Vaso-stan

The guy’s name is Vasili Tsetskheladze, but we call him Vaso (if you want, you can him by his last name. :)

He is a chanting teacher. I hesitate to call him a master chanter, because the name befits only those who knew hundreds of chants in three parts, taught to them orally by another master chanter. The last one I know of, Artem Erqomaishvili, died in 1967, just a year after he recorded one hundred and five of the most difficult chants, all three voices, one part at a time.

With the Saint George’s choir boys, I go to rehearsals at Vaso-stan (Vaso’s place). Here’s how it works: I call up Giorgi Gvimradze and say, is there going to be a rehearsal? Vasostan? Yeah, we’re going to Vasostan, eleven o’clock. Are you coming?

If I show up at eleven I’m forty-five minutes early. But today I showed up at noon and I was forty-five minutes late. Just when I think I’m understanding Georgian time, I’m fooled again!

To explain Vaso’s eccentricity, everyone says he is from Guria, in western Georgia, as if it is clear that everyone from Guria is inherently crazy. But Vaso is really a bit crazy. When he looks at me with a wild look in his eye, his thick gray hair standing straight back from his forehead, and says something far too rapidly for me to even gather the slightest sense of what he is talking about, all the way half chuckling to himself and looking wildly around the room... I begin to wonder. Sometimes the other guys laugh, rarely they translate.

Vaso lives in a tiny monk’s room, clustered next to six other such rooms connected by a common balcony. The balcony overlooks Tbilisi from it’s high perch just under the Pantheon Cemetary (of Georgian writers and famous public figures) and Saint David’s church. I climb the cobblestone switchbacks every weekend now, to sing in the men’s choir. We’re only four or five guys, next to us in the balcony is a women’s choir of eight.

We sing difficult chants, but they sing beautifully! So beautifully. I’m really impressed. Everyone must come and hear this women’s choir sing.

When I arrived at Vasostan today, four of the guys were clustered around a small table and a room the size of a closet. I could barely squeeze in the door. On the wooden walls there were hanging pictures of all the great master chanters of pre-Soviet times. The gas burner was lit and roaring, but not heating any water. I supposed it was for heating the room, but seemed kind of hazardous. The rest of the room was sparse; there seemed to be more chant books than clothes in the place. Bunk beds signified two people could actually live here.

Under the low table was a big craft of wine. Vaso is no monk. He’s a chanter! They were singing a beautiful Easter chant when I entered, one top voice, one middle voice, two basses, and Vaso singing all the parts, whoever needed help. They were reading out of a published book of chants. To greetings from my friends, and a berating in incomprehensibly fast Georgian from Vaso, I took a seat and joined in, sweaty and out of breath from the fifteen minute climb up the mountain.

Sometimes Vaso let’s us get away with falling into the familiar tuning we’ve grown up with, but sometimes he tries to make us sing in the old Georgian tuning. There are no real half steps, but a lot of three-quarter steps. If we’re in the key of F, there isn’t really a B flat, it’s high, and the A is low, making a three quarter step between them. Hey why not? But if that B flat swings too high, suddenly we’re in a different mode and everyone gets thrown off. Suddenly the basses are making mistakes they never usually make because the top parts are sounding really funny.

I don’t know if it’s really possible or practical for us to sing the old tunings anymore. Of course we should try, and it would be interesting if we could actually do it, but the old Georgians tuned that way because that’s the way they heard it tuning properly! That’s the way it sounded right to them! But for us, it just sounds really odd and messes us up. Is it possible to change one’s ear so that new sounds become familiar and normal? Yes definitely, but very difficult, especially when everytime one walks into a store or rides a marshutka the unconscious gathering of sound reinforces our old ways of hearing in tempered, piano-style tunings.

Seeing the movie Ray reminded me how wonderful the world of sound is. I have the opportunity to use my ears intensively while singing, but otherwise, most sound seems to filter through me without much notice. Jim and I walked under a gloriously blooming fruit tree in Sighnaghi, and Jim said, wow! Listen to those bees! I had heard nothing, but suddenly a massive buzzing sound filled my head, and as I ducked instinctually, I glanced up into a dizzying, three-dimensional metropolis of orgiing honey gatherers of every species.

How many other sounds are filtered out daily so that we can concentrate on what we’re doing?

I’ve been meaning to experiment with my hearing for several years now, but never have. I want to wear a blindfold for a couple days without speaking and simply listen to everything. I would need someone to take care of me though. I don’t think I’ll try this in Georgia.... Has anyone done this?

I’ve only ever been friends with one blind person, this guy named Jim Hunt at Pennsylvania State Chorus. We sang bass-one together, he had the most beautiful voice. He won first chair in the whole state that year. I used to walk around with him, arm and arm, and talk about whatever. He recognized everyone by their voice. I would introduce people by their names, but I remember their voice quality being far more important and memorable for him than names. I only knew Jim for the five day festival, and after that no one ever returned my letters to let me know if I was writing Jim at the correct address.

I wonder if I even register voice quality. I usually try to associate names with faces I think; smiles, eyes, anything visual.

Well Vaso makes us listen. I sing it wrong, he sings it right, I’m looking at the page making my visual associations with the note, and sing it wrong again. He sings it right, and I have to go through this ridiculous process of looking at the note he is singing out of key, make a mental change to the printed note on the page, imagining it were slightly higher. If I didn’t have the music at all, I could probably do this a lot better altogether, but then it’s an issue of trying to memorize hundreds of chants like the master chanters did in bygone days before our heroes wrote everything down in western notation. Goodluck.

Vaso loves to talk. Sometimes he goes into crazy rants, and I feel like I’m understanding just about as much as the rest of the guys, which is hovering around nothing. But what a teacher! Who else in this country can teach chants with original tuning?! I count my blessings.

More to come on Vaso as visits to Vasostan become more frequent.