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97David Shugliashvili, both eastern and western Georgian church songs are based on thesame set of canonic melodies, and the difference mainly arises in the ways the melodiesare harmonized by the second and third (middle and bass) parts (Shugliashvili, 2000).Traditional and professional (religious) polyphony in Georgia have alwaysinfluenced each other. It was traditional polyphony that influenced the initial monophonictradition of early Christian church singing and turned it polyphonic (as in many othercountries of the Europe). Good church singers were good experts in traditional music aswell and would sing both in the church and at social events. Church songs were alwaysperformed at these social events (usually at the beginning of the supra-feast). The mostactive interaction between the church and traditional polyphony must have occurredduring the 19 th century, when Georgian church singing was officially banned fromGeorgian churches by the Russian authorities, and for a few decades the tradition ofchurch singing was kept alive in the families of church singers. Nugzar Jordania proposedthe idea that the extremely developed polyphonic tradition of the ensemble of threeindividual singers in Guria was the result of the influence of the church-singing traditionand was initially created by church-singers (Jordania N., 1985).[Readers might be a bit confused by mentioning of the works of differentJordania’s, so maybe I need to explain the readers that I come from the family ofethnomusicologists. Nugzar Jordania is my younger brother, and Mindia Jordania (1929-1979) was our father. Luckily, in Georgia wives usually do not change their names aftermarriage, otherwise two other ethnomusicologists from our family – Nino Tsitsishvili andMarina Kvizhinadze – would have increased the number of Jordania-ethnomusicologiststo five. ]The slow melodic development of most of the trio songs, the very elaborate noncoupletform with asymmetrical musical sentences, specific cadences finishing themusical sentence on two interlocked fifths (F-C-G) – all point to the closeness of the triotradition to the church-singing tradition of western Georgia.Here are the typical examples of West Georgian and East Georgian church-songs:Ex. 38. Zhamta da Tselta. [ Epochs and years] West Georgian church song(Garakanidze, Jordania, 2004:110)