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.