Peristvaleba (Transfiguration)

At around 11:30 pm last night I walked over the to the church where the Didgori Ensemble guys chant. The Vigil had already begun, so I stood in the doorway and listened to the troparion. Luarsab and I have begun studying 19th century hand-written neumatic notation, so we had just been talking about a peculiar feature of this troparion. In nearly all of the sources we've looked at or heard of, there is a long series of marks on the final syllable of the text, indicating a long melisma. This observation bears through with the notational and audio sources that have survived, including the variant from Artem Erkomaishvili recorded in 1966 that the guys were singing now. At the end, Artem had sung a series of o-io-io-io's on an incredible three voiced melisma. Given that we have so many sources for the same chant, I think this might be a key for unlocking the secret to reading many of the neumatic sources, which vary to the other because they were worked out by individual chanters.

Later, I had a chance to sing the Gelati Monastery school variant of the same chant, as recorded by Pilimon Koridze, with Luarsab. Just in the middle of the chant, the unmistable rumble of a low flying plane was heard overhead. The air sharpened as people looked around in alarm. The woman standing next to the choir went into a near panic, twirling around and clutching her friend's purse. We continued chanting, and the plane passed. No bombs.

The affects of war will take a long time to heal.