1. From high above came Piruz.
2. She waves at me to come over, Piruz.
3. I went up and sat her next to me, Piruz.
refrain: Piruz, Piruz, the panduri's duckaboo.
             Duckaboo and heart's rose, we say she's a beauty!
 

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.

a mixed trio from the Gurian village of Tav Surebi

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!"

Christ has risen, and by dying has conquered death.
We need no longer fear the grave. He is the giver of life.
 

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.

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.

1. First of all, we praise Him who made sea and dry land,
    Whose eternal existence is immortal and imperishable.
2. He saved us from Hell and brought us the light of life.
    We ask Him to deliver us from danger and evil.
3. Shalva, my darling, you are sweeter than life.
    You were born and raised to bring me hope.
4. Oppressed by fate, enduring great misfortune,
    I burn inconsolably. I beg you to bring me relief.

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.
 

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").

1. I, Rustaveli, have composed this work by my art.
2. For her whom vast armies obey, I lose my wits, I die!
3. I am sick from love, and for me there is no cure anywhere,
4. Unless she give me healing, or the earth a grave.
5. This world is mostly false and unreliable.
6. Show me one person who is content.
 

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

In contrast to that high formal literature, the last two verses use as their text a rhymed couplet of anonymous folk poetry, whose simplicity and darkness could not be more distant from the extravagant courtly compliments of Rustaveli's quatrain. No one knows what Gurian singer first joined these two worlds, but nothing unites them except the music, which rolls on impervious to any sudden shift in textual tone. An essential property of Georgian folk music in general--Gurian trios only take it to an extreme--is that the musical setting is opaque: the music follows its own imperatives and gives no cues as to high or low tone, happy or sad mood in the text. While the singers may do different ingenious variants on every verse, the musical mood stays fixed throughout, and nothing in the text is highlighted or telegraphed by the music: Gurian trios are not Schubert lieder.
 

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.

refrain: Tsangala and the girl! Girl, girl, girl, girl!
1. Tsangala went to town, he brought back grapes.
    He ate them himself! He digs our graves!
2. This boy dances so well on his tiptoes,
    If he falters, he'll blame the girl.
3. This boy dances so well on his tiptoes,
    If he falters, who will he blame next?
4. My darling, my brother, you look like an archangel.
    Your cap is cocked to one side, you look like a hero.

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

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.