Singing at Your Own Funeral:
Overdubbed Intimacy and the Persistence of Tradition in Soviet Georgia

In February 1967, a funeral service was held for the Georgian singer and choirmaster Artem Erkomaishvili. As mourners bore his body from the municipal theatre to his family plot in a nearby village, a recording of the Georgian Orthodox rite for the dead emanated from a portable tape player. The voice on the recording belonged to Artem himself: by this time, no one else in officially atheist Soviet Georgia knew the traditional requiem chants. Inspired by a recent experiment at the Tbilisi conservatory, Artem had used two tape recorders to overdub his own voice, layering the three-part chants in succession (Shugliashvili 2014). In this paper, I explore the production and later circulation of these recordings, which amply demonstrate the particular affordances of magnetic-tape technology—primary among them the ability to reconfigure time through looping and rewinding (McMurray 2017). At the same time, these tapes invite reflection on how processes of mediation can unsettle the boundary between individual and collective memory and transform the work of mourning itself.

Artem Erkomaishvili’s six-decade career stretched from the earliest commercial recordings of Georgian folk music in 1907 to the widespread use of consumer tape-recording technology in the 1960s. His chant recordings—both the conservatory project and the private funeral tapes—were made outside formal channels of music production and distribution (cf. Schmelz 2009), employing amateur equipment and foregrounding the intimacy of the unvarnished voice. In this way, they resemble magnitizdat, the private tape recordings of poetry and song that circulated unofficially in the late Soviet period (Daughtry 2009). Made at a time when sacred music was still heavily censored, Artem’s recordings likewise occupied the vast grey area between officially sanctioned and explicitly dissident expression. Building on recent work exploring sound in everyday Soviet experience (Cornish 2020; Lovell 2015) and expanding the discussion of Georgian music beyond the disciplines of folklore and ethnomusicology, I argue that such private practices of listening and recording provided a means for Georgians in the post-Thaw era to grapple with questions of faith, the loss of tradition, the polyphony of a fracturing state, and the afterlife of a single voice.