Extreme Day

06-20-05
Extreme Day


The foreigner’s choir, Okros Stumrebi (Golden Guest), traveled to western Georgia to take part in a music festival. Actually Josh Dankoff has been here for a week visiting, so we went early with Luarsab who had to do some research in a museum.

Highlights: we swam in the Black Sea at sunset, the gentle waves carrying us in a gentle sweep down the beach. As we started to swim back in, we were freaked out when we touched an underwater net.

We attended a 400 person supra where the Tamada shouted into the microphone toasts in Russian and Georgian. Six or more choirs were present and performed continuously.

On Saturday we sang chants in a 7th century monastery with our nun friends.

We met the French-Georgian heirs of the local noble family. The man was dressed in a traditional Georgian military outfit (chokha), but was hilariously complaining about how scared he was to open his car for fear that the alarm would not turn off (his beeper battery was dead). We made fun of his french accent for the rest of the trip.

We swam in a river, the current so strong that it threatened to pull us downstream when only waist deep. Drunk policemen watched us from the embankment, and applauded us when we sang a threepart song in the middle of the river. Later, we took pictures.

The Big Concert: a monstrosity as usual. 41 performers, we were to be 35th. Half of the performances were imported Russian stars, the other half groups of chocka’d men singing Soviet era folksongs. One dance troup, that was cool. But otherwise the sound systems were at ear-plugging volume, and the mix of music was so bad that the only way to sit through hours and hours of it was to get drunk on beers. So we did that. And we stuffed wadded napkins in our ears.

The three acts before the foreigner’s choir were Russian pop stars with arm-waving teenagers going crazy in the audience. When we got to the stage, the spotlights were so strong, and the acoustics so bad that we couldn’t see or hear anything. Our vibe was completely different as we sang folksongs in our foreign accents, the only group of mixed singers to perform the whole evening.



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Then the Extreme Day:

At the final Saturday night supra after the Big Concert, I found the Svanetian choir guys, and sang with them. It was a great musical experience but disastrous for my sobriety as we drank glass after glass.... that night we returned to our hosts at 4:30am. In the morning it took five tries to get out of bed at 9am, as it turned out that we were chanting in church and they were holding the service for our arrival. I didn’t find this out until we got into the car to leave.

At the service, I was the only bass and instead of a normal chantbook they only had a miniature version, the Georgian script barely decipherable from the musical notes.

After service we swam in a dirty river where a boiling hot springs deposited mineralized water into a cool river. Interesting mix.

Back at our hosts house, I took a shower, then we had a supra with three nuns, the three of us, our host family, and one other man. I was tamada, the first time in Georgian.

Then we jumped in the car, and drove five hours to Tbilisi over the central mountains. Five hours in Georgia is a long haul because of all the potholes, herds of cows, slow trucks to pass, and mountain switchbacks. I drove the whole way this time, Josh keeping me awake while Luarsab dozed in the back. Half way, we saw a group of young guys playing soccer. Pulling over to watch for a minute, Josh and I decided to play. I was looking ridiculous in white socks, dress shoes, soccer shorts, and nothing else, but I scored a goal. The sun set for the second half of our drive.

In Tbilisi by 11pm, we went straight to the baths, where we sauna’d, hot-cold tub’d, and got scrub massages from a young guy with a fresh knife wound on his lower back.

The day should have been over for me, but we went home, packed Josh’s stuff, and took him to the airport at 3:30am. I drove home and went to bed by 5am, ready to leave the world behind.

Great Georgia Info Link

The Online news source, Eurasianet.com, just came out with an amazing special report on the regions of Georgia. Several of my friends wrote articles, took photos, and did research for this project. I highly recommend taking a look at this page for people interested in Georgia.

http://www.eurasianet.org/georgia/

Singing with Svans

Singing with Svans
06-18-05

At the Saturday night supra, I found the Svanetian singers, a bunch of really cool old guys in red chockhas and gray felt caps. They were drinking toasts and singing as only Svans can sing, tuning to some alternate cosmic hearing. Their singing seems to come out of the manner in which they are speaking, out of the gruffness of highland life, a thickening in the voice and mouth. All three voice parts are sung with heavy overtones, but not in a nasal quality but in strong natural voices. Big heads resonating. Big voices speaking-saying-singing familiar words. To teach Svan tuning, one needs to learn Svan vocal technique. One can’t analyze the tunings, try to reproduce them and hope to sound Svan. There is a manner of standing, of lifting the head, a regal bearing that needs to be present in the voice, the attitude as important as the sound.

These guys take a lot of pauses, breaks, especially in their sacred songs. I really wanted them to sing my favorite Svan sacred song, a hymn to Saint Elija called Ielrdei, and at the end of the night, out on the street at 4am, Islam and two others sang it for me. As Mom would say, I thought I had died and gone to heaven!

Their rendition was so completely different than the way in which I’ve been singing it with foreigners over the last two years. So much more profound. And perfunctory. steady and with a serious gaze. No added ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious delicacy’. They took great breaths every measure, cutting the ends of the syllables off sharply, then coming back in again...

solo: Ie-li-a-lur-de-i
chorus: le-i / me-i-e-wo-le / si-a-wo
so-li / da-a-me / ki-ri-e wo-le / si-a-wo
kra-wi-wo-de / kra-si-wo-de
a-li-gha-li / me-i-e wo-le / si-a-wo
so-li / da-a-me / ki-ri-e wo-le / si-a-wo

...or something like that. I’m writing this a week later trying to remember how they sounded. Also I think there were some note variations from the version everyone is learning from Village Harmony.

How to describe their attitude, even given our collective drunkenness at 4am on the lawn next to a highway somewhere in Samegrelo? It seemed as if they were searching for the correct tuning to match what existed in their ears as the most sacred tuning possible. Most likely a sound they remember somewhere from having their most respected people sing that way when they were children. One can only imagine. What is this perfect tuning, how does it sound like? It rings, cackling, sparking, creating a certain buzzing vibration that raises the hair on your arm. But when that happens that’s what they seem to be looking for, and it is thrilling, it is absolutely straight to the head, straight to the heart, all the bones in one’s body start to vibrate and quiver out of the sheer oddity, sheer physical complexity of the sound being heard. They are searching for and relishing a certain feeling that comes from lost secrets of overtone tuning. It is simply electrifying. It must be a combination of singing the right relationship to the other voices and singing with the right overtones. Could a music specialist reproduce this sound? Even a lifetime singer, having heard these tunings from their grandparents, would try and try again to recreate this sound, constantly trying with his counterparts to achieve what might only come in rare moments of magic. A specialist could reproduce the tunings, but not the spirit, not the musical memory, not the magic of a moment that produces the feeling of sound feedback that is exactly one is looking for. It is the fleeting taste of ecstatic feeling every musician searches for, when all the conditions together create a brief moment of absolute joy filled clarity.

The reason I may never be able to do this with Svan music is because i learn and memorize music visually. I see whole and half steps on a five line staff, and because I have trouble singing exactly in tune anyway, I work hard to place my pitches on the scale that I have been trained in. Not this scale.

These guys also aren’t concerned with ‘stage-sound’ at all. They don’t hold end pitches out, but cut them off sharply, the first note of each phrase being a new, fresh, deliberate attempt to land directly into the harmonic they are trying to create. The basses belt out a gravelly resonance, overtones flying high, to which the other two parts must line up. But the placement of the upper two parts is what becomes so baffling to a western ear. The top part usually sings a very wide fifth, to my ear nearly a half step higher than I would place it, but somehow still recognizable as a fifth interval. This kind of fifth, with ringing overtones, seems to want to pull the whole song sharp, and pulls the ear up and away from the immediate vicinity, the sound resonating all over the place. It makes my head vibrate. When the middle voice sits right in the fourth interval position, creating the one-four-five chord of the ancients, the sound surpasses mental listening capabilities. It is recognizable as that particular chord, but the overtone waves, and the particular timbre of the composite sound create such and incomprehensible third entity, a unique sound independent of normal human articulation, that it defies further explanation.

Qaz and fog

Josh Dankoff is here to visit. We took a marshutka straight up into the Caucasus mountains to the village of Qazbegi, from where one can look up on a clear day and see the bright dome of famous Mount Qazbeg, said to be the site of Prometheus torture. Obscured in cloud, we never saw the mountain. But we climbed through Gerdeti village, where all the houses have one meter thick slate walls without mortar, and later intersected a track leading to the Trinity monastery up above.

After awhile, the clouds closed around us, and feeling the cold, we left the gentle switchbacks for a calmer day and started climbing directly up the slope. The mist closed in around us, and our breath came out in gasps from the altitude. Small yellow flowers peaked out cautiously from damp knee length grass, and the long arms of pine trees caught our sleeves, beckoning us into their dark undergrowth. A dull glow throbbed through the constantly shifting mists, casting disorienting but hardly perceptible shadows across the slope. Our faces were damp from dew or sweat, we didn’t know which.

Pausing for breath on a 60 degree slope, unable to see more than thirty feet up, down, or to either side, I felt completely lost to the world. Our voices died on our lips with little resonance, the same hollow sound one speaks with in dreams. Faintly at first, then clearly audible we heard footfalls and a slow tugging of grass, though no beast or man came into sight. The sound lasted for five uncanny minutes as we listened intently, hovering on the steep hill surrounded in white. It was hard to believe any animals could be on this slope with us, but not wanting to think too clearly about what it might be, we pushed forward, knowing simply that our destination lay uphill.

We finally achieved the top, discovered our cow friends from the eerie noises of the slope below, but alas, did not discover our destination monastery. We were on top of the hill and as far as we could see everything went downhill. So we sat and contemplated the mist, hoping for a break in the clouds that never came.

Having no other plan, we chose a direction and wandered downhill in another direction than the one we had come up. Soon a gravel track emerged from the mist to the right, disappearing just as quickly to the left. Following it just a short ways down it turned uphill and soon we were in the lee of a jutting rock outcrop, the monastery walls rising solemnly into the cloud, black slate stones with thin scratches of orange lichen in a thick wall circumnavigating the compound. We pushed our way through surprised mountain cows, finding an entrance through a belltower on the far side of the wall. The clouds danced around and above us, flirting unreservedly with the stoic church cupola, veteran of many clouds, many snows, many moons.... Green grass was moist with dew, we tiptoed towards the church in the center of the lawn.

Inside a monk befriended us, I sang chants in the church, and Josh did not feel bashful lighting candles in front of icons, their glow casting long shadows into the dark corners of rough rock. A monastery in the clouds is not such a strange place to be afterall.

Daryal Gorge

Daryal Gorge

A rickety old taxi carried Josh and I out of Qazbegi on the road towards the Russian border, just twelve kilometers away. Our driver, a man of more than seventy years, confessed better days for road maintenance under the Communist regime, and demonstated his point as we rounded a corner and saw the outer lane of a bridge destroyed by a rockslide. Concrete slabs littered the slopes below, which fell steeply 300 feet to the river valley. The road had reopened only three days ago our driver mused, nonchalantly taking his beat-up maroon Lada through the rock rubble which littered the remaining lane. We continued at no great pace into the magnificent Daryal Gorge, valley of legend, trade, and war.

A river rages beside the road, growing rapidly from the influx of swollen streams rushing down every gully and side canyon, the clean clear water of the highland snow mixing with the muddy slosh of the canyon river. The cliffs rise steeply, reminding me of Yosemite valley except the crags here are not smooth and gray, but jagged and brown, their silhouettes against the sky sharp knives and needle points of defiance.

Nearing the Georgian border patrol, we looked across the river and saw the remains of a castle on a natural upthrust of rock: the perfectly obvious defensive position in the valley. One footbridge was below the checkpoint at the border, the other above but further away. We convinced the driver to wait for us and passing behind a truck depot with a bunch of rough looking guys standing around, Josh and I scrambled over the bridge and up a scree slope to the old Daryal Gorge road.

We walked across a field on the upper slope just below the castle outcrop, 150 meters wide, 500 meters long, a long stretch of green grass in an otherwise vertical landscape, and the whole while I imagined vast armies camped there in anticipation of the enemy’s approach. Caravans of travelers must have camped there, maybe even kings and princes on emissary trips between north and south. Many battles were fought here in ancient times because it is the major gateway through to the north Caucasus.

We ambled across the lawn; soldiers, merchants, or princes, we didn’t know. We climbed up, there were just the bare remains of the castle left: a few walls, stone portal doorways, and remnants of the massive outer walls, grass and flowers growing over everything in the thick, brambly ‘back-to-nature’ campaign style one often sees on old buildings returning to nature.

The top of the outcrop was probably about 150 meters square, large enough for a big garrison. Below we saw the remains of a big wall that stretched across the road and up the opposite slope to another tower directly across from us. On the opposite side, cliffs fell steeply one hundred meters to the river far below. I wondered if they somehow had defensive positions across the river and the rest of the canyon floor... but I don’t know very much about the peoples who lived and fought here, so no telling.

One good thing is that the modern road, first built in 1783, hugs the opposite bank, leaving the old road and castle on this side a better chance of survival.

The sun came out and we looked for eagles soaring on the thermals. Sure enough, in ten minutes, they were out, circling far overhead. I have a picture of a 19th century drawing of the Daryal Gorge, seen by a European traveler while moving through on horseback. How crazy that must have been then, in the times of the Caucasian wars. Right now, the Daryal steams in the afternoon sun, the river rages, dusty trucks labor by on the beat up road from Russia, and history turns another page. Imagination is the best thing to have in this land.

The Big Push

The Big Push

Somehow the months in Georgia are fast approaching their end. I look to the end of the summer and it seems frighteningly close. My friends here are already mourning my departure and daily plead with me to stay longer, find a bride, and settle forever.

Luarsab and I are making a big push to write the narrative for a photo-narrative book on the history of Georgian chant. The book will have at least a hundred photos of all the major sites and people involved in the preservation movement, including our main man Saint Ekvtime Kereselidze, and will have a running narrative in English and Georgian. All of your ideas are welcome as we take this project from idea phase into design phase.

We’re also interested in possible publishing interest from professional publishers outside of Georgia.

Uplisikhe

Uplisikhe

I decided to take an invitation from my soon-to-be-married buddy James, and go on a tourist expedition with his visiting family from Britain. We loaded into marshutkas in the early morning and drove west ninety minutes, past the home of Stalin, through hills, and down into a long broad river plain. Poofy clouds cast shadows on the fields and small villages, the derelict electric towers as inconspicuous in post Soviet Georgia as the scrubby birch trees swaying to the cool mountain wind. We saw caves in the distance. Uplisikhe, bronze age city fort.

Half way into this broad valley, the hills on one side jut suddenly out towards the river, exposing a thick outcropping of chalky sandstone-limestone with geologically revealing sea shells imbedded in its soft white layers. From its summit one looks fifteen miles upriver and fifteen miles down river, everywhere fertile fields of green-waving stalks, a broad river running straight down the valley. If I was a nomad in 1500 BC, I could have called it quits right about here, putting down my spear for a hoe.

Apparently that’s what happened, because a city of 20,000 grew up here, building an incredible labyrinthine fortress-city of cave dwellings. A secret tunnel descends through the rock to the river, emerging underwater to escape detection, from which point besieged inhabitants had a constant source of water and a possible underwater escape route. I imagined the Nautilus docking here on a submarine passage to the Caspian Sea....

As you all know, I’m not the biggest fan of tours, so I abandoned the senior citizen British tour, and ran crazily through the rocks, zig-zagging down stone troughs like a snow boarder, vaulting through arches and up worn stone stairs like a character in Indiana Jones. I really felt like I was in a movie like that. I discovered large patios carved down between solid rock walls placed in front of large altar areas with secret rooms above and behind the altar, smudge blackened walls and ceiling speaking of centuries of ritualistic sacrifice.... ah! It is no secret pagan Georgia worshipped agricultural Gods, using animal sacrifice to show their gratitude for Sun, Moon, Bull, and the other strongest gods, so my imagination was running wild.

I bounded up the worn steps to the altar area, my excitement rising, but suddenly I became aware of the lingering presence of such Gods, and felt strange to be dressed the way I was. I looked at my shoes, at my camera on my belt. I felt myself to be an invader, an out of place oddity in a sacred space. Who was I and how did I come to be here? Did I know anything about these people or their traditions, their hopes, dreams, their deepest secrets, desires, and beliefs? I closed my eyes for a second and concentrated on humility, on submissiveness, on strength but not insult, and hoped that an intentional awareness would offset the type of curses and ailments spoken of in hushed voices around the evening stove.

I noticed column stumps in what must have been the main hall of this rock-hewn temple. I started tip-toeing around, inspecting the corners for secrets, testing the acoustics of each new space. The roof is long since gone, but maybe before hand, the space rang true to the ancient laws of acoustics.

I found many other cave rooms, some of them with carved ceilings. Chancing back on the tour, I heard the guide say the dimensions of one carved church space matched Roman church dimensions and the carvings on the roof also matched Roman inset square designs, though these rooms are believed to predate Roman times. Other rooms contained big cisterns, and I noticed carved water ways everywhere in the rock for the collection of rainwater. One room also seemed to hold notches for large qevries, the 6 to 10 foot wine-bearing urns used in Georgia to this day.

Skipping up several boulders, I noticed several Georgian teenagers staring at me as I approached the newer Orthodox chapel which sits near the top of the cave complex. They spoke some english and were thrilled to quiz me: ‘My name is Levani, your name is?’ ‘I want go America, can you help me?’ ‘America is friend to Georgia, and I am friend to you, yes?’ ‘What do you think of our beautiful country?’ The teenagers were actually a large group of ten or twelve and all together they showed me another underground chapel, this one looking of later origin with its carved arches and columns. I sang chants in there, but they didn’t join me.

Coming out near the top of the large outcrop, I was slammed by a breeze strong enough to carve new caves in the cliffside. What a lookout! I could see far up the valley, far down the valley, ruins below marking where villages stood by the river side. A badly written brochure said early invaders of the Georgian valleys knew their invasion relied on conquering this cityfort, how many times did armies lay siege here, and lookouts in rough cloth, spear in hand, stare into the wind at the masses across the river?

Before leaving this imaginative playground, I made friends with the current inhabitants of the caves, twelve inch long lizards who are not slow to beat retreats into their favorite cracks but also not reluctant to emerge into the sunlight again. Their memories may be short, but they’ve probably lived here longer than any bronze age pioneer or camera toting tourist.

Ofoto Links May

May in Georgia
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.985aj0t6&x=0&y=-wufdy9


April in Georgia
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.162kissi&x=0&y=a28yfv


March in Georgia
http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.18p7aviq&x=0&y=x0xs3u


January-February in Georgia
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.7ll41p2&x=1&y=-1542e3


December in Georgia
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.17sd8x8i&x=0&y=f4mwn4


November in Georgia
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.8v3vevi&x=0&y=qao7e9


October in Georgia
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.19cqv30y&x=1&y=-qwew2h


September in Georgia
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.6850a6q&x=0&y=-sc78rc


Colorado-Utah, June 2004
http://www.ofoto.com/I.jsp?c=4xi3poy.fc69t7i&x=1&y=77p1i4