1. Mother's Mirangula,
    Mother's boy, she had only you.
2. He has gone up to the tower.
    She brought you dinner in the tower.
3. Oh, may Wednesday be cursed!
    She has taken up dinner.
4. Mirangula was not there,
    Mother's Mirangula.
 

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.

medieval towers in Svaneti

Mirangula is a folk poem in the Svan language, a distant relative of Georgian. While the poem is more than a hundred stanzas long, the song uses only a few lines from near the beginning. Since it is a spoken rather than a written poem, there are many variants, but here is a quick summary of the whole story: Mirangula is spoiled by his mother, who keeps him in the family's defensive tower. He runs off--in spite of her warnings of doom--to fight the Balkarians across the pass. He shoots nine men and captures their oxen. He is pursued on his way home, and eventually he is shot. As he falls, God grants his wish for revenge and he shoots his killer before he himself dies. His body will be divided among the wild animals. Meanwhile, a group of Svan priests held captive by the Balkarians escape. On their way home they come upon Mirangula's body. They herd home the oxen he stole and offer them up at a funeral feast. So many are gathered at the banquet that the floor collapses, and many are injured. (This account is drawn from "An Anthology of Georgian Folk Poetry," by Kevin Tuite.)
 

a woman playing the chunir for her son

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.

Your resurrection, Christ, Lifegiver, the angels sing in the high heavens.
And we have been redeemed, every one, by the Holy One's heart. Glory to you!
 

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.

members of the Anchiskhati Choir in church

the Anchiskhati Choir performing folk songs in a village school

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.

1. I am traveling on the Shiraki Plain.
    The wind bids me turn back.
    Ahead I see a butterfly,
    The red of whose wing
    Resembles my beloved's dress.
    God, mark me with the sign of the Cross.
2. Across the way there is a big valley,
    Full of violets and roses.
    There sits a beautiful woman,
    Gracefully bowing her head.
    What does she need a comb for?
    Her braid is golden.
3. If only I could be like an eagle,
    The breeze would take me to you.
    I would lift the corner of your blanket,
    And carefully watch you sleep.
    I would keep you from shame
    And protect you from harm.

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.

our hunting party

The text is much older than the musical setting, which is contemporary, though in traditional folk style. The melody came first, for a soloist accompanying himself on the panduri. While the panduri is common in the music of Kakheti, and the text of the song refers to easternmost Kakheti, the musical style--unornamented melody with subordinate outer parts of much later date--suggests that this song is actually from the northeastern Caucasus mountain region of Tusheti. (So that traveler on the desolate Shiraki Plains is far from home.) This arrangement for three voices, in the folk idiom of other songs for panduri, was created in 1980 by the Tbilisi-based folk ensemble Kolkheti. It's pretty close to what a group of gung-ho though unschooled musician/hunters, not coached in this song but immersed in the style, came up with after a few dozen verses to get in the groove.

a horse-drawn farm cart

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.

1,3     Sunrise. You were praying to God at the wall of St. Mary's in Ushgul.
2,4,5  Sunrise. They were fighting the enemy.
6        Sunrise. Your young men are all gone.
 

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.

St. Mary's Church in Ushgul (Middle Ages)

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.