Sharadze Paper

Sharadze Paper
04-14-05

I’ve been working my head off on a paper, my first conference presentation ever! It happened this way: Luarsab said to me two weeks ago, hey you should present something at the sacred music conference. I couldn’t think of a good topic, but he gave me one: the importance of a man named Maxime Sharadze in the chant preservation movement at the turn of the last century.

Sharadze was the teacher and inspiration for Ekvtime Kereselidze, who we’re eventually going to be focusing on, so I already knew quite about him, but it was interesting to pull all the sources together for an article like this. Apparently no one has ever focused an entire paper on this man. Everyone overlooks him for the more salient actors in the preservation movement, like Koridze, who transcribed five thousand chants from village singers, and Kereselidze, who spent thirty years protecting and organizing all those chant transcriptions into great leather bound books.

I wrote little by little for a week, then Jim came and time seemed to be less and less. I started missing language lessons and rehearsals.... then the weekend came with the joys of singing in church, and suddenly Luarsab said, the deadline was yesterday for a one page abstract! So I whipped that out, but the conference was soon upon us!

Jim and I went to Sighnaghi for two days of trio singing with Shergil, and when we came back it was crunch time for me.

I was writing a major paper, already on my fourth revision two days before the conference when Luarsab mentioned I would only have fifteen minutes to present! I had written far too much. The cutdown process made me realize how reduntantly and absurdly romantically I was writing. I really don’t like writing dry texts, but it couldn’t be helped.

We tried to get the draft to some translators, but only two thirds were completed by the day before the conference. Luarsab got really sick, but still came over to help finalize the quotes in their original versions for the translation, etc. He showed up at 10pm, worked through a feverish daze with me all night long, and I drove him home as the sun rose, 7am. The city was empty, just the Kurdish women sweeping the streets. I was told they have a monopoly on street sweeping, and no non-Kurds can get sweeping jobs. I don’t think I’ll try to test that, I don’t hope to be up at that hour very often.

I came home, finished my edits, slept for three hours, and went late to the conference.

But, it being Georgia, I was actually early, and my paper was last. Luarsab never made it, having a temperature of 40C (104?). For the presentation, I read a paragraph, then Simoni, another friend, read the paragraph in Georgian. We went back and forth like this... I using my Shakespeare voice from the early days of play-acting in Waldorf school, Simoni using his excellent diction to read at incredible speeds and still be understood. It’s a decent paper, though assuming a lot of background information. Afterall, these are the sacred music scholars, so I didn’t want to tell them all the basics of their subject. Nevertheless, the history should be somewhat intelligible to non-Georgians, I’ll include a bit below.

Now off to sleep.

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Initiative:

Saint George’s Day, November 1885, was a turning point in Sharadze’s life. At a service in Kashweti Church, Tbilisi, he was brought to tears upon hearing the chanting of Saint George’s troparion in the old Georgian manner of church singing. He was astonished and moved to the heart by the simplicity, prayer, and beauty of the chants. After the service, he met the regent of the choir, Melchesidek Nakashidze, who was teaching chanting in Tbilisi with his expert Gurian choir on the invitation of Bishop Alexander Okropiridze (leader of the Collective to Preserve Georgian Church Chanting, begun in 1860). This fateful meeting would begin Sharadze’s important personal role in the chant preservation movement.

Upon Sharadze’s request, Nakashidze began to teach chanting classes at the brotherhood. Ekvtime Kereselidze writes: “Maxime learned the chants quicker and with more talent than anyone else. Because of this Melchesidek allowed him to give lessons to the other men in the mornings.”1 Learning chants continued for six years during which time Sharadze met many of the people already working to preserve chants. A critical question persisted: how to preserve the chants indefinitely? Sharadze understood that though it was important to learn to sing, the days of the great schools of master chanters and their students were over. A better method of preserving the chants for future generations was needed.

The answer came with Pilimon Koridze, a famous opera singer from Italy and St. Petersburg, who also fell in love with chanting during this period. Koridze had begun transcribing chants from Nakashidze in 1885, and took on a major transcription effort organized by Bishop Gabriel Kikodze of Kutaisi during the years 1885-1887, during which time he met and worked with the master chanters Anton Dumbadze, Razhden Khundadze, Ivliane Tsereteli, and Dimitri Chalaganidze. While these singers chanted, Koridze used his good ear and keen knowledge of western notation to write down the chants on five-line staffs, a belaboring task. Koridze’s Ukrainian wife died while he was working in Kutaisi, and when he returned to Tbilisi in 1891, without career, family, a home, or work, it was Sharadze who would give him renewed hope and energy for the chant preservation movement.

Koridze was unhappy when he returned to Tbilisi and it was possible that he considered going back to Italy to start a career again. Kereselidze reports, “Pilimon (Koridze) came to us and said, ‘I just arrived in Tbilisi, I don’t even have a place to stay here.’ Maxime said to him, ‘Please, teach us how to read western notation! We will give you a house and salary, anything you need, we are ready to dedicate ourselves to this study. We want to be able to chant the new transcriptions!”2 Not only did Sharadze keep his promise, finding Koridze an apartment with running water and other amenities, but he organized a teaching position for him at the brotherhood with a one hundred ruble monthly salary. Koridze came daily to teach western notation and, becoming his good friends, the men of the brotherhood supported Koridze by attending his theater events.
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Inspiration:

Through the Cabinet press, Sharadze continued to support Pilimon Koridze’s transcription project for many years, even buying him a small portable organ to facilitate transcription work. Besides monetary support, Sharadze used his giftsof inspiration to energize popular respect for the aging stage-singer turned village chant-transcriber. Koridze received many acolades in the media, and the Cabinet published some of his written works, notably a small book on the pedagogy of western notation.

Koridze once wrote these passionate words to Kereselidze and Sharadze at the Cabinet, “I have been many places in the world, but in all the world these are the most beautiful, most complicated chants I have ever heard. Day and night I pressure myself to work and work and work because I don’t want to lose any more of these chants.”3 He sent hundreds of handwritten transcriptions back to the brotherhood, where Sharadze and Kereselidze worked diligently to organize them into chant collections for publication.
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