Black Sea Sketches

Music, Place and People

Jim Samson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000340174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Ethnomusikologie

Black Sea Sketches is a portrait of some of the diverse musical cultures surrounding the Black Sea and in its hinterlands. Its six separate chapters follow a very broad trajectory from close-ups of traditional music (chapters 1-4) towards wide-angle studies of art music (chapters 5-6), and each of them opens windows to big, border-crossing themes about music and place. A wide variety of repertoires is discussed: ancient layers of polyphonic music, bardic songs, traditional music from the coasts and mountains, the sacred music of Islam and Orthodox Christianity, the art music of Europe and West Asia, and present-day popular music 'scenes'. The usual practice is for each chapter to begin with a Black Sea coastal location before reaching out into the hinterlands. The result is a collection of six relatively discrete essays on different locations and topics, but with underlying thematic continuities, and offering a wide-ranging commentary on cultural difference. Firmly grounded in ethnographic and documentary research, this is an important study for scholars and researchers of Ethnomusicology, as also of Caucasian and Russian/East European Studies.

1Homo Polyphonicus

Song masters

Even in antiquity, the Caucasus was an imagined space. Its mountain regions, the accursed peaks of popular imagination, were dark, fateful places in mythology, legendary sites of hardship, suffering and savagery. They hosted Prometheus, as he paid the grim price of defiant enlightenment, and they were bestrode by Amazons, warrior women of old and scourge of men everywhere. Even the indigenous sagas of the mountains – for not all imagining was from a distance – did little to soften their features. In contrast, the lowlands and the coastline presented a kindlier face to the world. The plains of ancient Colchis, with temperate climate and fertile soil, were a world apart from the inhospitable mountains of the interior, a contrast already registered in antiquity, notably by Strabo (Braund, 1994, 60 ff.). Corresponding more-or-less to the present-day Georgian littoral, Colchis faced the sea, looking westwards towards a Greco-Roman world, even as ancient Iberia looked eastwards towards Persia. As it happens, that distant world looked back, and in one of the oldest of its myth collections, recorded in one form or another in multiple sources, it dispatched the Argonauts on their heroic quest for the Golden Fleece. That quest ended in Colchis, at the attenuated edge of what was then the navigable Greek world.

In due course, Colchis entered history. It became Roman Lazica, and thereafter it was a constituent of medieval kingdoms, Abkhazian for a time and Georgian for rather longer, though Georgian nationhood struggled to rebuff successive waves of invasion and occupation by Mongols, Seljuks and Safavid Persians, and later still by Ottomans, who held the major ports of Poti (ancient Phasis of Argonautic fame) and Sukhum (ancient Dioscurias) at various times. Very much later, in the 19^th century, it would come under Russian governance, its coastline reinvented as the Caucasian Riviera, and with natural assets that were much sought after by Russian aristocrats. Later still, that same coastline would become a string of Soviet-era spas and sanitaria, their emaciated legacy captured in evocative words and images in a series of recent outputs by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen. In The Sochi Project, they set out to document the wider region before it came under the glare of international publicity attending the Winter Olympics of 2014, but in the process they invoked a yet earlier time when Sochi was one of a continuous series of coastal resorts stretching from Anapa and Novorossiysk in the north to Batumi in the south (Hornstra and van Bruggen, 2013) – all this before Olympic reconstruction divorced the city culturally from its past.

It had already been divorced politically from its neighbours. Since Georgian independence, the coastline has reached southwards through the disputed territory of Abkhazia and the Georgian provinces of Samegrelo and Guria, before reaching Batumi in the Autonomous Republic of Adjara, a stone’s throw from the Turkish border. These Georgian territories have been subject to rapid modernisation in recent years, as successive governments have incentivised tourism, not least by celebrating the ancient culture of a now proudly independent nation. Tourist brochures sloganise the selling points. In a pairing of ancient and modern pleasures – Dionysus and Apollo in one – Georgia is presented as ‘the cradle of wine and polyphony’. Traditional polyphony may seem an unlikely tourist attraction, but in today's Georgia it is a source of the greatest national pride. And it is above all in Guria, brushing against the eastern shores of the sea, that we encounter it in its most developed and singular forms. Not for nothing did Gurian song form the basis of the submission that designated Georgian polyphony one of the early representatives of UNESCO's ‘intangible cultural heritage of humanity’. That designation naturally increased its visibility, but it also nurtured a folklore movement whose effects, at once exoticising and sanitising, are not so easy to escape today. If we are to make the attempt, we will need to leave our coastal starting point and turn our faces towards the mountains.

Figure 1.1Islam Pilpani (1934-2017).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Figure 1.2Polikarpe Khubulava (1924-2014).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Figure 1.3Tristan Sikharulidze (b.1937).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Figure 1.4Anzor Erkomaishvili (b.1940).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Figure 1.5Amiran Turmanidze (b.1935).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Figure 1.6Andro Simashvili (1923-2019).

Source: Photo courtesy The Georgian Chanting Foundation.

Lenjeri nestles in a valley in the highest reaches of Upper Svaneti. The village is set off from the road, a few kilometres from Mestia, the main town of the region, and some 40 kilometres from Ushguli, a barely accessible village – strictly speaking cluster of villages – on the high slopes of Mount Shkhara. Lenjeri has the largely unspoiled rural rhythms of several generations ago. The village lacks Mestia's veneer of modern ways, and it lacks also the museum ambience of the Ushguli community, well suited to a UNESCO World Heritage site and strikingly depicted in the opening sequence of Mikhail Kalatozov's Salt for Svanetia, his silent documentary film of 1930.¹ Farm animals roam freely in the lanes of Lenjeri, village women carry pails of milk in the shadow of its stone-built walls, and oxen pairs slowly drag timber from the river Mulkhra below to Lenjeri itself, a steep climb. Tower houses, of a kind associated with pre-modern vendetta cultures in several mountainous corners of Europe, are the distinctive feature architecturally. But in Upper Svaneti, unlike the Mani in the Peloponnese, for example, they have not been converted for modern residential use. Here, as in Khevsureti, the analogous mountain region on the far eastern side of Georgia, modernity encroaches, but only up to a point. In both territories, vendettas were very much alive – perhaps not the mot juste – until the early 1990s.

Glance upwards and you will see immense snow-capped peaks, among the highest of the Greater Caucasus range. Bold and ineludible, they look without bias to the north as to the south. Mountain passes of ancient provenance had long served as trade and battle routes into the north Caucasus, and under Soviet rule they carried some tourist traffic from (present-day) Karachay-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria, and beyond. Typically, these northern visitors would dally for a while in the Mestia district before making their way down to the subtropical climes of the Black Sea coast, a Shangri La that would have provided a glorious, if temporary, relief from their austere mountain homes. Politics has intervened since then, of course, putting paid to most such traffic today. And politics has done other work in these mountain regions. Shared, or similar, cultures have been prised apart, even as very different cultures have been compressed into one. It is a familiar story the world over – compare Greek and Albanian communities in Epirus – and even historians of culture have been receptive. Such is the potency of national narratives.

The winter snows had not yet arrived in mid-October, so road travel to Svaneti was feasible. I had been warned in advance that the long drive would test my nerves. But I had also been told that the marshrutka drivers negotiating these mountain roads are professionals; they may drive terrifyingly fast (the distances are considerable), but they can be trusted. I decided to relax, but the shrines by the roadside, some supplied with glasses of vodka to reward those paying their respects, hardly helped. At least the journey brought home just how isolated this region would have been a century ago, how it could scarcely have avoided developing a culture that was both distinctive and unique. And that included a musical culture. In the 1860s, the mountaineer and geographer, Douglas Freshfield, was struck by the distinctive singing of the Svanetians, and urged the collection of their ballads (Freshfield, 1869, 1, 252).² In the 1930s, the Hamburg-based anthropologist, Artur Byhan, echoed and elaborated Freshfield's descriptions, referring specifically to the unique style of part-singing he heard at festivals in Svaneti (Byhan, 1936, 144). And later, in an age of science, musicologists tried to make a case for the characteristic polyphonic singing of Georgia having found its earliest distinctive forms in Svaneti (Aslanishvili, 2005 [1954]; Gabisonia, 2005).

Islam Pilpani was born in Lenjeri in 1934, and lived there until his death in 2017. His was a musical family, and at the age of 14 he joined the local song-dance ensemble in Mestia, at that time directed by his uncle Alexei. The ensemble had been founded in 1928 (its first director was Ivane Margiani), and even in those early days it received a very small subsidy for its contribution to the preservation of local cultures. Islam sang and played chuniri (a bowed lyra, akin to the kemençe), and his musical gifts were soon recognised. In 1960, he moved to Tbilisi, where he spent four years studying at the Zachariadze School of Culture. He was offered a post teaching traditional music at the school, but decided, following the birth of his two children, to return to Svaneti, where he worked as a singing teacher. In 1967, he succeeded Platon Dadvani as director of the Mestia ensemble (known today as Riho, after a well-known song) and from that point worked tirelessly to promote and develop Svan traditional music and dance.³ When I met him, he was in his 80^th year, and was handing over much of the responsibility for Riho to his son, Vakho. For his part, Vakho is keen to continue his father's work. He teaches, directs the twice-weekly rehearsals, and makes musical instruments. He also runs a small hostel adjoining the family house, designed to accommodate those enthusiasts of Georgian traditional music who arrive in Lenjeri from various corners of the world. They come to learn the Svan repertory, with its distinctive performance style. This is the way in Georgia. There is a small group of song masters, much respected, in its different regions, guardians and disseminators of the old traditions, and bulwarks against the westernised styles cultivated during much of the 20^th century by professional folk choirs.

To watch Islam rehearse was to marvel at his prodigious memory. Part of the Svan repertory has been notated (Akhobadze, 1957), but notation massively under-specifies this music, just as the early recorded archive over-specifies it.⁴ Fortunately, Islam carried a multitude of the songs in his head: hunting songs, often invoking Svan mythology (see Khardziani, 2005 for a discussion of the mythological figures and remembered heroes in Svan folk texts), laments, table and toasting songs, epic songs, work songs, religious songs, and ritual songs dedicated to St. George, but also to the sun, complete with pre-Christian references. Islam kept the repertory refreshed, bringing marginalised songs forward, renewing familiar songs with novel improvised elements, and also creating new songs. He knew all three parts of all songs – mejem (high voice), bän (bass) and moejekhv (middle, and ‘leading’, voice) – and his approach was to rehearse them individually before putting them together.

As you watched, you learnt something about the nature of Svan polyphony. Georgian scholars have assigned various labels to it, including ‘complex polyphony’, ‘synchronised polyphony’ and ‘chordal unit polyphony’. The labels are unsatisfactory, at least in translation, but the latter two do at least draw attention to its prevailing mono-rhythmic character. What you see more clearly in rehearsal is the dialectic of independent and interdependent part movement. The inclination of the singers is to a normative organum-like parallelism, coloured by non-tempered tunings. But the individual parts tend to break free from this norm, deviating from the pervasive parallelism to generate idiomatic dissonant harmonies. Thus, Islam spent some of his rehearsal time countering the instinctive tendency of his singers to lock the parts together in synchrony.

This description leaves several things out of account. One is the inseparability of many of the songs from dance: round dances, of course, but also solo dances of considerable pedestrian virtuosity in gradually accelerating tempi, the light-footed dexterity (the upper body remains immobile) oddly matched with such a virile vocal style. Another is the frequent use of accompanying instruments, especially the familiar pairing of chuniri and changi (a form of harp once more widespread in the region, but now surviving mainly in Svaneti). And a third is the effect of folklorism. This was attributable initially to standard Soviet policy on folklore (the threat to native-language songs was mainly applied to sacred repertory). But today, the folklore ethos is all but inseparable from the life of the songs, wherever they are performed.

All three factors were in evidence when I attended a small private concert given by members of Riho for a group of Israeli tourists. The setting was a hotel in Mestia, and here Vakho Pilpani presented the traditional songs and dances of Svaneti with well-rehearsed humour. ‘Presented’ is the key word, conveying something of the professional values that accompany folklorism the world over. In truth, Riho steers a course somewhere between the conservation of ritual song and its representation as (commercial) entertainment. Broadly, the concert in Mestia veered from the former towards the latter as the evening ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Betwixt and between
• 1 Homo Polyphonicus
• 2 Giants, Heroes and Circassians
• 3 Not only Greeks
• 4 Across the sea
• 5 Building houses
• 6 Placing composers
• Afterword: From maps to apps
• Index