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199According to the common belief of Georgian ethnomusicologists, this song isparticularly important in the context of the emergence of polyphony in Georgian music.A solo melody, joined casually by the co-singers at the very end of the musical phrase,looks like the most natural way of joining a group with the soloist. Most importantly,when the new phrase starts in this song, the single note drone is still sounding, thuscreating the most archaic, or even “primordial” kind of drone polyphony. Mostimportantly, the singing style itself in Khevsureti sounds incredibly archaic – a very loud,actually a shouting declamation of poetry without any serious commitment to anyparticular scale (although in some versions of this common falling Khevsurian melodythe features of the minor pentatonic scale are evident).In discussions of Georgian ethnomusicologists Khevsureti was the onlyalternative to Svaneti, another high mountainous region in western Georgia, as thecontestant for the position of the “most archaic dialectal area” of Georgia. Svaneti wasalways known among ethnographers for its incredibly archaic elements of material andnon-material culture (I mentioned them in the first part of this book, in a section aboutGeorgia). The only suspicion for the archaic nature of Svanetian traditional music wascaused by the Svanetian polyphony itself – unlike the Khevsurian singing, where thereare only meager elements of two-part polyphony, in Svaneti the tradition of three-partsinging with sharp dissonant chords, exhilarating round dances and the scales of fifthsdiatonic thrives. So, if Svanetian polyphony has a well-established three-part structure,Khevsurian polyphony seemed to be at the very “origins” of the polyphonic singingtradition of Georgian tribes.In the second part of the 1980s a particularly interesting new phase of thediscussion about Khevsureti started. Not going into detail of this discussion, I want tomention that the discussion was centered round the possibility of so-called “secondaryarchaism” in Khevsureti ethnography, religion, and culture. Zurab Kiknadze, head of theTbilisi University department of Georgian traditional poetry, was the main proponent ofthe idea of “secondary archaism” in Khevsureti. He argued that some of the most archaicelements of Khevsureti culture were in fact not an ancient survival, but the result of adegradation of the higher forms of culture. This idea caused a major controversy and longpublished and unpublished debates among Georgian scholars. My research of Khevsuretimusical traditions brought me to multifactorial analyses of this question. I approachedKhevsureti musical traditions from different sides and tried to check it by the set ofarchaic elements of musical culture accepted among Georgian ethnomusicologists. A fewof these archaic elements are as follows:‣ Syncretic unity of singing and dancing;‣ Importance of round-dances;‣ Importance of antiphon performances;‣ Survival of nonsense syllables, today devoid of meaning;‣ Use of the more ancient forms of poetry;If we check Khevsureti traditional music against these criteria, we will find that:‣ There is virtually nothing left in Khevsureti from the ancient syncretic unity ofsinging and the dance;‣ The last remnants of round-dances were witnessed in Khevsureti in the 1930s;‣ Although it is present, antiphon does not play an important role in Khevsureti;