shvili comma adze : sakartvelo

nunc te bacche canam nec non silvestria tecum
virgulta et prolem tarde crescentis olivae
Virgilius Maro

georgia is a country with fantastic music. also bad. ideal conditions!

as I post some lovely georgian music here, I just want to let you know (are you reading this?) that I'll be trying to make the songs a little easier to find by posting the links in a more visible & dramatic way. you still have to wade thru zshare -- I'm working on that.

now. the first georgian music I heard was polyphonic folk song, & the sound was transfixing. like most places defined by mountains, georgia is home to a million ideas about how to get into things. shashvi kakabi is an exampe of the kartlian style of georgian singing, & the recording is from 1912, so be gentle, gramps. I wish I had a lot more to say about the context of & about the ideas underlying this music: I don't. but I'm struck by how gorgeous it is, & by how, again, almost futuristic it sounds. it also reminds me of medieval choral music, the notre dame school (my very very favorite), vox organum with intricate lines baroquing & fixing the space the space over it. there's a tension shared in both kinds of music between the vertical (progression of the music as a series of chords made by all the voices together at any given time) & the horizontal (the line as sung by each individual voice). I'd like to blog more on that soon; Machaut's formes fixes & Albert Ayler, great intersection!

click here to hear &/or download shashvi kakabi.

I gather that shashvi kakabi means the thrush & the partridge. it describes a sing-off held by the two. "a beautiful morning / most difficult war / thrush victorious over partridge".

I do not know what a thrush sound like; I do not know what a partridge sounds like.

as'll happen, people who were not from georgia heard this music & became sort of hot-in-the-pants to get comradey with it. increasingly as the soviet union worked to position itself as an enlightened, plural society (good joke about this in a sec), polished, respectablized versions of ethnic behaviors were created for public experientialities. there emerged a so-called "academic" style of georgian folk singing that, while inauthentic, surely deserves to be considered its own thing. the song mravalshamier is beautiful, sung by the rustavi choir, probably the best-known group making recordings in the academic tradition. this song is in the kakhetian style. but really I'm intending to contrast its inauthentic kakhetianness with the authentic kartlianness of the last song. the musicologist Carl Linich writes that the "Kartlian and Kakhetian styles are commonly grouped together, mainly because the provinces have been united for so long that it is no longer possible to determine which style originated in which province." I'm trusting you, Carl. (are you out there? Carl?)

click here to hear &/or download mravalshamier.

I do not know... anything at all, about the lovely sad song batonebo. it is sung by a guy called Badri Jimsheleishvili. I'm not sure of the woman's name who sings with him. I don't know what the title means, or any of the lyrics. but it's a beautiful, kind-of-stately-but-not-in-a-farting-way, don't you think? & there's a particular line, they sing it a few times, the harmony in the guy's voice is flatted, blue, & it just hits me with a powerful effect every time they sing it. the line I mean is the one that sounds like it begins with the words moan 'em yeast, like at 1'57", & again at 2'10". heart-stopper, right? I don't think it's a coincidence that that's how the last line of the song begins. well & but don't take my word for it:

click here to hear &/or download batonebo.

I should probably stop now, but first I just can't resist a little rtuli dro. it's a rap song, from georgia. it's very not, I have to say. wish I could understand the words. rtuli dro is translated as difficult time. I mean, even in radiant georgia, I'm certain there's worse music. & this isn't the first cis rap song I've heard aping that one Eminem & Dido did together. go ahead, hear a little rtuli dro. you've earned it.

click here to hear &/or download rtuli dro.