Singing at Your Own Funeral: Overdubbed Intimacy and the Persistence of Tradition in Soviet Georgia
Brian Fairley
Right, a single ordinary tape machine; there’s no need for more than that.
Alexander Galich, “We’re No Worse than Horace,” 1966.
The first scenes of Tengiz Abuladze’s celebrated 1984 film Repentance (Georgian Monanieba, Russian Pokaianie) depict an incomplete funeral. Varlam, the longtime mayor of an unnamed Georgian town, has died, and yet his disinterred body keeps reappearing, propped up in his son’s garden or seated at a sidewalk cafe. The perpetrator of these repeated resurrections, it turns out, is a woman whose father, a painter, was put to death at Varlam’s order. Her trial sets in motion a cascade of memory and fantasy as Varlam comes back to life, not as an animated corpse, but in surreal flashbacks, an allegorical figure of Stalinist terror. The film’s release in 1987, after three years of delay by the censors, sparked long-overdue debates on state repression of art and religion, making it one of the “best-known symbols of glasnost” (Christensen 1991: 163). In the film, the Christ-like painter pleads with Varlam to save an old church from destruction, but it is blown up in a climactic moment, a straightforward allusion to the widespread demolition of churches in the anti-religious campaigns of the 1920s and 30s. Never before, it seemed, had such nostalgia for the sacred been so openly, rapturously expressed. As a wandering old woman, played by Veriko Anjaparidze, muses in the film’s closing scene, “What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?”
Two decades earlier, in 1967, a funeral in a town resembling the one in Repentance also featured the deceased in an unusually lively role. And once again, as in a film flashback, a seemingly forgotten world snapped back into view. As the casket of the singer and choirmaster Artem Erkomaishvili lay in state at the municipal theater in Ozurgeti, a reel-to-reel tape player clicked on:[1]
Weep for me, brothers and friends, relatives and acquaintances. Only yesterday I talked with you, yet today my hour of death has come. And now I will go to that place where there is neither hypocrisy, sorrow, nor wailing, where the slave and master stand together. (Erkomaishvili 1980: 17)
The voice was Erkomaishvili’s own, reciting a portion of the Orthodox Christian rite for the dead. When spoken by a priest toward the end of a funeral service, it is a moment of sometimes jarring ventriloquism: speaking in the voice of the dead person, he consoles the bereaved and begs for their intercession through prayer. Yet Erkomaishvili chose to record this text himself, along with several traditional Georgian Orthodox chants. This was no simple operation, as the chants require three singers harmonizing together. He achieved this feat by overdubbing himself on two tape recorders. He had used this technique before, when scholars in Tbilisi brought him to the capital to record over a hundred liturgical chants from his vast repertoire. While these “conservatory chant” recordings are widely celebrated today, especially among chant revivalists in Georgia (Shugliashvili 2014), the funeral tapes are almost entirely unknown. The first two published versions of Erkomaishvili’s biography, written by his grandson Anzor, do not mention them. In later editions of the biography, including its English translation, we learn of their existence and their ultimate disappearance: the tapes were stolen from a recording studio and the only digitized versions lost to hard drive corruption (Erkomaishvili 2018: 324).[2]
Artem Erkomaishvili’s funeral tapes, lost and inaccessible as they may be, illuminate several paths toward understanding the sonic dimension of social and religious life in late Soviet Georgia. Along with the 1966 conservatory recordings, they testify to the persistence of Georgian Orthodox traditions that narrowly evaded nineteenth-century policies of russification and the anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet era. Yet they are both something more and something other than folkloric treasures. Like the underground songs then circulating as magnitizdat (Horne 2015), they exploited the availability and intimacy of consumer tape technology, though they were never meant to circulate. Like previous attempts to preserve Georgian chant through notation and technological inscription, they grappled with the problem of multiple voices sounding simultaneously, but only these tapes were intended for an active role in live ritual. And like so many recordings before and since, they attempted to preserve life after death, even as they offered a final farewell to the body that originated the voice. Erkomaishvili’s funeral was at once highly unusual and utterly fitting for the post-Khrushchev period of Soviet life, negotiating boundaries of private conscience, religious prohibition, local custom, and national identity. The layered voices emanating from the tape reel may have belonged to one man, yet they contained multitudes.
The study of Georgian traditional music has long been the exclusive purview of specialists in folklore and ethnomusicology, only rarely engaging the attention of historical musicologists, let alone sound studies scholars or those from other disciplines.[3] Yet Georgian music has a remarkable twentieth-century history of encounters with sound-recording technology – including some of the world’s earliest multichannel recordings – which warrants broader recognition.[4] Recent research on Georgian folk and sacred music has included important contributions to gender studies (Tsitsishvili 2006), linguistic and cultural anthropology (Ninoshvili 2011; Kaganova 2021), and theories of tourism and post-socialist revival (Knight 2019; Bithell 2014). Specific techniques and histories of sound recording, however, factor only rarely into these discussions. While no single approach unites this heterogeneous body of scholarship, sound recordings tend to be viewed as more or less transparent vessels for the transmission and storage of musical material. Recordings may be cited as evidence for particular lyrical forms, song structures, or scale tunings; or they may be used as comparison with present day practice (Ziegler 1993). Yet the historically particular conditions for the emergence of these “sound documents” (Bohlman 2016) are worth considering in their own right. Georgian traditional music, of course, has a deep history preceding the rise of sound-recording technology, but we cannot separate the way the music is heard today from the way it was recorded in the recent past. By examining the material and social processes behind different techniques of listening and recording, we can better understand how dominant narratives of music history and national culture emerge and circulate.
Russian and Soviet cultural studies, according to Masha Salazkina, have been slow to adopt the “sonic turn” prevalent in film studies and the anglophone academy as a whole (Salazkina 2014: 4; but see Clark 1995; Hernandez 2004). Although new work on cinema (Kaganovsky 2018) has begun to fill this gap, there is still a linguistic bias to be reckoned with. A Russian-language perspective from the urban centers of Soviet life is still the default, occasionally tempered with critical attention to matters of heteroglossia and translation (Margolit 2014; Razlogova 2014). Not only will the study of Georgian traditional music be enriched by a greater consideration of sound in its socially and technologically mediated manifestations, this work will also add much-needed geographical range to histories of sound in everyday Soviet life (Cornish 2020; Lovell 2015).
In what follows, a discussion of Erkomaishvili’s self-made funeral tapes will bring forward a series of issues at play in late-Soviet Georgia. A brief narration of his lengthy recording career will serve to demonstrate how thoroughly Georgian music is entangled with the history of recording technology. Part of the enduring fascination with Erkomaishvili is the way he juxtaposes the modern and the medieval – his obvious familiarity with advanced recording techniques alongside his monastery training as a church chanter. A centuries-old oral tradition that was nearly eradicated in the Soviet period, Georgian chant’s modern history is one defined by practices of inscription and storage, whether on paper, disc or magnetic tape. The use of tape in Erkomaishvili’s final recordings also places them in context with other Soviet tape practices, including but not limited to magnitizdat. Finally, the funeral tapes return us to one of the foundational ambitions of sound recording: to preserve voices after death. Despite the commonplace association of recording with mortality, every death is unique, and Erkomaishvili’s shows how much can be captured with an “ordinary tape machine.”
Witness to Recording History
Few singing careers have followed the early history of sound-recording technology as closely as Artem Erkomaishvili’s. Born on 22 October 1887, near the tenth anniversary of Edison’s invention of the phonograph, Erkomaishvili had a six-decade recording career, dating from 1907 to his death in 1967.[5] During this time, he encountered everything from wax-cylinder phonographs to reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders.
Artem’s father, Gigo Erkomaishvili, was a farmer in Makvaneti, a village bordering Ozurgeti, the largest town in Guria, one of the historical regions of western Georgia. Gigo was also a well-known singer and led a semi-professional ensemble that included his brother-in-law, Giorgi Babilodze, and other relatives and neighbors. When Gigo’s group was invited by a wealthy merchant to come to Tbilisi and make recordings for the Gramophone Company, he brought along his nineteen-year-old son, Artem (Erkomaishvili 2018: 26). At this time, Tbilisi – more commonly known by its Russian name, Tiflis – was a major center for musical recordings in the Russian Empire, with offices belonging to the London-based Gramophone Company that served the Caucasus and Central Asia (Prentice 2002; Gronow 1981). As a multiethnic outpost of the Russian empire, perched along several trading routes, Tiflis was a target for record companies as soon as they started doing business in Russia in the late 1890s. The recordings made by Gigo Erkomaishvili’s ensemble in 1907 were the first commercial disks to feature folk singing from Guria and are among the earliest surviving documents of Georgian traditional music (Erkomaishvili and Rodonaia 2006; Fairley 2020). Artem was thus an active participant in the birth of the record industry in Georgia.
In the years after the 1907 recording sessions, Erkomaishvili steadily earned greater recognition as a singer – he had a powerful bass voice with a piercing timbre – as well as teacher and choirmaster. After the Red Army’s conquest of briefly independent Georgia and its incorporation into the Soviet Union in 1922, professional opportunities for folk singers gradually increased, with the establishment of amateur and “ethnographic” ensembles under the auspices of various worker and trade organizations (Smith 2002). Erkomaishvili helmed several such groups, most notably a song and dance ensemble in Batumi, a port city on the Black Sea. With this and other groups, he found success in republic-wide competitions called “olympiads” (LaPasha 2004) and made commercial recordings of his folk-song repertoire, beginning in the 1930s. In later years, he returned to his hometown of Makvaneti, where he helped raise his grandson, Anzor. With his brothers Vladimer (Ladiko) and Anania he recorded several chants and trio songs, including some that were filmed for television in 1965.
Artem, Vladimer, and Anania Erkomaishvili (left to right) performing the hymn Siqvarulma mogiqvana upalo (Love has brought Thee, oh Lord), ca. 1965.
In addition to recording for state-run record companies, Erkomaishvili was involved in ethnographic and experimental recording projects. In his autobiographical notes he recalls being brought to Tbilisi in 1924 to work with a number of Georgian composers – among them Meliton Balanchivadze, father of the choreographer George Balanchine – who were making transcriptions and sound recordings. In 1930 his ensemble was invited to Leningrad, where the Russian musicologists Evgeny V. Gippius and Zinaida V. Evald made recordings using three phonographs simultaneously, one for each polyphonic voice-part (Erkomaishvili 2007: 236; Ziegler 1993). And in the last year of his life, he was the subject of another multichannel experiment, when his own voice was overdubbed on two tape recorders (Shugliashvili 2014).
This sketch of Erkomaishvili’s prolific recording career should refute any perception of him as a naive or untouched recording subject, passively consigning to tape the pure treasures of his oral tradition. Yet that is precisely how he is viewed in some quarters of Georgian society today – perhaps not as naive but as a legitimate representative of a pre-technological age, the pilot of a “sonic time machine” (Ernst 2016) transporting listeners to a golden age before the twin scourges of Bolshevism and industrial modernity. This image owes in large part to his unique reputation as the last living sruli mgalobeli (complete chanter), a title bestowed on masters of the oral tradition of Georgian Orthodox church chant (Graham 2015: 124). In order, then, to understand Erkomaishvili’s position within a narrative of Georgian culture’s rise and fall, it is necessary to consider the religious context of his musical training.
Transcribing the Tradition
The Georgian Orthodox Church dates its founding to the early fourth-century conversion of a king of Kartli in what is today eastern Georgia (Lang 1956: 13). From 1811 to 1943, the church in Georgia was officially subordinate to the patriarch of Moscow as an exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church, a state of affairs galling in no small part due to the Georgian church’s seniority: it was founded six hundred years before Russian Orthodoxy’s conventional starting point (Jones 2009). Along with the loss of “autocephaly” or ecclesiastical independence, policies of russification gradually eliminated the liturgical use of the Georgian language and replaced Georgian church chant with Russian-style hymns. In post-Soviet Georgia, there is a tendency to lump together the nearly two centuries as part of the Russian and Soviet empires as a single, dark period of colonization and domination, out of which the present-day state of Georgia finally emerged as a properly independent nation. The effect of this narrative, in terms of sacred music, is to link these imperial-era policies with the later anti-religious campaigns of the Soviet Union – a single arc of devastation leading to the loss of Georgian chant as a living practice. This, however, elides important differences between the two periods: even as Georgian chant disappeared from daily services, Russian church authorities still allowed the teaching of Georgian chant in seminaries and monasteries, employing, among others, the Karbelashvili brothers, central figures in the movement to preserve chant in notation. The Soviet campaigns of the 1920s, by contrast, were explicitly anti-Orthodox – whether Russian or Georgian – and dedicated to the wholesale elimination of religious life, leaving little room for the continued teaching or singing of chant, even in private.
Writing the history of Georgian chant is made especially complex by the fact that, for most of its existence, it was not notated. (For a general introduction to Georgian chant, see Sukhiashvili and Oniani [2018].) While hymnographic texts were preserved in medieval manuscripts, the closest thing to melodic notation was a system of neumes, still undeciphered, which appeared in manuscripts in the tenth century and disappeared barely a century later (Graham 2015: 63). Georgian chant’s endurance up to the time of Erkomaishvili thus relied on chains of oral transmission, whether taking place in individual parishes or within the monastic centers where master chanters were trained.
The site of Erkomaishvili’s training was the monastery at Shemokmedi, some five miles from his home village of Makvaneti. In early 1908, not long after the Gramophone Company recording in Tbilisi, Erkomaishvili was recruited to study chant by the prince Melkisedek Nakashidze (Erkomaishvili 2018: 33). The environment he entered, however, was not the retreat from modernity perhaps conjured by the phrase “oral tradition.” By 1907, Shemokmedi had already seen a flurry of activity in recent decades, centered around the effort to transcribe Georgian chant into Western notation (or “Russian notes” as it was often called in Georgian). Beginning in 1883, the opera singer and Gurian native Pilimon Koridze worked with master chanters at Shemokmedi like Nakashidze and Anton Dumbadze, setting up a portable organ in one of the monastery cells and doing his best to capture in staff notation the intricate, three-part chants (Graham 2015: 254). While Erkomaishvili’s training likely proceeded in much the same manner as in previous centuries – an arduous process through which he learned, by his own reckoning, some 2500 chants – the question of transcription was in the air. He would eventually learn how to write nishnebi neumes (Graham 2015: 370-2), a mnemonic device for recalling chant melodies, and kept a small notebook full of chant texts with dots, curves, and other lines above the words (Figure 1). Such mnemonic notations, while helpful for jogging a master chanter’s memory, are only useful when a chant has already been learned – i.e., they cannot simply be read and reproduced without the requisite training.[6] But this problem – how to preserve chant – would stay with Erkomaishvili to the end of his life.
Figure 1. Erkomaishvili’s handwritten notation for the paraliturgical “Galoba bunebis arsebobaze” (Hymn on the being of nature) (Zhvania 1964: 53)
His training complete, Erkomaishvili worked as a chanter throughout western Georgia. The opportunities, however, were relatively few, due to the suppression of Georgian chant, and dried up entirely when Georgia was absorbed into the officially atheist Soviet Union. Most accounts of his career dating to his own lifetime – including his first autobiography, penned in 1939 – thus omit any mention of his chant training, focusing instead on his secular folk singing. As a result, his chant repertoire lay dormant for decades, with few chances to hone his craft and palpable risks to his public career should he practice religion openly. This enforced silence penetrated even into his home. His grandson Anzor, who would become the most famous musician in Georgia and the keeper of his grandfather’s legacy (Fairley 2020: 283), regretted the fact that Artem never taught him chants at home:
Singing sacred hymns was forbidden. I grew up in a family of chanters, but I never learned a single one. Grandfather Artem would conceal even from me the invaluable treasury he owned. (Gabisonia 2007: 29)
Only at his great-grandfather Gigo’s funeral in 1947 – Gigo was 107 years old when he died – did seven-year-old Anzor first hear the old chants, when Artem, joined by two other Shemokmedi-trained chanters, Dimitri Patarava and Varlam Simonishvili, sang at the service (Erkomaishvili 2018: 99). The three met up again to record chants for the ethnomusicologist Vladimer Akhobadze in 1949 (Sukhiashvili 2020), but the reunion was short-lived, with the deaths of Simonishvili and Patarava leaving Erkomaishvili to carry on the tradition alone.
The Family Business
It is worth pausing at this moment to acknowledge the emerging contours of a hero story. In previous work (Fairley 2020), I have sought to demonstrate the extensive influence that Anzor Erkomaishvili, Artem’s grandson, has had on the perception of Georgian traditional music, both at home and abroad. Indeed, the story of his family saga often seems to converge with the history of Georgian music as a whole. It might even be fair to say that Georgian musical discourse had reached an Erkomaishvili saturation point well before Anzor’s death in 2021. This sudden loss led to a new wave of encomia and ultimately the renaming of the State Folklore Centre in his honor. The effects of Anzor’s domination of Georgian musical discourse are manifold. Not least among them is the perpetuation of an elitist historical narrative, one driven by individuals from a few prominent families, whose achievements were validated by positions such as the leadership of state ensembles and various public honors. In a sense, it is a continuation of the Soviet paradigm of elevating “people’s artists” who represent an officially sanctioned version of folk performance. The result is the neglect of musical practices that don’t conform to a certain vision of Georgian culture – male, vocal, polyphonic, Christian, ethnically and/or linguistically Georgian – including women’s musical traditions and those of long-established ethnic and religious minorities within Georgia (Tsitsishvili 2006, 2009). By adding to the literature on the Erkomaishvili family here, my aim is not to further enhance their reputation, but rather to shift the emphasis from celebrated individuals and families toward the dispersed techniques of listening and recording.
The point where we left Artem, in late middle age – the last living chanter trained in the oral tradition – is also the point where Anzor really enters the story. Born in 1940, Anzor, in several memoirs, recalls being tasked at an early age with preserving his family’s musical legacy. He was encouraged to study Western classical music and eventually enrolled at the Tbilisi State Conservatory. For Artem, having a grandson who could write in staff notation – and whom he was also teaching folk songs in the usual home environment – fulfilled an idea first suggested to him in 1930. On that same trip to Leningrad where he made experimental recordings with Gippius and Evald, the Armenian musicologist Khristofor Kushnarev remarked that it would be better for Georgians themselves to learn notation, rather than letting Russian scholars try and fail to transcribe Georgian polyphony accurately (Erkomaishvili 2018: 63–64). Thus, once Anzor had developed sufficient skill, he began transcribing his grandfather’s songs, working voice-by-voice. Anzor later published some of these as scores for men’s choir, eventually compiling eighty-two songs and eighteen chants into a single volume (Erkomaishvili 2005).
While the chain of transmission may have been broken – Anzor learned a handful of chants from Artem directly but not the method of improvising harmonies that formed an important part of chant training – that did not mean that no one was singing these chants. Artem began teaching chants to a group of conservatory students from Tbilisi, organized by Anzor, who in 1962 would form the ensemble Gordela. This group was one of the first to present Georgian chant in concert, breaking a long-standing taboo on the performance of sacred music (Chokhonelidze and Rodonaia 2004: 52).[7] Even so, they had to be mindful of the censors at the state record company. On a 1969 album, one of the first to feature Gordela, they perform the liturgical chant Ghmerti upali (God is the Lord), yet in the liner notes it appears simply as korali (chorale). According to Anzor (personal communication 30 August 2016), this was a common workaround. While some sacred chants had been assimilated as folk songs, particularly Shen khar venakhi (You are a vineyard), which was often sung at weddings, overtly religious titles and printed lyrics were still unacceptable. To be sure, a Georgian hearing Ghmerti upali would have no difficulty recognizing its origin and purpose, but to Russian ears it was all the same.
The Conservatory Experiment
At the time of Artem Erkomaishvili’s 1966 chant recordings, Georgia’s religious past was slowly re-entering public consciousness. While this process mirrored developments in other Union republics, the Georgian experience was distinctive, reflecting changes in the political settlement between Moscow and Tbilisi following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. As historian Claire Kaiser argues (2022: 207), the central Soviet government granted the Georgian SSR a significant degree of autonomy to handle its own affairs, a “hands-off approach” that emerged in the wake of the violent suppression of protests in Tbilisi in March 1956.[8]
Thus, while Khrushchev’s rededication to “militant atheism” at the official level led to the closure of half of all Russian Orthodox churches (Smolkin 2018: 60), this move had less impact in Georgia, in part because it had so few working priests to begin with: barely a hundred priests in eighty parishes were reported in the entire republic in 1962 (Jones 2009: 110). The so-called Thaw of the Khrushchev era, characterized by social reforms and a rejection of terror, also found nationalist expression in Georgia, with the consolidation of power in the hands of ethnic Georgians and the celebration of “national” culture, including folk song and dance. Despite officially atheist policies – reflected in the censors’ sensitivity to recordings of sacred chant – the Thaw created space for the cultivation of private consciences independent of state control, allowing religious ideas to circulate beneath the surface of public life.
By the mid-1970s, when Eduard Shevardnadze, First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party, led a misguided campaign to root out “harmful traditions,” primarily religious ones, and replace them with properly socialist practices (Kaiser 2022: 154-55), a revival of Orthodox Christianity in Georgian was well underway. The powerful ideological link between Georgian Orthodoxy and Georgian national identity – strengthened through the efforts of Patriarch Ilia II (elected in 1977) and Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a Christian zealot and the first president of independent Georgia – endures to this day (Rapp 2019).
In recognition, perhaps, of the changing attitude toward religion taking place around him, Erkomaishvili came to the folklore department of Tbilisi State Conservatory to record Georgian liturgical chant with professors Grigol Chkhikvadze and Kakhi Rosebashvili. The details of these recording sessions, which produced recordings of over a hundred chants, have been discussed elsewhere (Shugliashvili 2014); what I wish to emphasize here is the necessarily ad hoc nature of the project. The technique of using two tape recorders to allow Erkomaishvili to overdub himself had already been established by 1964, when Chkhikvadze came to Ozurgeti (then called Makharadze) to record sixty folk songs with him (Zhvania 1964: 55). Rosebashvili, remembered by his students and colleagues as an inveterate tinkerer with considerable technical skills, was responsible for the recording setup, which likely involved commercially available open-reel tape recorders. (I have not yet been able to determine the precise model.)[9] Erkomaishvili sang the top-voice part of the chant first, then sang along with the playback to add the middle-voice part on a second recorder. As a final step, he sang the lowest part along with the playback of the two voices from the second recorder, with the first recorder now capturing all three voices. As you might imagine, the sound quality of the resulting tapes leaves much to be desired.[10]
When I first wrote about these recordings (Fairley 2020: 292), I attributed the absence of headphones to a simple oversight, resulting in the ample distortion we hear as Erkomaishvili’s booming voice maxes out the microphone’s sensitivity. The accumulation of room tone from successive recordings also calls to mind Alvin Lucier’s experimental composition I am sitting in a room, recorded some three years later. Now, however, I realize that playback in the room, as opposed to through headphones, was necessary to allow Erkomaishvili, when he came to record the third, lowest part, to hear both of the previously recorded voices. A multitrack tape mixer, which would have resolved this issue, would not be available in the Soviet Union until the 1970s (Meerzon 2000). There were, however, recording studios in Tbilisi, owned by the national record company, Melodiya, which certainly had the capacity to do more sophisticated overdubbing. But the official channels required to access such equipment would have been closed to these scholars, given the nature of the recordings to be made, which were experimental in form and featured an ideologically suspect genre of sacred music.
Deathbed Aurality
According to Anzor’s biography of Artem (Erkomaishvili 2018: 216), it was Artem himself who came up with the multiple-recorder method, although the narrative of this part of Artem’s life is otherwise uncharacteristically scanty on details. At the time of the conservatory project, Anzor was away on military service, as he often was during Artem’s final three years, meaning that much of the information derives from secondhand accounts. The funeral tapes, however, form the centerpiece of the story of Artem’s death. During his final illness, he left a hospital in Tbilisi and returned to his home in Makvaneti – this was a common occurrence in the Soviet Union, where families tended to prefer to handle funeral arrangements locally (Dragadze 1993). One night, having decided he would not live to see the morning, Artem spoke to Anzor alone in his room:
Now listen to me [Artem said to Anzor], there is another tape recorder sitting in my room. I borrowed it from Amiran [Toidze]. […] There are some cassette tapes in a second drawer and the chants for my burial have been recorded on them. When there was no one at home, I recorded the entire “Rite of Mourning” using the two tape recorders. (Erkomaishvili 2018:320)
Artem had performed this act of recording in secret, with Anzor away in the army, and only himself at home. He proceeds to ask his grandson to play the tapes at his funeral, and for the group Gordela to sing some chants as well. To prove himself fully in possession of his faculties, he recites a Bible chapter in Russian, to Anzor’s astonishment (Erkomaishvili 2018: 321), boasting that it had been seventy-two years since he learned it in school. He then asks Anzor to play tapes of the old records of Gurian music, many sung by himself or his father, Gigo. He offers commentary as he listens, drawing Anzor’s attention to different variants and turns of phrase, until his voice trails off. At that moment, Anzor realizes he is gone, just as “Shavi shashvi” (Blackbird) – a song whose lyrics recur as a leitmotif throughout the memoir – begins playing (Erkomaishvili 2018: 322).
But it was not always told thus. The earliest version of Anzor’s biography of Artem is an essay called “Babua” (Grandfather), first published in 1975 in the journal Gantiadi. It has reappeared in book form no fewer than four times, each time as part of collections of essays and memoirs (1980, 1988, 2006). Reappeared, but never in exactly the same form. A process of revision is evident throughout the text of successive versions, but especially so in this scene of Artem’s death. In 1980 and 1988, there is no mention at all of the funeral tapes, and the description of the conservatory recording project is likewise circumspect: rather than sagaloblebi (chants), Anzor reports that Artem recorded simgherebi (songs) with Chkhikvadze and Rosebashvili, obscuring the religious nature of the material (1980: 48). Only in post-Soviet versions do the funeral tapes finally appear (2006: 126–27). The most extensive telling of Artem’s life (2015), which was the first to be translated in English as My Grandfather, Artem Erkomaishvili (2018), is a hodgepodge of material, with interpolations from other essays and extra chapters on ethnography and agriculture woven into the main text of the “Babua” essay. It is here that we get the fullest telling of Artem’s last recorded testament, down to the name of the neighbor from whom Artem borrowed one of the recorders. But let us now step back from these details to examine the conditions which allowed for this remarkable experiment. Why was there a tape recorder beside his deathbed in the first place?
Tape in the Soviet Sixties
Perhaps the most well-studied application of tape recording in the late Soviet period is the phenomenon of magnitizdat, the unofficial circulation of music and poetry recorded on home tape recorders known as magnitofony (Horne 2015). The literature on magnitizdat tend to focus on avtorskaia pesnia – literally “author songs,” though other terms were also in use – represented by such figures as Bulat Okudzhava, Aleksandr Galich, and Vladimir Vysotsky (Smith 1984; Daughtry 2009).[11] Often framed as a form of dissent or critique (Sosin 1975), their intensely personal, guitar-accompanied lyrics punctured the banality of officially sanctioned cultural production, often leading to censure and restrictions on performance and publication. As J. Martin Daughtry argues, however, dissent is at best a limited and incomplete framework for discussions of magnitizdat. “Inherently less oppositional than samizdat” – the underground publishing of texts that by analogy gave magnitizdat its name – these tape recordings are better understood as belonging to “the vast gray area that lay between illegal opposition and active promotion of the regime” (Daughtry 2009: 31). The reforms of the post-Stalin era and the growth of an “informal public” (Zdravomyslova and Voronkov 2002), less plagued by the constant threat of denunciation, made even more room for this realm of personal expression.
While resembling magnitizdat in some ways, Erkomaishvili’s tape work also opens up new avenues in the study of Soviet citizens’ use of amateur recording techniques. Georgian chant in the 1960s, to be sure, faced the threat of censorship, if no longer on the murderous scale of the persecution of church activists in the 1920s (Graham 2015: 349). Like the tapes of dissident bards, both the conservatory recordings and the funeral tapes had to be undertaken entirely outside of official channels. A certain quality of intimacy and the unvarnished immediacy of Artem’s voice also resonate with the experience of listening to magnitizdat (Cornish 2020: 206). Yet the conditions of circulation and the intended audience differ markedly. Erkomaishvili’s conservatory tapes were never intended for public release and seem to have gone largely unheard until the 1980s, when a new generation of conservatory students began studying them as part of a nascent chant revival movement. The funeral tapes, meanwhile, were intended only for a single, unrepeatable listening context. They had the effect, like the well-worn tape reels of guitar poets, of bringing into being an ephemeral listening public in the moment of playback, though they were never copied, to the best of my knowledge, and, through their disappearance, resist circulation to this day.
Tape practices in the Soviet Union extended well beyond the canonical figures of magnitizdat, incorporating a wide range of genres and contexts. In his “superficial history of early tape,” Peter McMurray (2017) discusses the Soviet state’s adoption of magnetic-tape technology after acquiring devices and reels from Germany during and immediately after World War II. In the Soviet context, McMurray argues, the possibility of erasure and reuse afforded by tape was of chief importance, as authorities dealt with limited tape resources and constantly shifting political exigencies. Not only would radio stations need to tape over previous broadcasts as a practical management of limited tape supply, but the “emergent temporalities” afforded by tape allowed for the re-writing of political history by choosing what to preserve and what to discard (McMurray 2017: 40–41; see also Lovell 2015: 166). The spread of home tape recorders in the 1960s thus weakened the state’s monopoly on erasure.
At the time of Erkomaishvili’s death, tape recorders had become a commonplace item in Soviet households: between 1960 and 1965, the yearly manufacture of commercial tape recorders jumped from 128,000 to nearly half a million (Horne 2015: 179).[12] (These numbers, as is often the case, do not account for different realities of production and availability in the various Union republics, which were likely lower than in Russia proper.) Burgeoning interest in consumer electronics, fostered by popular science journals (Cornish 2020: 204), led to much experimentation with sound recording at home. Writing about cassette tapes in socialist-era Poland, Andrea Bohlman suggests that “these little stories on tape and about tape offer a window into networked epistemologies of sound under state socialism” (Bohlman 2017: 122). These “networked epistemologies of sound” largely elude the written archive, as they consist of ephemeral moments of listening, material acts of splicing, mixing, or taping-over, and personal relationships of lending and sharing.
While Artem Erkomaishvili was certainly not alone in using tape to preserve or hand down a traditional art form that was waning under Soviet cultural policy, stories like his are rarely highlighted in broader discussions of magnitizdat or unofficial recording. Much more common are Cold War–style narratives emphasizing either the dissident views of underground singers or the irresistible force of Western genres like rock and roll, infiltrating and undermining a totalitarian propaganda regime. The experience of sound in everyday life was of course more complex and ideologically ambiguous than these narratives suggest (Cornish 2020) and warrants further archival and ethnographic investigation across the myriad languages and social contexts of the Soviet world.
With the introduction of new sound-editing capabilities, tape “conjured time that had never existed or never been heard so clearly in its passage” (McMurray 2017: 46). Splicing, looping, and stretching time were operations that, even if technically possible with inscriptive media like gramophone discs, had never been so available to the professional or amateur recordist. These techniques also allowed for the layering of multiple temporalities at once, prompting the recognition, by McMurray and others, of tape artifacts as close cousins to textual palimpsests. Daughtry recounts the making of a 1981 tape palimpsest “composed” by the singer and guitarist Iurii Kirsanov, then a soldier in the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Using two tape recorders, he layered his singing and playing with previously recorded sounds of warfare and natural surroundings (Daughtry 2013: 15).
In Erkomaishvili’s overdubbed chant tapes, the time dilation – measured in minutes or seconds – is less extreme than in Kirsanov’s. The multiple performances required to create the three-part chants are separated only by the time needed to sing one voice-part, rewind the tape, start the second recorder, and begin singing again. Nevertheless, the resulting composite has palimpsestic qualities from the layers of oral culture that make up the chant tradition itself. Generations of preservation and over-writing, of performances imitated and half-remembered, can be heard in Erkomaishvili’s chants, if one chooses to listen this way. Tape’s affordances of copying, rewinding, and layering, also make it possible to hear Artem’s own listening, as he tunes to his own voice and improvises the correct harmonic intervals and conventional formulas. The “time that had never existed” was also a physically impossible space, in which three identical Artems stand around a single choir lectern. The image calls to mind the famous fifteenth-century icon by Andrei Rublev, The Troitsa (Trinity), in which three angels sit together at a table (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Andrei Rublev, Troitsa (The Trinity, ca. 1425)
Itself a palimpsest, bearing the traces of centuries of repainting and restoration, up through the late imperial and Soviet periods, Rublev’s icon is both material and metaphysical, a tangible object caught up even now in conflicts over the relationship between church and state in Russia. At the same time, it condenses, in its spatial arrangement of figures and symbols, a theological mystery: the presence of multiplicity within an indivisible One. This mystery appeals to Georgians as well, for whom the trinity is an apt analogy for the three-part songs and chants that have come to define their national culture. Scholars cite, for justification, a brief mention by a medieval Georgian philosopher, Ioane Petritsi, who likened the Trinity to the inseparable three voice-parts of music (Gigineishvili 2014: 222). Despite some ambiguity about this passage – it is not entirely clear whether Petritsi is referring to a sacred or secular tradition or what relationship he is attempting to establish between his musical terminology and the Greek Platonist vocabulary he uses elsewhere – this medieval testimony is a cherished piece of evidence for the antiquity of Georgian polyphony, proof of polyphony as “a category of Georgian traditional music thinking” (Tsurtsumia 2003).[13] In its most ambitious form, the longue durée narrative of Georgian chant posits an unbroken chain from the eleventh to the twentieth century, making Artem Erkomaishvili a vehicle of the deep past, a museum piece, like the Trinity icon, in which one is encouraged to see only the oldest layer of paint, and none of the necessary mediations that followed.
Voiceless Sounding, Breathless Life
As objects of media history, the Erkomaishvili funeral tapes permit a re-examination of one of the defining tropes of the “phonographic regime,” as defined by Andrea Bohlman and Peter McMurray. They observe that in most media histories tape plays a “subordinate, subsequent role to phonography” (Bohlman and McMurray 2017: 7). As a result, features considered intrinsic to the phonograph – such as the early association with death and post-mortem preservation (Sterne 2003: 287ff.) – are generalized to apply to all sound recording. As Steven Connor writes in his cultural history of ventriloquism: “As the medium capable not only of separating the voice from its source in space but also in time, the phonograph was associated very early on with death, or the possibility of a speech that defied death” (Connor 2000: 386). Thomas Edison’s own preoccupation with the possibility of communication after death is well documented (Kahn 1992), and the promise of capturing the important last words of “great men” was heralded in the very earliest promotional materials for the phonograph (Kane 2017: 65).[14]
To some extent, the link between sound recording and death is a cliché not because it is untrue, but rather because it is overdetermined, a more general feature of technologies of storage and transmission. In the words of media scholar John Durham Peters, “all mediated communication is in a sense communication with the dead, insofar as media can store ‘phantasms of the living’ for playback after bodily death” (Peters 1999: 142). Tape, as we have seen, has a marked ability to subvert linear frameworks of time, not only through rewinding and overdubbing but through a kind of vocal embalming, preserving testamentary utterances with the sensory plenitude of all recorded sound.
What makes Erkomaishvili’s case noteworthy is not so much what it tells us about death and tape in general, but about dying at this specific time, in this specific place. When Artem recorded the funeral chants for his own service, there was no one, it is true, who could have sung the chants the way he or his late compatriots had. But this was not the only ritual context where traditional knowledge was lacking. The hollowing out of church infrastructure in Georgia meant that many important rites, like funeral rituals, were in the hands of laypeople who typically lacked “knowledge of, or concern with, the underlying theology and moral teaching” (Dragadze 1993: 146). Abortive attempts by the regime to establish atheist variants of lifecycle rituals like weddings and funerals never really caught on: a 1965 request for special music for a “socialist funeral” went unanswered by the Union of Composers (Smolkin 2018: 186). Domestic, unofficial rituals were thus the norm in Soviet Georgia, maintaining a skeletal form of earlier religious practices. In this way, Erkomaishvili’s tapes substituted not only for a particular, elite chant tradition, but for a whole world of customs and social relations that had once accompanied the recognition of death.
In other parts of Georgia, particularly the mountainous regions on its northern border, funeral practices have long been seen as a reservoir of traditional knowledge. In Svaneti, in northwest Georgia, the wordless, three-part lament known as zär (zari in Georgian) has attracted lasting scholarly, cinematic, and theatrical attention (Bolle Zemp 1997; Zemp 2007; Shevtsova 2013).[15] Whether seen as a vestige of pre-Christian practice, an example of “magical” speech/music intonations (Kalandadze-Makharadze 2005), or simply as a relic of what was once a more widespread phenomenon – other regions, like Guria, have songs known as zari but without the same rituals – the Svanetian zär cannot help but invoke the past.[16] The anthropologist Marina Decristoforo (Kaganova 2016), however, urges us to resist an image of Svaneti as primitive and pre-industrial – even as this image is commodified by a burgeoning tourist industry – directing our attention instead to the “ghosts” of Soviet modernization projects that still haunt the region.[17] In such an atmosphere of buried pasts and repressed traditions, as exemplified by the multiple interments depicted in Repentance, dying in the Soviet Union, was never a simple matter.
“Weep for me, brothers and friends …” The text from the Eastern Orthodox rite for the burial of the dead quoted at the beginning of this article – which comes from Anzor Erkomaishvili’s account of his grandfather Artem’s tapes – omits some significant passages. Typically, when the priest first begins to ventriloquize, he begins not with the request to “weep” for the deceased but rather to behold their current state. One English translation reads, “As ye behold me lie before you all[,] speechless and bereft of breath, weep for me, O friends and brethren, O kinsfolk and acquaintance” (Hapgood 1906: 391). The word for “speechless” in the original Greek is aphōnon, literally “without a voice.” In the Georgian version it is similar: ukhmod (khma means “voice”). Voicelessness and lack of breath (apnoun in Greek, usulod in Georgian), is here a defining feature of death.[18] The ritual text, then, is already in defiance of the silence of the grave. One is bound to wonder why Artem left out this part of the liturgy, if indeed he did – we have only Anzor’s account to go on. Perhaps the contradiction was too profound: the sounding voice, already animating the scene of its material dissolution, bearing witness to its own absence.
More fundamentally, Artem has been left voiceless, his final testament, expressed in chant, inaudible. I have perhaps delayed the final twist in this narrative for long enough. The funeral tapes sat in a cardboard box for many years until Anzor, with the help of his friend, the renowned sound engineer Mikheil Kilosanidze, decided to digitize his family archive (Erkomaishvili 2018: 323). (He does not give a precise year, but one would assume it was after Georgia regained independence in 1991.) The first digitization attempt failed: a power outage and “some kind of virus” erased the files. When they went to retrieve the tapes and try again, they discovered that they were missing, apparently stolen from Kilosanidze’s recording studio (Erkomaishvili 2018: 324). No suspects have ever been named publicly, although Kilosanidze, to this day, thinks it must have been one of the musicians who passed through regularly.[19] Though their disappearance is justly considered a loss to Georgian performers and scholars, the funeral tapes, in this final resistance to transmediation, seem to have fulfilled the purpose for which they were made: a singular occasion, serving the needs of a single soul. If the history of media is indeed “the history of the productive impossibility of capturing what exists” (Peters 2015: 11), these are some of its key moments, when miraculous objects like Erkomaishvili’s tapes flash to the surface, only to recede again in the tide of social contingency and material decay.
Conclusion: Last of the Mohicans
In the liner notes to a recent CD release of Artem Erkomaishvili’s 1966 conservatory chant recordings, he is given the moniker “Last of the Mohicans” (Shugliashvili 2016). The title recognizes his status as the last known sruli mgalobeli, a term referring to someone who knew the chant tradition, with its thousands of three-part chants, “completely.” Though mentioned in passing, this phrase, “Last of the Mohicans,” is worth dwelling on. It has a remarkable global reach, thanks to the widespread popularity of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel: the first Russian translation appeared in 1833, during Cooper’s lifetime. A Georgian translation was available no later than 1907. It remains popular in Georgia, reprinted several times a decade and often included in inexpensive “World Classics” book series. The phrase has long been current in both Russian and Georgian, rendered as poslednii iz mogikan in Russian and uk’anask’neli (or bolo) mohik’ani in Georgian. As in English, the epithet can refer not only to the last of a particular race, social group, or profession, but to anyone considered old-fashioned or wedded to certain customs or practices. It appears regularly in Georgian newspapers, going back at least to a 1928 obituary of the writer Niko Nikoladze. Perhaps Artem even used it of himself.
The title is significant in the way it sets Artem apart. The racial fantasy of Cooper’s novel posits a world of discrete tribes and pure bloodlines. The different “races,” moreover, are actors in the progressive movement of history, in which Indigenous people are depicted as inevitably making way for “the white man.” For many Georgians, Erkomaishvili represents, if not a different race, perhaps a tribe apart, offering a vision of what life could have been like had Georgia not suffered Soviet domination. (Some would even turn the clock back farther, before Russian annexation in 1801.) In old age, he would walk down the streets of Tbilisi, dressed in an akhalukhi and chokha, the long tunic and wool coat traditional to the Caucasus, with his long white hair flowing behind him, drawing affectionate attention wherever he went (Erkomaishvili 2018: 285). Like Chingachgook, the wise, older Mohican mentor of the white hero in Cooper’s novel, Erkomaishvili clung to his old ways, even as the changing world began to crowd him out.
But Chingachgook is not, in fact, the “last Mohican” named in Cooper’s title. That honor goes to Uncas, Chingachgook’s son, supposedly the last “full-blooded” Mohican, after whom there will be no more. But Uncas dies in the novel’s climactic scene, attempting to save a white woman with whom he has fallen in love.[20] Artem, too, had a son, David, known as Datiko, who died young, killed in a car accident in 1954, aged thirty-two (Erkomaishvili 2018: 197). Whether or not this additional biographical resonance is intended by anyone employing the “Last of the Mohicans” phrase, the coincidence underscores the generational skips and discontinuities that come into play whenever the concept of last-ness is invoked. Unable to pass on his knowledge to his son, Artem turned to his grandson Anzor. In his insistence that his grandson study Western notation – as in his embrace of recording technology throughout his life – Artem showed little of the resistance to modernity that might be expected of a “Last of the Mohicans.”
Resistance, in general, is hard to square with the facts of Artem Erkomaishvili’s life. Although he was not a Communist Party member – the reason, Anzor suggests with some bitterness, that his obituary appeared only in soplis tskhovreba (the Village Life newspaper) instead of more prestigious outlets (Erkomaishvili 2018: 323) – he held prominent positions in state-sponsored ensembles for most of his career and received ample public recognition toward the end of his life. The post-independence narrative in Georgia has tended to emphasize the suppression of Georgian national culture “under” the Soviets; in fact, as Claire Kaiser (2022) shows, the consolidation of Georgian national identity as a political and cultural project relied on structures of governance, promotion, and patronage set in motion by Soviet authorities, predominantly in the post-Stalin era. Students and enthusiasts of the Georgian folk revival would do well not to gloss over the years from 1921 to 1991 in search of a prelapsarian Golden Age, but rather to hold in analytic tension the contradictions that ran through Artem Erkomaishvili’s eventful life, leaving material traces that can only be understood, in Kaiser’s formulation, as Georgian and Soviet.
Ethnomusicologists have only recently begun to shed the tendency to fetishize certain kinds of musical traditions, particularly those based in oral, unwritten practices, which necessitate physical co-presence. Different kinds of technological mediation, far from corrupting the authenticity of a given performance genre, are better understood as integral to the traditions themselves, developing in tandem with – not in opposition to – the rise of sound reproduction and recording. For his funeral, in fact, Artem Erkomaishvili orchestrated a double act of transmission. There were the tapes, yes, which no one seems to remember hearing, and which went unmentioned for decades. But there was also Gordela, the ensemble of conservatory students who considered Artem their “spiritual father” (Chokhonelidze and Rodonaia 2004: 52). They chanted beside the coffin, fulfilling Artem’s deathbed request, bridging the realms of ritual and stage performance – they were in the municipal theater, after all, not a church. They could never sing like Artem – not like the voice emanating from the tape player, weakened with age yet self-entwined in complex, layered harmony – but their polished performances would soon set the standard for groups across Georgia. Their voices, imprinted with the discontinuities of transmission and stewardship that defined Artem’s life, redefined what was possible in a political environment that was gradually making space to hear Georgian chant again.
Postscript, March 2024
Like an overdubbed tape reel, the story of Artem Erkomaishvili’s funeral continues to double back on itself. In December 2023, I learned from Sandro Natadze, a singer and archivist employed by the Folklore State Centre of Georgia (named since 2021 after Anzor Erkomaishvili), that the “lost” funeral tapes had turned up. These were not, to be clear, the same tapes that had disappeared from Mikheil Kilosanidze’s recording studio, but rather tapes that had once belonged to the musicologist Kakhi Rosebashvili. According to Natadze, Rosebashvili’s tapes were donated to the National Archives in Tbilisi in 2017, though they had not yet been processed when I visited the archives in 2020 and 2021. In the catalogue of the Central Archive of Audio-Visual Documents there are two undated tape reels with the archive number 9496 that contain four funeral chants attributed to Artem Erkomaishvili.[21] These chants match the ones mentioned by Anzor Erkomaishvili in his biography of Artem. What seems likely is that Rosebashvili helped make these recordings in April 1966, when he visited Artem in Makvaneti, a village near the regional capital of Makharadze (today Ozurgeti). We know Rosebashvili made this trip, since he discusses it in the preface to Kartuli galoba (Rosebashvili 1968), his first collection of chant transcriptions, as well as a later collection of Easter chants (Rosebashvili 1976).
This reconstructed narrative also illuminates a letter I found among Artem’s papers, a brief note dated 12 September 1966, in which Rosebashvili mentions sending “the recordings of those chants you wanted.”[22] He apologizes to Artem (addressed with respectful affection as babu, “grandfather”) for the poor quality of the recording and explains that he did his best. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is also bureaucratic business to deal with: Rosebashvili needs someone to sign a form authorizing his travel to Makvaneti, since the head of the Cultural Department was away on vacation when he visited.) I had long wondered which recordings Rosebashvili was referring to in this letter, and the discovery in the archives suggests that it was indeed these funeral tapes.
So, one mystery solved: we will someday know what these funeral tapes sounded like, since the reels have been digitized and will soon be made available to scholars, as was the case with Artem’s conservatory chant recordings. In place of a mystery, however, we have plot holes and inconsistencies, more evidence of Anzor Erkomaishvili’s shaky reliability as narrator of his grandfather’s life. If it was Rosebashvili who helped Artem record his funeral chants – and not Artem himself on the tape recorder borrowed from his neighbor – what are we to make of the deathbed scene depicted above? Did Anzor make up or misremember the details of Artem’s DIY tape experiment, or did Artem himself introduce this misdirection, taking credit in order to shield Rosebashvili from accusations of impropriety, namely helping produce this personal, sacred object? We cannot ask bat’ono Anzor, who today rests in the Mtatsminda Pantheon overlooking Tbilisi, a necropolis honoring Georgian writers, artists, and public figures. He is one of the very few musicians – perhaps the only one – to be celebrated in that place, a fitting honor for someone who placed traditional song at the heart of the Georgian national myth.
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