Page 21 - 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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there and back: circassians in anatolia
Sometime after the trip to Svaneti I visited Tusheti in the eastern
mountains. And it was while I was looking around the ethnographic mu-
seum in Zemo Alvani, on the border between Kahketi and Tusheti, that I
heard a rather haunting music played on accordion in another part of the
building. When I sought it out, it transpired that the performer was Eliko
Torghiraidze, niece of the well-known Tushetian musician Epiro Torghi-
raidze, and one of the few people currently performing a traditional Tushe-
tian repertory on the instrument today. I was taken aback when I heard this
music, for it was actually a style I recognised. Six months earlier I had been
in central Anatolia among the Circassian diaspora communities. The mu-
sic played by Eliko instantly recalled music I had heard there, music that
had originated in the North Caucasus. There were differences of course,
but the underlying harmonic basis, often a simple alternation of a major
triad and the minor triad a tone higher, was the same, as was the repetitive
rhythm and the dense layer of trilled ornamentation over alternating ped-
al points.
If we insist on invoking dialects here, we might want to claim that
this music is a dialect not so much of Georgian as of North Caucasian mu-
sic. In other words, I was discovering that the musical idioms of the North
Caucasus had spilled over the mountain range to Tusheti in eastern Geor-
gia. Again I had to question the Georgian narrative. What we actually see
in both these borderlands is a political boundary dividing a shared culture.
This is not exactly uncommon. One only has to think of the traditional po-
lyphony of Epirus, labelled by UNESCO as ‘Albanian folk iso-polyphony’,
but also performed by Greek singers (in the Greek language of course) on
the other side of the political border, and indeed by Vlach singers (in the
Aromanian language) on both sides.6 None of this should surprise us. It is
in the nature of music to flow and to spread. Partition is not its natural con-
dition.
The third borderland I visited was Abkhazia, whose political status, as
everyone knows, is contested. For Abkhazians, theirs is a politically inde-
pendent country, albeit heavily dependent economically on Russia. Yet for
Georgians, and for most of the international community, it remains an oc-
cupied part of Georgian territory; it is Georgian. This is not so much a po-
litical boundary dividing a shared culture as a cultural border dividing an
6 Vassilis Nitsiakos and Constantinos Mantzos, “Negotiating Culture: Political Uses of
Polyphonic Folk Songs in Greece and Albania,” in: Dimitris Tsiovas, ed., Greece and
the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192–207.
19
Sometime after the trip to Svaneti I visited Tusheti in the eastern
mountains. And it was while I was looking around the ethnographic mu-
seum in Zemo Alvani, on the border between Kahketi and Tusheti, that I
heard a rather haunting music played on accordion in another part of the
building. When I sought it out, it transpired that the performer was Eliko
Torghiraidze, niece of the well-known Tushetian musician Epiro Torghi-
raidze, and one of the few people currently performing a traditional Tushe-
tian repertory on the instrument today. I was taken aback when I heard this
music, for it was actually a style I recognised. Six months earlier I had been
in central Anatolia among the Circassian diaspora communities. The mu-
sic played by Eliko instantly recalled music I had heard there, music that
had originated in the North Caucasus. There were differences of course,
but the underlying harmonic basis, often a simple alternation of a major
triad and the minor triad a tone higher, was the same, as was the repetitive
rhythm and the dense layer of trilled ornamentation over alternating ped-
al points.
If we insist on invoking dialects here, we might want to claim that
this music is a dialect not so much of Georgian as of North Caucasian mu-
sic. In other words, I was discovering that the musical idioms of the North
Caucasus had spilled over the mountain range to Tusheti in eastern Geor-
gia. Again I had to question the Georgian narrative. What we actually see
in both these borderlands is a political boundary dividing a shared culture.
This is not exactly uncommon. One only has to think of the traditional po-
lyphony of Epirus, labelled by UNESCO as ‘Albanian folk iso-polyphony’,
but also performed by Greek singers (in the Greek language of course) on
the other side of the political border, and indeed by Vlach singers (in the
Aromanian language) on both sides.6 None of this should surprise us. It is
in the nature of music to flow and to spread. Partition is not its natural con-
dition.
The third borderland I visited was Abkhazia, whose political status, as
everyone knows, is contested. For Abkhazians, theirs is a politically inde-
pendent country, albeit heavily dependent economically on Russia. Yet for
Georgians, and for most of the international community, it remains an oc-
cupied part of Georgian territory; it is Georgian. This is not so much a po-
litical boundary dividing a shared culture as a cultural border dividing an
6 Vassilis Nitsiakos and Constantinos Mantzos, “Negotiating Culture: Political Uses of
Polyphonic Folk Songs in Greece and Albania,” in: Dimitris Tsiovas, ed., Greece and
the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 192–207.
19
