Georgian Folk Music: about the Georgian Songs

Like a tender whisper or like a tremendous roar, the ancient Georgian folk songs fill the air.
For at least one thousand years, the polyphonous song has been a natural part of life in this country south of Caucasus. The Georgian people have always been singing during labour in the fields, at weddings and funerals, at parties and in wartime...
There are even serious music researchers who state that once upon a time, the Georgians taught our ancestors in the West to sing polyphonic songs. In Georgia, it is above all men, who sing polyphonic songs. There are also many folk songs for female voices, but there are no mixed choirs in traditional Georgian music.
Roughly speaking, Georgian can be divided into a West Georgian and an East Georgian tradition. In East Georgia, it is very common that two solo performers weave their richly ornamented parts together, carried by the flexible bordun voices of the other singers.
In West Georgia, the polyphony is more refined. In a westerners ear, the songs may often sound rather chaotic at first, with three or four voices living their own lives with no traditionally harmonious connection.
However, there are leading people in the West, who have declared that these songs, from a composition-technical point of view, are equivalent to the most refined works by Bach and Beethoven.
In West Georgian music, you may also often hear the unique krimanchuli song. Krimanchuli is a form of yodeling in an extremely high tone. The technique is very arduous and the best krimanchili singers are highly esteemed in Georgia. You may often listen to real championships when the singers try to surpass each other with the most outrageous musical excesses.

Jens Moller
producer of the Mono Music CD with Ensemble Tbilisi

In May 2001 the UNESCO, meeting in Paris, designated 19 oral traditions to a World Cultural Heritage List. One was the polyphonic singing from Georgia:

Chakrulo - the Georgian song, which 30 years ago was selected to be part of the music that was to represent human culture aboard the spacecraft Voyager I. It is on its way to Outer Space from the Earth travelling at 144 000 km/h and it is at present in the Autumn of 2001 some 12 000 millions km away.