So Who Were These Chanters?

So who were these ancient singers? In whose work are we indebted to have this incredible body of sacred chant? My secret theory is that the composers were monks, living in University centers where many hymns were inspired and learned through a network of traveling chanters. The ancient kingdoms of Georgia had been melded through conquest and intermarriage in the 11th century, and it was at this time that the ‘Golden Age’ of feudal Georgia allowed the arts to flourish. Georgians from time immemorial have been singing, so the hymnographers of this renaissance period had an incredible musical language upon which to base their hymns. It must have been very exciting to change the chant melodies from the imported Greek to the vernacular harmonies of Georgian folk songs.

So who were these monks? Were they similar to the monks of Western Europe? Much of Georgian history has been filled with war and danger, many monks hid in extremely remote locations. However, during this ‘Golden Era’, the chanting schools flourished, and monks must have been learning relatively safe and concentrated in high numbers. Can we suppose that the new chants were being learned in force by many people? Who was teaching the new chants?

Three part harmony! Set to the familiar texts of the Orthodox service ritual, and suddenly accessible as part of the mainstream musical culture, the new chants must have rejuvenated church experience.

Their culture constantly under attack, I imagine the Georgians of the 10th-12th centuries being fiercely committed to their traditional arts. Haystacks and villages can be burned, church stones toppled, nobles and monks beheaded, but something lives on... what can we call it? My sister would call it the Georgian ‘folk soul’. Yes, something like that. So this is my idea: the new chants suddenly tapped into an ancient stream that is the Georgian folk soul. The mysterious force which binds these people to their land, their dancing, their food, their traditional honor and laws, the mountains, their families and clans... and to singing because it is somehow the web that holds all the emotional energy of the people together.

After all, what is it said that Heroditus wrote in 400BC about Georgians marching to battle? “They have a peculiar singing that is strange to the ear”.

Chants were never written down, a complex musical notational system was not developed (many manuscripts contain neumatic notations, but these appear to have been personal cues to a master singer who already knew harmonic movements and modes). But why should the chants be written down? Village folk singers knew thousands of songs by heart. Epic poems were memorized, mythological stories remembered, complicated group folk dances practiced. Folk memory did not necessitate a written record, and suddenly, chants were of this folk soul.

A unique alphabet and examples of writing have existed in Georgia since between 500BC-400AD (earliest inscriptions from the 5th century AD in a Georgian monastery in Palestine). But I imagine this writing system remaining a code of the elite and educated. A villager who could memorize thousands of chants or an entire epic poem could survive without writing a little bit longer.

Chanters and lay people alike probably knew thousands of chants. In 1949, a remarkable recording allowed three of the last living chanters to preserve a small portion of their knowledge. One man knew 500 chants by heart, another 2500, and a third, with the help of his book marked with neumatic notations, claimed for the record that he could sing 3500 chants if there were enough reels to record him. Can we imagine this?

I think that amidst centuries of turmoil and conquest, the Georgian folk soul survived largely through the help of the Orthodox church, which the Persian, Turkic, and Mongolian invaders never succeeded in wiping out. Yet what is in Orthodoxy? Deep faith, strong ritual... and what is at the heart of the ritual? Yes, chanting. I don’t mean singing. I mean, the chanting of holy texts which remind us of our humility before God and Jesus Christ.

In times of crisis, can we imagine chant being a vehicle for the preservation of the Georgian folk soul? To remind us of our courage, hope, endurance, and strength, to know right from wrong, to have faith in the future, to find our roots in ancient tradition, all these things chant was able to give.

For hundreds of years, these chants were passed down generation to generation. With the chants that have survived the trials of the last two centuries, we analyze and try to understand, we sing and try to feel, we remember in some deep place the folk soul of this land, this place in time and history. Our efforts look back in time to the great chanting tradition we seek to uphold. Our singing hangs suspended in the present moment of a church loft, the beams of light on the fresco faces revealing timeless eyes, timeless ears. And who will hear, who will sing, who will remember?

Those of us in this movement now feel like we are the beginning of the other side of the Hour Glass. There was a time when countless people knew countless chants. A crisis time came when 35 volumes of carefully transcribed chant were saved from marauding Communists by one monk named Evtime Kereselidze. These books are largely the only chants to have survived to our present revival movement, and are fueling the spinning, churning excitement that will lead again to countless people knowing countless chants. (small exaggeration here).