I recently served as Giorgi Amashukeli's faculty mentor for his TruScholars Summer Research project; he received a competitive award to finance his field study of Georgian folk polyphony. In the summer of 2011 he traveled throughout the Republic of Georgia, including remote regions of the Caucasus Mountains, recording polyphonic folk songs and taking notes on unique customs and ceremonies. We are currently working together to produce a non-commercial CD, with extensive liner notes, for the use of English-speaking scholars.
(Giorgi Amashukeli:)
Field Research in the Republic of Georgia: Preservation of Folk Songs in the Caucasus Mountains
In 2001, the UNESCO proclamation of Georgian vocal polyphony as "A Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity" led to worldwide interest in Georgian culture and, in particular, to the country's polyphonic singing traditions. Because of my Georgian family background, this subject has been of great interest to me over the years, but I discovered that there are very few resources in English devoted to this topic. This is largely due to the fact that 150 years of Russian Empire rule and Soviet annexation effectively limited the outside world's access to Georgian folk culture, until 1991 when Georgia declared its independence. Thus, with the support of my university and faculty research mentor, I designed and carried out a field-research project in the Republic of Georgia during the summer of 2011. The primary goals of the study were: 1) to make English-language annotated recordings, both audio and video, of selected polyphonic folk songs unique to remote regions within Georgia; and, 2) to preserve and make available to U.S. scholars many ancient songs and stories that are gradually disappearing from Georgia under the pressures of modernization. Compiled from more than sixty hours of field recordings, with detailed contextual notes and photographs, the result of the research project is a circulating, non-commercial CD, comprised of 35 tracks of polyphonic folk songs, presented to my university library with the hope it will be accessed and appreciated by many.