Williamsburg Regional Library

Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus

videorecording

Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus

922560436

Originally produced by Documentary Educational Resources in 2007

21

The villages of the Svaneti province are located in north-western Georgia, in the valleys that lie between the mountains of the Caucasus. The Svans represent about 1% of the Georgian population. Their language differs from the Georgian language, and their religion is a syncretism of Orthodox Christian faith and pre-Christian beliefs. The polyphony of the Svans appears as one of the major styles of the Georgian vocal art. It consists of two soloist voices and the bass of the choir. In their funeral rituals, the Svans combine three vocal expressions which are rarely found nowadays in other parts of the world: women's individual laments punctuated by collective wails like in Ancient Greece, men's individual laments, and polyphonic chants by male choirs. While the individual laments are aimed at the deceased and the souls of departed people, the men's polyphonic chants use no words but a series of syllables which follow a set pattern. With chords partly dissonant to a Western European ear, and without any cries other than musically stylized ones, these collective chants of great intensity manage to convey the helplessness and inexpressible grief of Man faced with death. "Funeral Chants from the Georgian Caucasus is an important ethnomusicological project and a rare video documentation of music and social practices in the Caucasus... The film will also interest scholars who study the genre of lamentation as an expression of social protest, gender ideology and cultural identity, especially in wider Mediterranean scholarship." "" Nino Tsitsishvili, The World of Music, 49(3), 2007 "(The film) offers an important lens into the musical traditions of highland rituals in the Caucasus, and more globally to issues of music in oral tradition, ritual, gender, and the maintenance of traditional identities in the modern era." "" John A. Graham, Ethnomusicology, 53 (2), 2009 Filmmaker: Hugo Zemp

live action