Internet down

I've been away from the blog for some time now. I don't have internet in Sighnaghi, not to mention gas, water, or electricity half of the time, so life is increased to the wonderful essentials of work, sustenance, study, and friendship without technological dependence. But I do miss my email, I must confess.

Meanwhile, blogger has been down here in Tbilisi anyway, today is the first day I've been able to log on since being back here for almost a week.

The Fourth Polyphony Symposium is around the corner, and despite the war this summer, quite a number of foreign scholars and several foreign choirs who specialize in Georgian music are coming to Tbilisi. My own choirs sadly won't make it this year, but apparently they are organizing to perform in New York city at a Georgian photography exhibit. Good luck guys!

I am, as usual, being extremely last minute about my presentation on the mysteries of memorial archiving of chant in the oral tradition... because honestly, who actually knows how these people memorized up to 4000 chants? I'm not about to pretend that I know, but still, one has to come up with a fancy way of saying what no scholar really wants to say... "We don't know."

Anyway, there are plenty of analogues from Western music history and Byzantine chant studies, and the trick is to somehow suggest that these models have relevance for the Georgian tradition which is actually quite different.