His Name Is John Graham, and He Is Actually an Ethnomusicologist Who Did His Undergraduate

051117afcgeorgia

Peggy Bulger:

Good afternoon everybody. Welcome. I’m Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center, and on behalf of all of the staff at the [American] Folklife Center, I want to welcome you to our Benjamin Botkin Lecture Series. We’re very happy to have today with us a lecture demonstration, which -- I think some of you may have heard a concert last night with the group that we’re about to hear, but I want to introduce the man who’s responsible for this entire tour.

His name is John Graham, and he is actually an ethnomusicologist who did his undergraduate work at Wesleyan University, and he has a Fulbright Scholarship in which he has been working and living in the Republic of Georgia, studying and collecting traditional music and culture in that area. So he has been responsible for getting the group here to the United States, and we’re so happy to have John with us to introduce the group. Please welcome John Graham.

[applause]

John Graham:

Thanks, Peggy. Good afternoon. It’s a pleasure to be here in the Library of Congress. We are nearing the end of a fantastic tour, which we’ve been on for the last, I’d say, three and a half weeks already. We started in southern Vermont. We went to New York, Boston, and then headed west all the way to Chicago, and we’ve come back driving through Indiana, Bloomington, Pittsburgh, to Philadelphia, and now here in D.C. If you want to see a full concert of the choir, we will be here Sunday evening at 8:00 in St. Nicholas Cathedral on Massachusetts Ave.

I wanted to speak briefly about the Anchiskhati Choir and the importance of their work in the revival of folk music and the medieval chanting tradition, which we’ve inherited. The Anchiskhati Choir members met in the conservatory in the late 1980s, and at that time began researching the old chanting modes and transcriptions, which existed from the 1800s. They found some of these chants in the archives, and I’m talking about handwritten transcriptions. They had to rehearse these in secret in the Betania Monastery. But with the changing political climate they were able to sing these chants more in the open, and took up residency in the Anchiskhati Church in Tbilisi -- this is a sixth century basilica. And since that time they have been working steadfastly to record these old chants and also to publish them.

Right now this is very important work. It’s a revival of this ancient music, and one can go to many churches throughout Georgia, not just in Tbilisi, the capital, and hear people singing this medieval music. This is music that was not heard during the communist era, and really speaks to an older Georgia, a feudal Georgia, which existed in the 9th through 12th centuries, and then in various fragmented forms throughout the Middle Ages.

This music is in three-part harmony, and it was passed down from generation to generation. It was received in the 1800s by musicologists who worked to preserve the music so that it wouldn’t pass away with the last of the master chanters. They went into the field and found these people, asked them to sing, and wrote down their notes, but this work was very disorganized and had to be collected and written into good copy.

And this work was undertaken by a man named Ekvtime Kereselidze, who worked from 1912 to 1936 organizing 5,000 chants according to the liturgical services, and the great feast chants and the chants of the saints. And this was an excellent work. And it’s from these handwritten transcriptions that the choir is reviving the various schools of chant within Georgia. We will be able to speak more about that in the demonstration.

Now, about folk music. This is an ancient three-part polyphonic tradition. Georgia looks small on a map, but they say if you ironed out all the wrinkles it would be a much bigger country, because really, it rests in the foothills of the Great Caucasus Range. This is an 18,000-foot peak -- great geographical barrier to the north, which separates the valleys of Georgia from the steppes of Russia to the north, and the desert plateaus of Azerbaijan and Armenia and Turkey to the south. There are many different types of environments in Georgia, and the geographical, the geographical areas within Georgia sort of affected the peoples who lived there.

So we will start off the program this afternoon with folk music from eastern Georgia. This is a region that does not receive very much rain. It’s a flat grasslands area, low hills, and as you go into the mountains -- the music in this whole region, from the mountain valleys down into these sort of grasslands plains is a very similar style of music. And it’s greatly contrasted to western Georgia, Black Sea coast, which is a different people. This is a region, say, in Guria, where you have 200 inches of rain a year, steep hills covered in thick forest full of vines. And tea fields grow well there, tangerines, et cetera. And this music is highly polyphonic, with moving bass lines and an improvisatory nature to the folk music. So we’ll be able to complement that in the program today.

Likewise I could say that there are probably a dozen distinct regions within Georgia with their own dialects, their own cuisine, their own traditional outfits and folk dancing, folk arts, and folk singing. And the chants developed as well through the Middle Ages to match the sounds of the folk music. So I think this program will be really interesting for you, and we have some of the most professional teachers and scholars of Georgia music here with us today. The director is the leading expert on chant, medieval chanting in Georgia, Malkhaz Erkvanidze; and several other members of the groups are ethnomusicologists, musicologists and teachers of this music.

So without any further ado, we will welcome the choir. Actually, before we start I should mention the slide presentation, which we have here. These are rare 19th century and 20th century photographs collected from the archives, and our tour translator this evening, Luarsab Togonidze has collected these photographs and is researching them. He writes a weekly column in Georgia trying to match names with faces. These photographs exist in huge piles in the archives, in many, many boxes with no names. We don’t know who they were, and so the research is to try and match photographs and figure out who these people were. This photograph, you can see that this is a trio being recorded. There were a number of recordings made from 1907 to 1914, and it’s from these recordings that the current group is trying to reproduce the old tunings and folk arrangements of folk songs. And this is an incredible work.

It’s important work, because during the communist era music was leaning more towards western harmonies, western arrangements, bigger choirs, mixed choirs, dynamics, et cetera, whereas in traditional Georgian folk music it would always have been three-part harmony, normally with a soloist in each of the top two parts, with the larger group singing the bass. And we’ll have that as a demonstration. So it’s from these old recordings that we can really try and hear how the Georgians were singing at that time, as inherited from their ancestors through the Middle Ages. So I hope the video presentation lends a visual image to what you will now be hearing. Please welcome the Anchiskhati ensemble.

[applause]

John Graham:

Before we begin, let me just introduce the members of the group by name. To my right I have Luarsab Togonidze, he is the researcher of the photographs, and he will be translating for this afternoon’s program. Then we have Malkhaz Erkvanidze, ethnomusicologist and director of the choir. Next we have Dato Shugliashvili, musicologist of Georgian sacred music, professor at the conservatory in Tbilisi. And these two will be giving some of the lecture elements today. And then members of the choir, Dato Zatiashvili, teacher; Gocha Giorgadze, iconographer; Zaza Tsereteli, math teacher, computer programmer; Vasil Tsetskhladze, professor, musician; Dato Megrelidze, teacher and architect; And Mamuka Kiknadze, architect. Thank you.

[applause]

[singing]

[applause]

To begin the program we sang “Dideba Chven Shekrebas.” It says “Glory to our gathering.” And the rest of the words to this song are “And may God bring peace to our guests and to our hosts.” This is a chant melody from western Georgia, but because chants were not allowed, chants words were not allowed during this past century, it’s taken on a bit of the folk words that aren’t strictly of the liturgical service, so that it could be permissible. But the melody is a canonical chant melody, and the harmonies as well.

Dato Shugliashvili : [Georgian]

Luarsab Togonidze

We are happy to be here. Thanks for coming, thanks for coming, and for such a great interest in the Georgian folk music.

Dato Shugliashvili [Georgian]

Luarsab Togonidze:

We are happy to see some of the faces of the people who are already familiar to us, because they are studying Georgian folk and the church music already for decades.