Harira is a round-dance song from Samegrelo in four sections, each of which would have a different step pattern. If it were actually being sung to accompany dancers, each section would no doubt be repeated many more times than in this condensed concert version. Apart from the nonsense syllables, there is no text, though the soloist in the last section may improvise some chatter--in Megrelian, of course. In that last section, the dancers stop in a circle and clap while a solo dancer (or a succession of them) takes over the center and puts on a show.
 

This is a case where no living teacher can equal an old master. Noko Khurtsia, a legendary Megrelian singer, recorded in the 1930s what many people consider the definitive Harira. That Khurtsia's version is still accessible now is thanks to an enormous labor of love performed by Anzor Erkomaishvili: In the late 1980s Anzor personally waded through Georgian folk-music archives, listening to everything from formal studio recordings of the 1930s back to a treasure trove of field recordings made between 1907 and the First World War. From all that material Anzor produced for Melodiya a box set of LPs, entitled "The First Records in Georgia," and an extensive series of LPs devoted to individual artists. The value of that resource, for us or for any other singers or scholars of Georgian folk music, is beyond description--as a library of wonderful old "new" variants of songs, or as a record of how intervals were tuned by Georgian singers before they or anybody else had heard Tchaikovsky on the radio.

Noko Khurtsia  (1905-49)

1. The river carried along a chip of poplar wood.
    Be still, water, and show my beloved's reflection.
2. Girl, girl, merry girl, come here by the riverbank.
    Give me a drink from the water jug, sate me with your kisses.
3. Last night I saw you in a dream: your eyebrow was raised,
    You stood at the window, your hair in a braid.
4. The hen was driven to the other side, but it cackles on this side.
    When I see a handsome boy I tremble like the sea.
5. I had a toy apple, it rolled toward you.
    If you hate me and love another, may you be torn up by your roots!
 

traditional Georgian dancer

In the mid-20th century many old songs or fragments of songs were strung together in suites and medleys for concert use. The most popular of those arrangements have, in just a few decades, become "traditional" numbers in their own right. The modern form of Gandagana was created as music for a dance company, and the name comes from the motion of the dancers across the stage. The original ballad came from Achara, the southwesternmost part of modern Georgia. Achara was under Turkish control for many centuries, but Acharan traditional music remains very similar to that of neighboring Guria. Songs with a meter in 3, however, are common in Achara and rare in Guria.

As for the text, the somewhat discontinuous couplets of the last two verses suggest that these may be lines originally borrowed from different sources or improvised for the sake of the rhyme. (The mysterious line about the toy apple turns up just as unexpectedly in a famous Gurian work song.) The accompanying instrument is the chonguri, and Gandagana is also popular as a chonguri solo.

1. [no text]
2. Go out and come back, my plow,
    Sing the bass, little wheel,
    Cut into the ground,
    Cut the roots of the weeds.
3. My cherished plow,
    With your crooked neck,
    You are the bringer of bread,
    And the protector of barley.
4. [no text]
 

The meaning of the word orovel is not settled, though it is associated with plowing songs in both Georgia and Armenia, whose languages are entirely unrelated; the word may evoke the name of an ancient god of plowing. Most work songs, like Megruli Naduri on our album, set a rhythm for communal work. But plowing is solitary stuff (if you don't count the oxen), and as a result this famous Kakhetian solo approaches the limit of pure, pulse-free, lyrical recitative. When Orovela moved from the field to the concert stage, an accompanying drone was added: two pitches, the first a fifth below the soloist's second note, the second, halfway through each verse, a step lower. Many great recordings of that simple arrangement exist, most notably that of the Rustavi Ensemble's legendary soloist Hamlet Gonashvili. We have chosen to return to the earlier form of the song, as it might be sung by a solitary plowman in his field--a plowman, however, who had studied with the greatest masters of Kakhetian ornament of his time.

Hamlet Gonashvili  [photo: A. Mamulova]

Carl's first teacher of ornaments was Hamlet Gonashvili himself, though Carl never met Hamlet, who died in 1985. But Carl had Hamlet's recording of Orovela: to understand what was going on in the cascading loops of ornament, Carl put Hamlet's LP on a turntable and spun it by hand, slowing the ornaments down until he could hear the precise pattern of the vocal turns. Only several years later did Carl find a living teacher; using his Hamlet technique, he sang for Levan Abashidze, director of the Tsinandali Ensemble and a renowned specialist in Kakhetian singing. Since Levan had the advantage over Hamlet of being alive and in the room, he responded, "That's good, but you should do it like this:" and he sang something that was utterly new to Carl, a figure that sounded like it looped around in spirals. It took Carl another year of working on his own, back in the U.S., before he got his voice to produce what he had heard Levan doing--a year of relentless vocal trial and error, mostly done while driving a long commute (the industrial-age equivalent of solitary plowing).

The Zar is a dirge from Svaneti, a ritual song still performed at funerals by the men of the deceased's village. The only word in the song is "wai," an exclamation of grief. Women do not join in the Zar, but instead perform a series of rhythmic wails and screams, often nearby and at the same time as the men are singing. After the Zar has been sung, and the body has been taken by procession to the grave site and buried, family members of the deceased will not sing at all for up to a year. (An American ethnographer we know traveled to Svaneti in 1992 to study singing practices. She got there at the height of the separatist war in the Georgian region of Abkhazia. In an act of collective mourning for the war dead, no one would sing, and she eventually changed her topic to the study of rituals, including funerals.)

The role of the Zar in daily life remains so significant and so specific that until quite recently Svan choirs hesitated to perform it out of context on a concert stage. When they did, they were heckled with remarks like, "If you don't stop, it will be somebody's funeral!" But it is clear to most Svans that the Zar represents, in distilled form, the tonal language unique to Svaneti, and that it deserves to be heard as music. It has only one word of text and a musical structure of extreme simplicity, but among ourselves we often call this Zar "The Hardest Song in the World." The reason is tuning: this song lies at the extremity of the quintave tuning system described in the introduction. For native Svans, born to this music, tuning this way is as natural as breathing; for us, born in a softer land and emigrants to Georgian music as adults, it's like breathing  the fierce, intoxicating air of another, more ancient planet.
 

members of the Latal Village Ensemble

The musical form of the song varies slightly from village to village; the version we sing is from Latal, near Mestia. We learned it from a concert recording of the Latal Village Ensemble, since even the staunchest singers we met in Svaneti seemed reluctant to put themselves through the Zar without cause.

1. I've known you a long time.
    God keep you from harm.
2. You are strikingly beautiful.
    Your head and neck are especially nice.
3. Who raised you up such a beauty,
    To be the assassin of me and my heart?
4. God bless the parent
    Who gave birth to you!

In the sequence of toasts that are the inseparable accompaniment to the drinking of wine at a Georgian table, the toast to the memory of the dead (whether specific persons recently deceased or "those who have gone before us" in general) is traditionally followed by the toast to children, who represent life and hope for the future.

We learned this song from Anzor Erkomaishvili, who has undoubtedly been singing it since he was three years old. A culture that successfully carries forward an ancient tradition of singing has to be vigorous about training its young: Georgian children barely old enough to talk are taught to sing, and almost immediately they are expected to be able to hold onto a part by themselves while their parents or siblings sing thorny counterpoint. On several occasions, in the home of one eminent singer or another, we have been treated to a performance of Didi Khnidan Gagitsani by the great man's very young children or grandchildren. This little Gurian trio contains, on a manageable scale, the entire toolbox of quintave counterpoint and interchangeable variants that those children will need when they grow up and take on pyrotechnic extravaganzas like Meh Rustveli and the Guruli Vakhtanguri -- thereby carrying the ancient art of Georgian folk music into the future.