Apprenticeship Over!

This week I quit singing at my regular little Sabertalo church, deciding that my continuing angst with our director Antonina was preventing me from learning or singing properly. I felt a bit of nostalgia in leaving but was secretly overjoyed to be graduating from this Apprenticeship.

At the end of Sunday service, all the choir guys waited around until most people had left, then we asked Father Theodore’s blessing to take a photograph. He asked me why I haven’t been taking communion regularly, and I replied that I haven’t been giving confession to anyone, and so haven’t been taking communion. He recommended an english speaking priest who I could talk to in the city. Most of the guys I chant with don’t really take communion, I’ve developed this pet idea that our way of worshipping is to sing the glory of God, but of course, the real Orthodox activity of worship is communion.

Father Theodore stepped into the photograph with us, and we took a couple photos with just the singers as well. Outside, we sang Aslanuri Mravalzhamier, one of the table/ritual songs that we sang the first Saturday night I ever met these guys, way back in January. I’ve sung every Saturday/Sunday since then at this little church. Amazing how time flies. I feel such a kinship with these guys already; Josep from Abkhazia, Giga from Mingrelia, and the two teenage acolytes Bazha and Levan. When my brother was here, we had a great time with them, going to the soccer game, having a little supra in my apartment, and playing basketball after Sunday service.

Josep is an ‘IDP’ -Internally Displaced Person from Abkhazia, and hasn’t seen his home on the Black Sea coast in thirteen years. Imagine, my friend Teresa is now there heading up an NGO office for World Vision, she travels back and forth frequently, but this man whose grandparents died there, whose memories until age 22 are completely connected there, he can’t go home.

After the civil war between Georgia and Abkhazia in 1993, 200,000 ethnic Georgians had to flee their homes in Abkhazia, many of them having to take dangerous mountain passes through the Svanetian highlands because the coastal plains were infested with minefields, tanks, criminals, and paramilitary.

Jim Desmond is here, he was asking why the Abkhaz war happened. My rough, non-political-science knowledge says this: The Soviets used a divide-and-conquer policy, making Abkhazia an ‘autonomous’ republic, but putting them under the jurisdiction of the Georgian Communist Party bosses. At the same time, they pumped up Abkhaz nationalism, creating for a time an independent Abkhaz alphabet, giving each child an ID card labeled with his Abkhaz nationality, etc.

When the Soviet Union fell, Abkhazia, like all the other little states in the former empire, declared their independence. Abkhazia declared independence from Russia, but also from Georgia, who had been their direct oppressors during Communist times. They declared independence on principle, and Georgia couldn’t handle it because Abkhazia has historically been part of Georgia though many times invaders have fractured the country into smaller kingdoms.

In 1992, Georgian military leaders staged a coup of the elected President Zviad Gamsakhurdia (who was an intense nationalist / Anthroposophist interestingly enough), then sent troops into Abkhazia to quiet the independence movement. Meanwhile, political leaders in the North Caucasus were trying to rally behind Chechnya to form a trans-Caucasian state, and using the Abkhaz - Georgian conflict as a bonding issue, they raised a north-Caucasian army to defend their Abkhaz brothers.

Before anyone could figure out what was happening, a massive civil war erupted, a timebomb planted many years earlier by the Soviet divide and conquer policies which also time-bombed the Balkans.

My language teacher recently confided that her husband and many friends were killed in the war. 10,000 died and for a small country like this, that means just about everyone knew someone who died. Ethnic Georgians from Abkhazia have been exiled since then, with the border still closed and both sides refusing to negotiate until apologies have been made. Abkhazia wants to be part of Russia now, and Russia of course likes nothing better than to have political conflict in the Caucasus so that they can more easily control the situation here. At least that’s the going sentiment in Georgia.

*******************


Back to the boys: Giga is from Mingrelia, the region right next to Abkhazia which received most of the displaced persons after the war. The Mingrelians speak their own language, a derivative of the Georgian Kartvelian language. It was the language of the ancient Colchian kingdom which bordered the eastern coast of the Black Sea for many centuries in Greek and Roman times. Giga likes to teach me Mingrelian words like ‘muchorek’ -which means hello, and cracks up in fits of laughter every time I say it. I think Mingrelians are the butt of many jokes in Tbilisi. In this culture obsessed with regional and familial inheritances, each of the regional idiosyncracies are preyed on by jokesters from other regions.

I needed to leave the choir because of my annoyances with Antonina, our sweet little lady director. I suppose that since I am passionate about these chants, my best and worst qualities come out in connection with them. Why should I have such a problem with this harmless lady? Let me tell you:

She is from a generation of women chanters all trained by Lia, a seventy year old grandma chanting guru who has been faithfully teaching the basic chants since the early 1980s. I don’t know how she learned the chants. Many of her students are now teachers in small churches around Tbilisi and the country, for example the choir director out in the village of Sighnaghi.

We sing from handwritten notes written ten years ago. I have many of these same chants in newly published chantbooks, often with subtle note variations. However, when I would sometimes sing the variations to slightly color a very simple chant, Antonina would get very paranoid and tug on my sleeve saying, ‘ar sheidzleba, ar sheidzleba’ -it’s not allowed, not allowed!

Our first tenor is a decent singer, but untrained, and Antonina is not helping at all with her jerky conducting for every simple chanted ‘Amen.’ I once taught her that if she conducted in a jerky motion, she would get a jerky choppy sound from her choir, but if she conducted in a smoother horizontal motion, she might hear a more legato beautiful sound from the choir... and if she didn’t conduct at all we would probably be fine and sing better than ever! She readily agreed to all of this but never changed her nervous conducting habits.

She herself took liberties with the sheet music, slowing down at inappropriate times, speeding up at inappropriate times, sometimes not singing the notes correctly. Always she was passive aggressive in telling me that though I was a ‘professional’ and could learn chants quickly, the other guys needed her conducting and their very basic chants and incorrect tempo habits. But this wasn’t true: in my opinion we always sang better when she wasn’t conducting, and we learned quite a few new chants on our own which she would not let us sing in services because she didn’t know them well herself or didn’t like them.

In other words, this choir is not getting better and the main obstacle is our own director! This double standard irritated me to extreme frustration with no outlet. I remember standing in service becoming more and more irritated with each little thing, but having no way to communicate my frustration.

And who am I to have so many opinions about how to sing chants well? I listen to Anchiskhati choir recordings all the time, I am in different churches several times a week, but still I’m a foreigner and a beginner. But I can say now that I have preferences, I have opinions, and being a simple Anthropological observer is not so easy for me anymore.

I want to sing chants with love. I want to believe in what I’m doing, follow the service without preoccupation... I couldn’t do it with the frustration that was continually building within me with Antonina as director.

This weekend I will be singing in a new church with my chant teacher, maestro Vaso Tsetskladze, who will certainly be receiving his own frequent blog entries in the near future. All agree he is quite crazy, but the best chant teacher in the city, anyway, quite a character!