Georgian Polyphonics: Screening and Performance

“The decline of culture in musical terms—if you will excuse a bit of my own historicism—is the devolution from polyphony to monophony.”
-Igor Stravinsky

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday March 21, at 3pm for Georgian Polyphonics, a screening of Soso Chikhaidze's Old Georgian Hymns (1970) and Otar Iosseliani's Ancient Georgian Songs (1969) followed by the performance of Georgian composer Giorgi Koberidze.

Georgian polyphonic song is one of the longest-tenured musical traditions across human history, with scholars placing its origin before the arrival of Christianity in Georgia in the 4th century AD. The practice consists of 15 regional choral variations, each made up of their own chemistry of staggered melodies, interlocking vocal threads and folklore. Its lineage today travels even in a bottle launched “into the cosmic ocean,” with the chant Chakrulo being included as one of the Voyager space craft’s 29 representative musical compositions, selected for the contingency of extraterrestrial contact.

Electronic and classical composer Giorgi Koberidze experiments with an eclectic palimpsest of Georgian polyphony and Caucasian instrumentation, painting tradition over with modernity and vice-versa, an aim which this program mirrors with the two short screenings preceding the performance of Otar Iosseliani’s Ancient Georgian Songs and Soso Chkhaidze’s Old Georgian Hymns.

The event is co-organized with Tone Glow and Cinema Guild.
Films

Soso Chikhaidze, Old Georgian Hymns (1970, 31 minutes)
Working with the Georgian polyphonic ensemble Rustavi and composer Anzor Erkomaishvili to resurrect the countryside’s derelict monasteries, Chkhaidze films eroded structures and faded biblical paintings caressed by sunlight, evoking the ambivalence of a besieged culture despite Georgia’s extant link to antiquity. Building on themes from his earlier work, Kolkhida, where Chkhaidze assigns the famed national myth of Jason’s quest to find the Golden Fleece in Colchis a negligible value in proportion to the land’s permanence, Chkhaidze here examines and historicizes Georgia’s identity as one of the earliest adopters of Christianity.

Otar Iosseliani, Ancient Georgian Songs (1969, 21 minutes)
Under the premise of documenting for the sake of preservation the various forms of Georgian religious chanting, a distinct kind of sonorous psalmody passed over from generation to generation, what Otar Iosseliani captures in reality is the snapshot of a not-so-distant past that coexists with the world we might know yet transports us to what used to be.

For more information, contact [email protected].

Accessibility

– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door) leading into the e-flux office space. A ramp is available for steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom with no steps between the event space and this bathroom.

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