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96Religious musicThe East Georgian state Iberia was among the first states of the world to officiallybecome Christian in 337. Georgian historians and musicologists believe that in the firstfew centuries the Christian rites were performed in Greek with monophonic singing. Ataround the 7 th or 8 th centuries the Georgian language and polyphonic singing traditionmust have penetrated the church. According to the written sources polyphonic singingmusic must have been well established in Georgian liturgy by the 10-11 th centuries(Javakhishvili, 1990, Iashvili, 1977). In the 11 th century, when the Greek orthodoxcanonic liturgy was translated into Georgian, special professional help was sought tomake them polyphonic (possibly three-part). The Georgian linguist Zurab Chavchavadzemade a brilliant suggestion that the term “Organ”, used in medieval Georgian literature todescribe the expertise of the knowledgeable person who was put in charge of making the“alien Greek sound closer to Georgian”, was denoting not a musical instrument, but“Organum”, the medieval term for the early European type of vocal polyphony(Chavchavadze, 1986, 1993:34-36). Interestingly, the term “Organa” from the wellknownmedieval literary source of Giraldus Cambrensis (1200) was an enigma for Britishmusicologists as well. Lloyd Hibberd’s interpretation that “Organa” was not an “Organor “Instruments”, but “polyphony” – “Organum” (Hibberd, 1955) was gladly accepted bymost music historians. The closeness of the medieval British and Georgian use of thete rm “organ” is obvious. In the works of the Georgian philosopher Ioane Petritsi (11-12centuries) the author makes symbolic parallels between the Christian Trinity and the threeparts of the Georgian church singing tradition, and mentions the then-existing names ofthree parts: “Mzakhr”, Zhir”, and “Bam”.The religious music of Georgia, like traditional music, has been traditionallydivided into two – eastern Georgian and western Georgian branches, although todayGeorgian scholars prefer to speak about different local schools, rather than east-westdifferences (Shugliashvili, 2000 ). After the “Golden Age” of the Georgian state andculture (11-12 th centuries) hard times brought numerous invasions during the 13 th -18 thcenturies. Maybe the hardest time for the Georgian church-singing tradition was the firsthalf of the 19 th century, when Georgian singing was banned in Georgian churches byRussian authorities. By 1860, with the rising of nationalist movements throughoutEuropean countries, a special committee was created in Georgia to look after theGeorgian church-singing tradition. According to available information, by the 1860srepresentatives of one school in eastern Georgia and three schools of western Georgianchurch singing were still alive. Out of these three western Georgian schools one (theKhundadze school) was closest to the eastern Georgian school. Another school,mentioned sometimes as the Shemokmedi school (according to the name of a village), orErkomaishvili school (according to the family of the tradition bearers) continued thechurch-singing tradition the longest (until the 1960s). One of the last survivors of thisschool, the famous Artem Erkomaishvili (grandfather of Anzor Erkomaishvili), was stillusing the specific neumatic signs to enhance his memory remembering thousands ofchurch songs (neumatic notation was an early medieval system or music writing inEurope, invented around A.D. 800, and indicating the approximate movement of melodiclines, without precise reference to pitch). This school-singing tradition was the mostcomplex and most distant from the only eastern Georgian tradition recorded by the end ofthe 19 th century by Karbelashvili family members. According to the important study ofth