The Fifth International Symposium on Traditional Polyphony ...

Refraction of Georgian Folk Polyphony in Professional Music
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principles – complementary-sonorous polyphony, is quite close to the features of traditional Georgian
polyphony. At the same time, on the score pages we cannot find any concrete expressive methods referring to
the folk source. Kancheli is not very keen on imitative polyphonic forms, which, in my opinion, is conditioned
by the specific character of the composer’s national mentality: imitation is not very characteristic of Georgian
folk polyphony.
<strong>The</strong> principles of folk polyphony in Kancheli’s creative work are characterized by qualitatively innovative
approaches, clearly indicating the author’s artistic-aesthetic position. It is this issue that Rusudan Tsurtsumia
dwells on in her research into the relationship of the Georgian composers of the sixties with folklore; she notes
that “this is an indirect relationship with folklore, the view not from ‘the inside’, but from a certain distance”
(Tsurtsumia, 2005: 170).
When analyzing the composer-folklore problem, I often referred to the category of the composer thinking,
and every time I naturally focused my attention on its polyphonic nature, which, as many scholars think, is an
immanent feature of Georgian artistic thinking.
All the above-discussed aspects of the composer-folklore system are indicative of this very idea. It was
within this context that the composer’s approach to the material of the original source was discussed, besides,
the approach per se is characterized by two different directions:
1. “What” is the composer using (intonation, rhythmic movement, element of harmony, the type of
representing the material, genre, manner of performance and so on);
2. “How” he/she uses them (directly, indirectly, consciously, unconsciously, generally, in a transformed
form and so on).
Exposure of these tendencies in the works of Georgian composers has been one of the central aims of
the analyses in the works of Georgian musicologists. Polyphonic thinking by itself is a very multifaceted
phenomenon and has radically different forms of realization. I will cite only two examples, radically different
from each other.
I have discovered the first one when analyzing N. Gudiashvili’s polyphonic cycle “24 Preludes and
Fugues”. <strong>The</strong> composer mastered folk singing traditions, the specific character of polyphonic multipart
singing, the genre belonging to folk songs and their mode-harmonic regularities in an original manner. That is
why his polyphonic cycle is saturated with purely Georgian intonations, chords, cadences.
But this time I will present quite a different, unusual manifestation of Georgian folk thinking, which
occurred in such a conservative genre as a fugue. Here I mean the tone plan of the exposition of some fugues
(VI, X, XX, XXIII), where besides keeping to the modes of tonic-dominant inclination, the composer resorts
to additional appearance of the theme in the subdominant keys. In this way, the tonic plan, which is determined
only as a result of its developing through time in Gudiashvili’s fugues, in the vertical is based on the chords
very characteristic of Georgian harmony: fourth-fifth chords, second chord and so on, and this is connected
with the new interpretation of the time phenomenon in the context of the folk tradition.
<strong>The</strong> second example is radically different from the first one, but again proves the priority of the
polyphonic mentality of Georgian composers. <strong>The</strong> young composer E. Chabashvili created a work called
“Polyphonic Verses”. It is composed for four soloist-elocutionists, in it the author uses such conservative
and academic genres of polyphonic music as a prelude, choral, passacaglia and fugue. At the same time it
is a specimen of very unconditional musical writing. Here the word “notating” cannot be used, as there is no
notation in the score. <strong>The</strong>re are no directions denoting rhythm or metre, the organization of the measure is
absolutely arbitrary. What occurred is isolation of music from music.