek to break free from
this norm, deviating from the pervasive parallelism to generate idiomatic
dissonant harmonies. Now the Svaneti song master Islam Pilpani assured
me that you hear rather similar music on the other side of the mountain
range, in what are now the Russian republics of Karachay-Cherkessia and
Kabardino-Balkaria, and I was later able to confirm this on a visit to the
North Caucasus. The Maykop-based ethnomusicologist Alla Sokolova told
me that, aside from the language, she could barely distinguish Svaneti sing-
ing from the eastern Circassian singing in Karachay-Cherkessia (even to-
day, political borders are not easily controlled in these high mountains). So
I have to be suspicious of the pedigreed narrative about dialects. And by
the way in some accounts it even becomes an historical narrative, with the
Svanetian tradition represented as an early stage in the evolution of Geor-
gian polyphony. What is clear is that cultural and political borders are out
of sync.
3 Already in the 1860s, the mountaineer and geographer Douglas Freshfield was
struck by the distinctive singing of the Svanetians, and urged the collection of their
ballads. See Douglas Freshfield, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan includ-
ing Visits to Ararat and Tabreez and Ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz, vol. 1 (London:
Longman, Green and Co, 1869), 219.
4 See, for example, the essay by Shalva Aslanishvili in Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Jo-
seph Jordania, eds., Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyph-
ony (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010).
5 Several students of traditional polyphony argue that the term ‘polyphony’ is
inadequate for this kind of homorhythmic style. See, in the context of Russian
traditional polyphonies, contributions to Les polyphonies populaires russes: actes du
colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 1991).
18
sical ‘dialects’, with the implication that they are variants of a unified na-
tional culture.
In the course of fieldwork in Georgia I visited song masters in both the
north-western and the north-eastern borderlands. When I listened to the
music of Svaneti in the western mountains, it was immediately obvious that
this simple homorhythmic polyphony had little in common with the com-
plex textures of Guria, Mingrelia or Adjara down on the Black Sea littoral.3
Georgian scholars have assigned various labels to it, including ‘synchro-
nised polyphony’ and ‘chordal units polyphony’.4 The labels are unsatisfac-
tory (at least in translation), but they do at least draw attention to the pre-
vailing homophony, within which there exists a kind of dialectic between
independent and interdependent part movement.5 The inclination of the
singers is to a normative organum-like parallelism, coloured by non-tem-
pered tunings. But the individual parts constantly seek to break free from
this norm, deviating from the pervasive parallelism to generate idiomatic
dissonant harmonies. Now the Svaneti song master Islam Pilpani assured
me that you hear rather similar music on the other side of the mountain
range, in what are now the Russian republics of Karachay-Cherkessia and
Kabardino-Balkaria, and I was later able to confirm this on a visit to the
North Caucasus. The Maykop-based ethnomusicologist Alla Sokolova told
me that, aside from the language, she could barely distinguish Svaneti sing-
ing from the eastern Circassian singing in Karachay-Cherkessia (even to-
day, political borders are not easily controlled in these high mountains). So
I have to be suspicious of the pedigreed narrative about dialects. And by
the way in some accounts it even becomes an historical narrative, with the
Svanetian tradition represented as an early stage in the evolution of Geor-
gian polyphony. What is clear is that cultural and political borders are out
of sync.
3 Already in the 1860s, the mountaineer and geographer Douglas Freshfield was
struck by the distinctive singing of the Svanetians, and urged the collection of their
ballads. See Douglas Freshfield, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan includ-
ing Visits to Ararat and Tabreez and Ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz, vol. 1 (London:
Longman, Green and Co, 1869), 219.
4 See, for example, the essay by Shalva Aslanishvili in Rusudan Tsurtsumia and Jo-
seph Jordania, eds., Echoes from Georgia: Seventeen Arguments on Georgian Polyph-
ony (New York: Nova Science Publishers, 2010).
5 Several students of traditional polyphony argue that the term ‘polyphony’ is
inadequate for this kind of homorhythmic style. See, in the context of Russian
traditional polyphonies, contributions to Les polyphonies populaires russes: actes du
colloque de Royaumont (Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 1991).
18
