Music of Georgia
(Redirected from Georgian)
Georgian folk music is well known for its traditional vocal polyphony. There is no clear consensus on the structure of the underlying scale or tuning system, except that it is heptatonic and close to equalized. It is sometimes claimed that their scales are based on equal divisions of the fifth, but this is hard to verify.
From a corpus analysis of field recordings by Scherbaum et al.[1], the following conclusions can be made:
- Fourths and fifths are close to just.
- Thirds tend to be neutral (around 350 ¢), as are sixths.
- Harmonic seconds are close to 9/8, while the melodic seconds are smaller (between 150 ¢ and 180 ¢).
Videos
- The empirical research of a Georgian sound scale" by Z. Tsereteli and L. Veshapidze
- Georgian chant tuning (Malkhaz Erkvanidze demonstrates)
- Video on Georgian music theory by Stephen Weigel (suggests the use of 34edo notation)
Further reading
- Georgian polyphonic singing - intangible heritage - Culture Sector - UNESCO
- https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/tuning/conversations/messages/100326 Discussion on the Yahoo tuning list, June 2011
- Dicussion on Facebook, October 2016 - XA II - The music of Georgia (7edo vs. tetracot)
- r/GlobalMusicTheory's list of Georgian theory resources; many are academic/scholarly
References
- ↑ Scherbaum, F., Mzhavanadze, N., Rosenzweig, S., & Müller, M. (2022). Tuning Systems of Traditional Georgian Singing Determined From a New Corpus of Field Recordings. Musicologist 2022. 6 (2): 142-168. DOI: 10.33906/musicologist.1068947