Georgian Chant

Every other liturgical chant tradition of the Christian East is monophonic at its root. Byzantine chant sets a melody over a drone, Znamenny chant is sung in unison, Coptic and Syriac chant likewise. Georgian chant is not. It is sung in three parts at once, and the parts are independent lines rather than a melody with accompaniment underneath it. The voice that carries the chant is the mtkmeli, the one that moves above it is the modzakhili, and the lowest is the bani. All three are needed for the chant to exist at all, which is why a solo performance of Georgian chant is a fragment rather than a reduction.

Two schools are distinguished, and the distinction is real enough that chanters trained in one do not simply read the other. The eastern practice, associated with Kartli and Kakheti and with the monastery of Gelati, is the plainer of the two, with the upper voices moving close to the chant. The western practice of Guria and Imereti, associated with Shemokmedi, is far more elaborate, with wider intervals, sharper dissonances and a habit of resolving onto open fifths that strikes ears trained on Western harmony as archaic rather than merely unfamiliar.

What holds them together is that both are liturgical before they are musical. The three voice texture is not a national style applied to the office. It is how the office has been sung in Georgian for as long as anyone can document, and the folk polyphony of the same regions, which UNESCO recognised in 2001, is its neighbour rather than its parent.

The Georgian church lost its autocephaly to the Russian Empire in 1811, and over the century that followed the imperial administration pressed Georgian parishes toward Russian four part harmony and Church Slavonic. The chant that had been carried by ear in the monastic schools was, quite suddenly, at risk of simply not being passed on.

The response was a transcription campaign. From the 1880s a group of chanters and clergy, among them the Karbelashvili brothers and the singer Pilimon Koridze, sat with the surviving masters of both the eastern and western schools and wrote what they sang into Western staff notation. Several thousand chants were recorded that way over roughly three decades. The work was not neutral: staff notation cannot hold the intonation of the western school exactly, and the transcribers made choices that the modern repertory has inherited. But without it there would be very little left, because the Soviet period closed the schools that had produced the singers.

Revival followed the end of Soviet rule. Chant is taught again in dedicated schools, the manuscript transcriptions have been catalogued and published, and ensembles sing the western repertory that had come closest to disappearing. What is sung today is therefore a living tradition reconstituted from a written record of itself, which is a different thing from an unbroken oral chain, and Georgian chant scholarship is unusually candid about the difference.