About the Composer

This weekend, while going through some poorly tagged items in my music library, I came across a recording I’d dug up on the internet years ago of a trio of men singing a traditional Georgian folk song. This song, called Mival Guriashi, is something I first encountered in 1998 when I had a brief stint as vocal director for a folk ensemble. At that time, I had the surreal opportunity to prepare this fascinating music based on some unknown person’s (mostly accurate) transcription, and sing one of the parts.

This particular song is what’s known as a “table song”, characterized by three vocal lines, mostly homophonic. In this tradition, the melodic direction of the independent vocal lines has no concern for their resulting harmonies, flying in the face of everything we learned from our counterpoint books. So, what we have is impeccable voice leading with a harmonic mixed bag: sometimes they’re swooningly gorgeous, and sometimes they clash like crazy. You never know what you’re going to get from beat to beat.

Go on, give a listen ….(mp3. 1.1mb. 1:04)

Meanwhile, in reading up on Georgian music, I came across this page on the web site of Village Harmony , where more examples of this amazing music can be sampled. The site explains it best:

This project was inspired by recordings made in the 1980s, when singers of advanced age were invited to Tbilisi from different regions of Georgia and the Melodiya Company recorded their songs with microphones set up individually for each singer, enabling each song to be recorded both as a whole and with the voice parts in isolation.

If you only have time for one, I recommend the one called Khasanbegura: a feast of surprises for your Western-trained ears. Also, poke around on the Village Harmony site for more examples of wonderful stuff.

Georgian Voices, by the Rustavi Choir, is perhaps one of the best known (and perhaps best) recordings of Georgian choral music. You can hear a lot more excerpts on the Amazon.com page for this recording (including another version of Mival Guriashi).

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