The Texture of a Nation: Excavating Polyphony in the Caucasus

In the conventional discourse on “world music,” different global regions acquire a reputation as the exemplar of a certain musical form or process: West African polyrhythm, Indonesian cyclicity, Japanese space and silence, and so on (cf. Agawu 1995; McGraw 2008; Novak 2013). The South Caucasus nation of Georgia, for its part, has long been marked as a land of polyphony. While Georgian sacred and secular vocal music has been recognized as multi-voiced in one way or another since the nineteenth century, it was the post–Cold War period that saw the vast expansion of Georgian music’s international renown, eliciting comparison with other phenomena like the music of so-called Pygmy groups and the immensely popular recordings of professional choirs from Bulgaria. As Nino Tsitsishvili (2009) has shown, however, this celebration of polyphony as the defining trait of Georgian musical culture has led to the systematic exclusion of many traditions native to the region, among them women’s repertoires, urban instrumental practices, and the music of non-Georgian linguistic and ethnic groups who have lived in the area for millennia.

While valuable recent work in scholarship and performance has begun to rectify this imbalance (e.g., Wheeler & Williamson-Fa 2013), in this paper I look at the early history of scholarship on Georgian music to understand how this over-representation of polyphony came about in the first place. A critical moment was the study of Georgian POWs during WWI, in which German and Austrian scholars recorded the music of myriad ethnic groups from the Russian army, alongside photographic and anthropometric study of “racial types.” At a time when German-language musicology was consolidating its terms of analysis and narratives of European music history—in which polyphony played a central, originating role—the complex multipart singing of “half-civilized people” like the Georgians sparked intense curiosity. Beginning from this foundational moment, when Georgian racial identity was first linked to polyphony within the framework of imperial science, I show how polyphony not only dominated in the academy but came to serve as a national symbol, paradoxically touting the multiplicity of voices while forging an exclusionary link between nation and ethnicity.