We venerate your cross, O King,
And your holy resurrection.
Praise to you and hymns of glory!
 

Liturgical music in the eastern Georgian or Kartli-Kakheti style, of which this Easter chant is an example, has been especially susceptible to modern straightening out of the tuning for European-classically trained ears. As explained in the introductory notes, any reconstruction (including our own) of how this music was tuned between the years 900 and 1900 is at best informed speculation. The earliest Georgian liturgical transcribers with European training are commonly said to have made gross errors in their notation of accidentals, or even failure to notate them.

Ananuri Church in upper Kartli  (16th-18th century)

Late-twentieth-century common practice, in church and on the concert stage, is to perform the Kartli-Kakheti liturgical music in something close to European Just intonation, but we ourselves, along with our colleague Guy Brewer, are trying to find a more historically plausible system of tuning. If the assumption governing our own performance of this piece is right--that the liturgical music should properly be tuned like the secular music that surrounds it--then any transcriber working with only the twelve tones of the piano keyboard would indeed be forced to make one wrong choice of accidental after another, or give up accidentals entirely. (Modern transcriptions of Georgian music are replete with arrows to show microtuning.)

1. God bless you.
    You had a ram, one for God. [We don't sing this verse.]
2. It had a golden fleece.
3. You had oxen, one for God.
4. They had golden horns.
5. God bless you.

Like many of the ancient songs of the high mountain region of Svaneti (see Mirangula and Riho), Lazhghvash has a cryptic text, in this case suggesting maybe a sacrifice--or at least a dedication--of livestock. It's cryptic even to Svans, to whom the primordial songs of their ancestors, songs often connected with pre-Christian rituals, have come down without a user's guide. (The "golden fleece" mentioned may or may not have a connection to Jason, whose Argonauts sailed to the land of Colchis on Georgia's Black Sea coast.) Even the nonsense words are freighted with unspecific meaning, and are assumed to be corruptions of what used to be text or significant names.
 

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.

1. O morning breeze!
2. Blow over the threshing floor.
3. Blow over the village.
4. I will make lots of bread.
 

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

Holy God, Holy Almighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us.

This text is familiar throughout Christendom as the Greek Trisagion. A different musical setting, in the eastern Georgian liturgical style, is a much-recorded mainstay of the traditional Georgian repertoire. So far as we know, however, this version from Svaneti is a rarity not recorded by any Georgian ensemble. It's also something of a mystery: We learned it (over dinner) from Islam Pilpani, who presented it to us as Svan liturgical music. That would already set it apart from anything else we know: the best-known sacred songs from Svaneti, Lileh and Kviria, are firmly pre-Christian and invoke respectively the sun deity and the fertility deity, so the idea of a Svan setting of the Georgian Orthodox liturgy made us pay attention.

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

1. In one voice, in strict unison let's start,
    Let's sing our "Vakhtanguri,"
2. Since life has given us
    Merriment and joy.
3. Here's to you, friends!
    Live your lives as brothers!
4. Song has such strength
    When it drifts into foreign lands.
 

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.