Kickstarter

We- Early Dawn (Avery Book, Sarah Gibson, Rosalie Elkinton) and Carl Linich- have an ambitious and exciting goal of producing an educational "Teach Yourself Georgian Folk Songs: Svaneti" CD and booklet set. Svaneti is a remote mountain region of the Republic of Georgia, which has one of the oldest polyphonic vocal folk traditions in the world. Because of its isolation, Svaneti has preserved ancient traditions and songs without the higher levels of hybridization that has happened in other provinces of Georgia. Svan music has a very interesting and unique tuning system and very powerful performance style that many listeners find very moving. Svans also speak their own language, separate from Georgian.

This past summer, we traveled to Svaneti to record a group of singers from the Ensemble Riho. We recording 30 songs, ranging from Christian and pre-Christians hymns to comic songs about a man who drank a little too much of particularly potent spring water to songs documenting historic battles with tribes from the North Caucasus. The singers were reimbursed for their work and time.

Svan songs are mostly in three parts, often in very close, dense harmonies. The CDs would have recordings of each song, first with all the parts together, and then with each individual voice part highlighted in a separate track. This would allow a subtlety of study that is impossible with any existing recording of Svan music. The accompanying booklets would have the original Svan texts, translations from Svan to Georgian and from Georgian to English, multi-lingual background on each song and about Svan and Georgian music, more generally, and transcriptions of the songs. These will made available for sale to scholars, musicians, and all other members of the general public in Georgia and the rest of the world who would like to learn and learn about these powerful songs.

To accomplish our next steps, we will continue to collaborate with musicians and scholars in Svaneti and in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital (including the International Centre for Georgian Folksong). The money raised from Kickstarter will pay for transcribing the songs, translations, and will go toward professional mixing of the songs by a sound engineer. It our hope that we will also eventually we will be able to make video recordings of the dances associated with many of these songs.