Perfect Birthday

03-19-06
Perfect Birthday

I turned 27 today, and what a great day.
First of all, I’ve been starting to get sick, and staying up too late trying to arrange these Georgian tours, so the first good thing that happened is that my 7:45am alarm didn’t go off for church.

After I woke up at 10, I checked email and walked over to Mira and Micha’s house to have brunch. This has become a little custom for us because I usually get out of church around 11:30, right when they’re waking up, and we have Sunday brunch together. I’m always starved for food, and they do a really good European style spread (Germans are keen on eating well). I haven’t improved in my domestic training, and lately, if I’m not eating in a restaurant, I’m eating peanut butter out of the jar, or dough cakes filled with baked beans (lobiani) that I buy on the street corner. It’s fasting time now until April 23rd, so no meat or dairy products whatsoever. Protein needed!

Brunch lasted until 3:30pm because we got into one of those endless globalization conversations. But this one centered around the role of government in society on the spectrum from socialist (Sweden) to capitalist (America). Germany is trying to be both, but every time a new socialist law is written, Business seems to get around it.

For example, in an attempt to keep older workers in the workforce and off welfare, a recent law outlawing the firing of 56-60 year old workers backfired when businesses started firing more people at age 54-55. Sweden has solved this problem by charging businesses a tax if they do not have the correct percentage of older workers employed.

Lots of other points discussed as well, and it reminded me of Wesleyan days, when I used to use my political science brain.

Later I went to Guja’s office, where I found him typing Saint Ekvtime’s handwritten chants into Finale on the computer. I was so excited! Of course Guja doesn’t have any funding for this work, which is never-ending considering there are probably around 7000 unpublished chants, but he shares a similar enthusiasm to my own and works slowly slowly (nela nela) to input all of the chants.

I’m thinking of trying to set up some kind of foundation to sponsor this essential work. We need to secure the fragile state that the entire chant tradition is in right now. 8000 chants in one handwritten copy in a Soviet era archive, only about one thousand are in print right now, thanks to the efforts of the Anchiskhati Church Choir. So much work to be done, who would be interested in sponsoring this?

Guja showed me how to work his version of Finale, and I typed in one chant. I taught him how to sing the bass part, and we sang it through a few times. Guja is an awesome bass, but like most Georgian singers, he can’t sight-sing from notation. That makes it hard for him to sing the more obscure chants that he doesn’t already have memorized. But his ear is excellent because every song and chant that he can sing he knows by heart. In the end, he is a far superior singer to me because he has been trained to ‘hear’ his part, not to ‘read’ his part. Of course I also have to hear in order to sing in harmony, but it’s still much easier for me to rely on reading the notes than to learn by ear.

Luarsab showed up, and we sang a couple of the Irmos’ (dzlispiri) that Guja was transcribing, they are unbelievably beautiful and complicated and diverse. This is truly a treasure for Orthodox music. If people only knew, I think there would be limitless interest and funding to secure and study this music. Especially the dzlispiri in the paraklisi to the Mother of God. These guys estimated that there might be 4000 irmos’ of all different varieties in the archive.

Then we picked up Luarsab’s Nino, invited another Nino, and had a delicious Chinese dinner! I coaxed the non-service oriented Georgian service people to turn down the crappy techno music enough that we could sing a couple songs.

Mom called in the afternoon, and Andrew later when he got up. So good to talk to you both!