Svan Funeral Dirges (Zär)

A particularly interesting subset in the new research corpus are eleven recordings (both headset-  and larynx microphone recordings) of three-voiced male funeral songs called zär in Svan and zari in Georgian, belonging to five different variants. Zär are believed to represent one of the oldest forms of collective music making in Georgia  (Bolle-Zemp, 1997; Kalandadze-Makharadze, 2004). An interesting  personal account of the context of this ritual has been given by Bray (2011).

Musically, these chants are very special in that they lack clear mnemonic anchor points (e. g. a pronounced rhythmical structure) which facilitates learning and memorisation of the music. According to one of the informants whom we met in Zargash during our field expeditin in 2016,  “zär can not be learned, one has to grow up with them”. This notwithstanding, these 3–5 minute long pieces are not improvised. Two different recordings of the same 5 min long zär in Zargash, performed by  the same singers for example,  turned out to be more or less identical. 

What adds to the special character of this music is the fact, that in the majority of the recordings the singers increase the pitch more or less continuously as a function of time. The steepest observed increase reaches approximately 100 cents/min. As a consequence, the used pitch inventory continuously changes over time, making classical transcriptions practically  impossible as this would require to continuously add accidentals, which would wrongly suggest (musically meaningless) key changes, just to accomodate the pitch rise.

Additional challenges are provided by the „lyrics“ of zär, which primarily consist of semantically apparently meaningless vowels. Since the Svan language has a much larger vowel inventory (18) than Georgian (5), the proper recognition of the lyrics and its documentation in a phonetic system simply from recordings is an enormous challenge.

A quantitative investigation of the language-music relation in zär was performed in the ground breaking study by Bolle Zemp (1997), who for the first time  examined this topic from both an ethnomusicological and a linguistic perspective. Within our research on zär,  we revisited some of Bolle Zemp’s observations and assumptions with a much enlarged (by a factor of 11 ) data set and by using computational phonetic analysis tools not available at the time of her study (Scherbaum & Mzhavanadze, 2021).

The visualization of  the pitch trajectories of three-voiced songs as harmonic melograph plot (Scherbaum and Mzhavanadze, 2020), shows the joint display of their melodic and the harmonic content in a single plot. The spaces between the middle and top voice pitch trajectories (dark blue and red wiggly lines, respectively) and the bass and middle voice (black and dark blue wiggly lines, respectively)  are color coded according to the corresponding harmonic interval sizes between the voices (see legend on the right). The space below the bass voice pitch trajectory is shaped and color coded according to the interval between bass and top voice.

For all eleven zär recordings obtained during the 2016 field expedition, the joint visualization of their melodic and harmonic content as harmonic melograph plots shows that the intervals between bass and top voice, indicated by the vertical bars hanging below the bass voice pitch trajectory - are dominated by the bluesh color repesenting 700 cents, corresponding to a fifth. In other words, most of the times bass and top voice move in parallel fifths!

One of the most interesting results of our analysis is the observation that the musical structure of zär, expressed for example in its ambitus, the complexity of its melodic progression, and its harmonic chord inventory change systematically along the course of the Enguri valley. This can nicely be seen by lining up the harmonic melograph plots for the five different zär variants along the course of the river. In the upper course of the river (between Ushguli and Mestia) the durations of zär are rather short, the diversity of the harmonic inventory is small, and the harmonic interval between the bass voice and the top voice rarely exceeds a fifth. In contrast, the durations of the Lower Bal variant of zär increases significantly (roughly a factor of 2), the harmonic inventory becomes much more diverse (the harmonic melograph plots become more colourful), and the ambitus reaches an octave and more. This strongly correlates with the exposure of the settlements to non-Svan influences.

A similar correlation between complexity and location of zär origins is observed for the musical structure derived from classical musicological analysis (Mzhavanadze & Scherbaum, 2020b), e.g. for the way the main compositional principles repetition and elaboration are employed.

Finally, we see another interesting aspects of our observations in the consequences that arise for the discourse on the origin of Georgian polyphony. The traditional view on the historical development of traditional Georgian favours the view that three-part polyphony is the result of a process which has evolved from a monophonic melody. There are two different flavours of this perspective.  In the "Fourth Model", which goes back to  Aslanishvili (1954), the voice carrying the melody is assumed to be the middle voice to which a second voice is added a fourth below. The voice added as third voice is the top voice, which is located a fifth above the bass voice. Most Georgian musicologists share that model.

In the "Fifth Model", proposed by Gogotishvili (1994), the voice carrying the melody is assumed to be the top voice to which a second voice is added  a fifth below. The voice added as third voice is the middle voice, which is located a fourth above the bass voice.

In contrast to the evolutionary models, von Ficker (1929) and more recently Jordania (2006, 2010) have suggested that polyphony can be an original sound form. Von Ficker (1929) has argued that polyphonic sounds are an indispensable part of any natural soundscape and therefore should be considered as a primary sound form. Jordania (2006, 2010) has suggested that group singing was part of the original pre-human communication with great advantage for survival.