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Social and Political Constructions of Nation-Making in
Relation to the Musical Styles and Discourses of
Georgian Duduki Ensembles
To cite this Article: Tsitsishvili, Nino , 'Social and Political Constructions of
Nation-Making in Relation to the Musical Styles and Discourses of Georgian Duduki
Ensembles', Journal of Musicological Research, 26:2, 241 - 280
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Research, Vol. 26, No. 2-3, April 2007: pp. 1–51
SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATION-

MAKING IN RELATION TO THE MUSICAL STYLES AND
DISCOURSES OF GEORGIAN DUDUKI ENSEMBLES1
Nino Tsitsishvili
Georgian
Nino Tsitsishvili
Duduki Ensembles
Monash University
The study of the relationship between music and ideology in recent

decades has revealed multiple expressions of national sentiment and
helped us to understand those political-historical contexts in which the
aesthetics of musical style are interpreted in close relation to the domi-
nant ideologies of nation. The aesthetic perceptions of musical styles in
Georgia have been influenced by monoethnic nationalism and pro-Western
orientation. By supporting selected rural polyphonic singing styles of
ethnic Georgians to become the symbol of national identity during the
pre-communist, communist, and post-communist periods, the state’s and
elite’s cultural discourses and policies have attenuated the status of the
duduki ensembles and related urban musical styles derived from the
Middle Eastern maqam/dəstgah modal systems and the art of wandering
ashugh/asik minstrels.
1
I wish to thank Dr. Kay Dreyfus for her numerous critical readings of this article and
suggestions on improvements and stylistic corrections. I am grateful to the Georgian musi-
cians who provided significant information about the history, music styles, and repertoire
of the duduki dasta. For ethical and political considerations, however, I have decided not
to mention their names. I established contact with the duduki musicians largely with the
help of my friend and colleague Nana Kalandadze from The Folklore State Center of
Georgia, where she manages contacts with rural musicians. I would like to acknowledge
the help of Joseph Jordania who accompanied me on several fieldtrips, and Maqvala
Tsitsishvili, who searched through books and dictionaries and supplied precious informa-
tion over the phone when I desperately needed it while writing this article in Melbourne.
The comments, questions, and suggestions of the anonymous reviewers were most crucial
for the improvement and clarification of many aspects of my research, both for this article
and for the future.
242 Nino Tsitsishvili
INTRODUCTION: THE STATUS OF DUDUKI ENSEMBLES

WITHIN GEORGIAN NATIONAL RHETORIC
When I asked him what kind of music he loves to play most, a Georgian
duduki2 player and teacher from Tbilisi answered metaphorically: “You
know what, when I was a student at the Institute of Rural Agriculture
[during Soviet times], there was a slogan that said, ‘There is no bad soil,
there are only bad soil-cultivators.’ The same applies to music: there can
be no bad or good melody, there can only be a bad or a good perfor-
mance.”3 My question followed a long, emotional, and tetchy conversa-
tion on the subject of Georgian duduki music, its Persian-Middle Eastern
influences, and whether it represented Georgian culture; the musician fer-
vently asserted the duduki’s “pure” Georgian origin and nature.
Despite the alleged philosophical “truth” inherent in the statement that
all kinds of music are equal, it is evident that different societies and subcul-
tures within them apply different criteria of taste and aesthetic perceptions
to the music they hear. Music is capable of triggering emotions of love, nos-
talgia, disdain, or intolerance, and it can contribute to the “construction of
the self” by offering us the possibility of knowledge of other peoples and
the social worlds their music embodies, and of ourselves in relation to
them.4 Language surrounding music continues to be imbued with percep-
tions of race and ethnicity,5 authenticity, nation-ness, or nation-less-ness.
Most critically for this study, it has been repeatedly demonstrated in recent
ethnomusicological writings that musical cultures develop in close interac-
tion with political culture, historical contexts, and economic changes,6 and
2
Duduki (in Georgian), also known as balaban, yasti balaman, and düdük (in Azerbaijan),
and mey or ney (in Turkish), is a double-reed aerophone with a cylindrical bore, widely used in
the Middle East and Transcaucasia, mostly in ensembles. See The Garland Encyclopedia of
World Music, vol. 6: The Middle East, eds. Virginia Danielson, Scott Marcus, and Dwight Rey-
nolds (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Andy Nercessian, The Duduk and National
Identity in Armenia (London: The Scarecrow Press, 2001), 18. It has a warm and slightly nasal
timbre often described in Georgian as sweet (tkbili). It is popular among folk and professional
musicians. See glossary at the end of the article.
3
Interview, Tbilisi, April 29, 2006.
4
Martin Stokes, “Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music,” in Ethnicity, Identity and
Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. Martin Stokes (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), 3.
5
Ronald Radano and Philip V. Bohlman, “Introduction: Music and Race, Their Past, Their Pres-
ence,” in Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–53.
6
See Donna A. Buchanan, “Metaphors of Power, Metaphors of Truth: The Politics of Music
Professionalism in Bulgarian Folk Orchestras,” Ethnomusicology 39/3 (1995), 381–416; Buchanan,
“Wedding Musicians, Political Transition, and National Consciousness in Bulgaria,” in Retuning
Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Mark Slobin (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 1996), 201; Buchanan, Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in
Transition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Timothy Rice, “The Dialectic of Eco-
nomics and Aesthetics in Bulgarian Music,” in Retuning Culture, 176–99.
Georgian Duduki Ensembles 243
that rhetorics of national superiority and ethnic purity are attached to

selected and canonized musical repertoires at moments of nationalist resur-
gence and political transition.
In Georgia today, musical expressions of nation-building and monoeth-

nic nationalism are embodied in the aesthetic assumptions, political orien-
tations, and practices that academics, official musical organizations, and
musicians employ regarding the Middle Eastern-derived duduki dasta
repertoire. These assumptions and practices aim to rationalize, endorse, or
defy (consciously or not) the line of difference drawn between oriental
(aghmosavluri, lit. Eastern) music and its perceived negativity as “non-
Georgian,” “foreign,” “imposed,” “Tatruli” (from tatari, the term for the
Azeris), “Qizilbashuri,”7 “Musulmanuri” (Muslim), and “Somkhuri”
(Armenian) on the one hand, and on the other, the rural polyphonic song
tradition originally found among the largely peasant, ethnically Georgian
population and perceived as being “truly” Georgian.8 Musicians who
practice the Middle Eastern-derived repertoires and styles include ethnic
Georgians as well as Azeris, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and other minor-
ities who have lived in the country for several centuries. This article, how-
ever, focuses on the Georgian dasta musicians.
Despite their Georgian ethnic identity and background, duduki dasta
musicians have inferior status within the nationalist rhetoric compared to
that of state-supported polyphonic choirs that sing rural polyphonic
songs. Their lesser status derives from the Middle Eastern Azeri-Persian
and Armenian-associated styles of urban vocal-instrumental music they
perform; polyphonic song, in contrast, is perceived as autochthonous and
purely national (tsminda erovnuli). Such binarism became the backbone
of Georgian monoethnic musical nationalism in the late period of the
Russian Empire and in the socialist state, as well as in current musical-
cultural policies and, even more so, in scholarly thought.
7
Qizilbash are “Turkic tribesmen with origins in Azerbaijan, Anatolia, Syria, and the South
Caucasus, who had become attached to the Safavid Sufi order over the course of the fifteenth
century.” See Shahzad Bashir, “Shah Ismail and the Qizilbash: Cannibalism in the Religious
History of Early Safavid Iran,” History of Religions 45/3 (2006), 235.
8
Apparently influenced by Russian perceptions of the Orient, Georgian composer and
musicologist Dimitri Araqishvili (1873–1953) used the term “Eastern musicians” (Vostochnye
muzykanti, in Russian) in relation to the ensembles of Middle Eastern instruments known as
sazandari, which were popular in nineteenth-century Tbilisi (the capital of Georgia since the
fifth century CE). See Dimitri Araqishvili, “O Gruzinskykh Muzikal’nykh Instrumentakh iz
Sobranii Moskvy i Tiflisa” [On the Musical Instruments from the Collection of Moscow and
Tbilisi], in Trudi Muzikal’no-Etnograficheskoi Komisii, Tom II [Works of the Musical-Ethnographic
Commission, vol. 2] (Moscow: T-vo Skoropechatny A. A. Levenson, 1911), 190–1.
DUDUKI ENSEMBLES: THEIR INSTRUMENTS, REPERTOIRE,

AND STYLES, WITH SOME HISTORICAL AND ETYMOLOGICAL
CONSIDERATIONS
In this article I will discuss the musical constructions of nationalism

and state-building in Georgia using the example of duduki ensembles
and their aesthetic conceptualization within the nationalist rhetoric.
The tradition of playing duduki was widely disseminated in the cos-
mopolitan city of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, at least since the
nineteenth century, particularly among the multi-ethnic population of
lower-class artisans and small tradesmen. The most common perfor-
mance practice of duduki music is dasta, a type of ensemble com-
monly hired to play at weddings and other celebrations and
comprising two or three duduki, doli (a double headed cylindrical
drum played with sticks or with hands), a singer (who is also the doli
player), and more recently, an accordion, which became popular from
the end of the nineteenth century and is still played throughout eastern
and southeastern Georgia. Apparently the word dasta was borrowed
from the Persian language during the period of Persian-Georgian con-
tact; in Iran, a daste is a group of men who meet to perform poetic
laments for martyrs.9 A similar word, dastalughi, is a refrain of a song
that contains the main motive of a poem in the ashugh repertoire.10
Similarly, we might imagine the link between dasta, the Georgian
word for the duduki ensemble, and the Persian-Azerbaijani dəstgah, a
large cycle of mugham, the elements of which are assimilated into
Georgian duduki music.
The most popular form of duduki dasta since the nineteenth century,
one that is still commonly found in eastern Georgia, comprises three
musicians: damkvreli [the player], damkashi [the drone player], and med-
ole [the doli player], who is a singer as well. Similar ensembles compris-
ing either two duduki or two zurna and the drum are also popular in
9
See Danielson et al., 1080; Stephen Blum, “Iran: An Introduction,” in Danielson et al.,
826.
10
About the dastalughi see Ioseb Grishashvili, Dzveli Tbilisis Literaturuli Bohema [The Liter-
ary Bohemia of Old Tbilisi] (Batumi: Literaturuli Achara, 1997), 185. Dastalughi could also be
related to the Dastan (plural, Dastanlar) in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Central Asia, which is a
sung poetic narrative performed by an asiq or bakhshi. See Danielson et al., 1080; Charlotte F.
Albright, “The Asiq and His Music in Northwest Iran (Azerbaijan),” in Danielson et al., 851.
The Georgian and Armenian ashugh and the Turkish and Azeri asiq means “lover” and is
derived from Arabic. Both signify a folk poet, singer, and player. The most well known ashugh
poets and musicians in Georgia were the Armenian Sayatnova (1712–95), who worked as
Georgia’s penultimate king Erekle’s court musician, and Ietim Gurji (1875–1940), the son of a
Turkish-born Georgian; both were from Tbilisi. Poems written by Ietim Gurji are often sung by
the duduki dasta and individual singers today.
Azerbaijan and Armenia.11 The traditional repertoire of duduki dasta

consists of a variety of vocal-instrumental genres and hybrid styles of
Azeri-Persian-Turkish and Armenian derivation. These are kalakuri
[lit., “urban”] songs or instrumental pieces on the topics of love, home-

land and feasting, and mukhambazi, a term which is believed to have
phonetic and etymological connections with mughamat and to represent
a type of mughamat developed specifically in Tbilisi.12 However, it
might be more likely that the Georgian mukhambazi is related to a clas-
sical Arabic poetic form mukhammas used in Central Asian maqam tra-
ditions. The latter hypothesis seems more plausible because
mukhambazi is a poetic form introduced into the Georgian ashugh tradi-
tion by Sayatnova.13 Another form of Middle Eastern ensemble and
style of music particularly popular in Tbilisi in the nineteenth and the
beginning of twentieth centuries was sazandari (from the Azeri sazəndə
[instrumentalist],14 an ensemble consisting of kemanche,15 tar,16 daira,17
11
In contrast to the duduki, which is a double-reed cylindrical-shaped aerophone, the zurna
is a double-reed aerophone with a conical bore. While duduki is specific to south Transcauca-
sia and Turkey, zurna appears to be a common instrument in the eastern Arab world. The
zurna’s loud and high-pitched sound and the doli drumming are used to accompany outdoor
wedding processions and wrestling competitions in eastern parts of Georgia. In some villages
this practice was still in use in the 1990s. When the wedding procession entered the home,
zurna would be replaced with duduki ensembles, the gentle sound of which is more suitable for
indoor performances.
12
Aleksi Barnovi, Dzveli Tbilisis Musikosebi [Musicians of the Old Tbilisi] (Tbilisi:
Khelovneba, 1974) (in Georgian), 11.
13
Zezva Medulashvili, Sayatnova (Tbilisi: Caucasian House, 2006) (in Georgian, Armenian,
and Azerbaijani), 5.
14
Tamila Djani-Zade, “Music of Azerbaijan,” in Danielson et al., 929. According to a Tbili-
sian duduki player, the term sazandari derives from saz-na-dari, which is an amalgam of saz (a
long-necked fretted Turkish and Azerbaijani folk lute or any instrument), na (ney, Iranian end-
blown flute), and dari or daira (a frame drum) (personal communication). Three similar instru-
ments were used to accompany the singing of the asiq in Eastern Azerbaijan, Iran: the saz, the
balaban (a duduki type aerophone), and the qaval, called daira in Persian-speaking Iran (see
Albright, 845, 848). A further parallel can be drawn between the duduki and balaban used to
accompany the asiqs, and the playing of the ney flute and professional poet-performers, asiq in
Turkish Sufi ceremonies. Unlike the duduki and zurna players and ashugh poet-musicians who
originated from the lower social class population, sazandari musicians seem to have had a
higher-class social and educational background.
15
Spike fiddle played by a professional sazəndə or sazandari ensembles in Tbilisi, mostly
by Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The kemanche is similar in shape and construction to the
Georgian chianuri and the chuniri of the western Georgian provinces and some scholars
have equated these instruments. However, the number of strings and tuning are quite
different.
16
Tar (tari in Georgian) is a long-necked lute with a body in the shape of a figure-eight, was
widely played by the Armenian and Azerbaijanian professional and folk musicians. There are
some Azeri tar players in Georgia today.
17
Round frame drum.
santur,18 naghara19 and singer [khanende]). But whereas sazandari per-

formed the classical mugham repertoire, a large segment of the duduki
ensemble repertoire today is made up of folk songs, an amalgam of Mid-
dle Eastern styles, Georgian rural folk songs, and Western harmonies.20
Another traditional repertoire of the duduki dasta is baiati (a
Georgian word for maqam/mugham-də stgah21). Georgian duduki dasta
musicians denote the Middle Eastern-derived modal system by the term
baiati rather than maqam, mugham, or dəstgah, so that they have baiati
rasti, baiati shuri, baiati hijazi, baiati chahargah, etc., rather than
maqam rasti and maqam shuri. Generally, for Georgian musicians,
baiati is the counterpart of the Arab maqam, Turkish makam, and Azeri
mugham, while “mugham” in Georgia is often used as a slang word for
“mood.”22 This alternative usage of the term baiati in the Georgian
duduki ensemble tradition may have various explanations. It is likely
that baiati was introduced into Georgia as a specific mugham of the
Azeri-Persian dəstgah cycle, such as bayati qajar, bayati siraz, or
bayati kurd, all of which are incorporated into the Georgian duduki rep-
ertoire. On the other hand, the notion of baiati may also be derived from
the bayati as a folk poetic genre, as in the Azeri tradition.23 For exam-
ple, an accordion player and singer from an east Georgian village
described one of his sorrowful songs to me as bayaturi, despite the fact
that he was not familiar with the mugham/makam modal system.
Until the first decade of the twentieth century, the tradition of
baiati/mughamat was well maintained by the distinguished Azer-
baijani and Armenian tar players, singers (khanende), and sazandari
ensembles of the cosmopolitan and trilingual city of Tbilisi. These
musicians both practiced the mughamat and had a thorough theoretical
knowledge of the mugham modal system through their links with the
Persian-, Arabic-, and Turkish-speaking cultural world. From the
twentieth century this situation changed. The cosmopolitan atmo-
sphere of Tbilisi declined and the monoethnic Georgian population
grew, the result of which was that many Armenian and Azerbaijani
18
Trapezoidal zither struck with two mallets, today played largely in Iraq. Santuri was
played in Georgia by the sazandari until the twentieth century, but it is now preserved only in
museums.
19
Naghara is also known in Georgia as diplipito, a small kettledrum played in pairs. See
David Alavidze, Kartuli da Sakartveloshi Gavrtselebuli Khalkhuri Musikaluri Sakravebi [Geor-
gian Musical Instruments and the Instruments’ Spread in Georgia] (Tbilisi: Khelovneba,
1978), 98 (in Georgian).
20
See tracks 1, 2, 3, 4 on the CD Tamarioni (see discography).
21
From the Arab maqam, a polysemous term signifying a mode, genre, and a form of musical-
melodic development. See Djani-Zade, 929.
22
Mughamshi ara var [lit., “I am not in the mugham”] means “I am not in the mood.”
23
Djani-Zade, 931.
musicians left to pursue their musical careers in Armenia and Azerbaijan,

where the mugham and ashugh traditions were more appreciated at the
state and institutional levels.
While Georgian duduki musicians in Tbilisi today continue to prac-

tice certain scales and tunes of the dəstgah/mughamat/baiati modal sys-
tem, they do not have a thorough theoretical knowledge of the
mughamat as a modal system, mainly because of the lack of formal and
semiformal educational institutions that would teach the baiati (maqam)
tradition.24 The detachment from the Middle Eastern makam and ashugh
tradition was also facilitated by the gradual integration of the maqamat/
mughamat with Georgian and West European popular urban and rural
music styles, and as a result, by the development of specific local Georgian
duduki styles and repertoire. Therefore, many terms and concepts of
Persian and Azeri origin have been used in transformed and hybridized
contexts and meaning.
For example, present-day duduki players blend the concepts of
ashugh and baiati and speak about the baiati (and mughamat) as
derived from and associated with the ashugh tradition. The conceptual
link between the ashugh and the baiati-mughamat might be derived
from the possible connection between “dasta,” the Georgian word for
the duduki ensemble, and dastan, a sung poetic narrative performed by
an asiq (ashugh) (as explained earlier). Mugham modes were also inte-
grated with the asiq (ashugh) art in eastern Azerbaijan, especially
during Soviet times.25 The word baiati in Georgia also denotes a lyrical-
love song genre set to the rubais of Omar Khayam26 [rubai is a classical
poetic form often used in Central Asian maqam traditions]. For exam-
ple, the urban modal improvisatory duduki solo “Shikaste” on the CD
Soinari (see discography) is set to the words of a poem by the Georgian
ashugh Ietim Gurji, the eleven-syllable line (4+4+3) form of which is
identical with the short poetic forms of the asiq havasi in Northwest
Iran.27 Besides, ashugh/asiq art was utilized in Sufi religious ceremo-
nies, in which an asiq sang both liturgical and secular songs.28 Many of
24
Several duduki players told me in conversation that there are special houses in Tbilisi and
other east Georgian towns called bina [lit., “apartment”], where dasta musicians gather, learn
from each other, and practice. These bina apparently replaced the guilds that were plentiful in
the nineteenth century. In these guilds of the mostly lower social class population, young musi-
cians lived with and learned from their ustabash [the master zurna and duduki players]. Today
the number of bina has drastically decreased. Most dastas today are in the Khashuri, Gori, and
Kaspi regions of eastern Georgia.
25
Djani-Zade, 930.
26
Barnovi, 15.
27
Albright, 851.
28
Walter Feldman, “Ottoman Turkish Music: Genre and Form,” in Danielson et al., 114–5.
these genres utilized makam modes, as is apparent from the practice of

Mevlevi ney players.29 Such a polysemous and amalgamated usage of
the concepts of makam, baiati, and ashugh/asiq speaks for the greater
tendency of complex hybridization of styles and genres in the Middle

Eastern-influenced duduki dasta music of Georgia.
THE STATUS OF DUDUKI IN THE MODERN NATION STATE
Based on my analysis of field recordings, interviews, Georgian aca-

demic discourse, and cultural-folklore policies espoused by official
organizations, my focus is on the ambiguity and expandable nature of
identity that emerges as musicians and audiences alike try to explain
and make sense of their simultaneous multiple musical experiences,
tastes, artistic collaborations, and genuine love for music-making against
the background of a persistent ideology of ethnic nationalism and aes-
thetic standards set by the official music organizations and academia.
Caught between the rhetoric of nationalism and a diverse social-ethnic
reality in a dynamic and multi-faceted process of modern nation-making
that has been in progress since the nineteenth century, dasta musicians
employ ideas and interpretations that are often contradictory, pointing
to an expression of identity that is ambivalent and conflicting: between
the self and the ideology, between the culture as defined by the officials
(from institutions such as the Ministry of Culture and the State Conser-
vatorium), and the multi-ethnic and hybrid culture in which they actu-
ally live; between musicianship as an expression of nationality and
state-building, and musicianship as an activity that—due to music’s
intangible qualities and economic considerations—crosses ethnic
boundaries. While identity is in constant flux and national purity is an
elusive and ambivalent condition, ethnicity and nationalism still remain
as axes around which emotions and senses of belonging revolve and dis-
courses of power and truth are shaped.
As we shall see, this ambivalence is rooted in Georgia’s political-
historical experience of struggle for political-economic independence
from Islam during the seventh through eighteenth centuries and from
Russia since the eighteenth century, which deepened, indeed created, a
sense of alienation among the multi-ethnic and multi-religious popula-
tion of Transcaucasia, especially in the aftermath of the dissolution of
the Soviet Union, the government of which silenced the differences and
issues of interethnic relations. The experience of split and fragmented
identity, in which musicians and scholars are caught between two con-
trasting and conflicting worlds, is also facilitated by Georgia’s geopolitical
29
Ursula Reinhard, “Turkey: An Overview,” in Danielson et al., 769, track 2.
and social location between Europe and Asia. As their country is part of
Asia, Georgians cannot view things Oriental as completely Other, they
must view them as part of Self; therefore, the Orient occupies a different
place in the Georgian experience than in that of the European West,

because Orientalism as an intellectual concept was borrowed from
Russia and the West rather than emerging locally. Local culture and history
were manipulated to underpin ideas of the Oriental versus the European,
to be discussed below. The inferior status of dasta musicians is also
linked to the propensity of the Georgian political and cultural elites to
represent Georgia as intrinsically Western, and to the contradiction that
may exist between the representations of the Western-oriented elites and
the historical-social reality of Georgia’s broader rural and multi-ethnic
lower social class populations.
MUSIC OF THE CITY, MUSIC OF THE VILLAGE: ORIGINS AND

POLITICS OF GEORGIAN NATIONALISM
Georgia emerged at the crossroads of Europe and Asia in contact with the
Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Persian civilizations. In the fourth century
Georgia adopted Christianity and together with Armenia became the East-
ern stronghold of Christendom in Caucasia. Georgia’s history and culture,
however, was largely determined by links with the Islamic world.
Through its long history of cultural and political ties with the great Per-
sian powers from the sixth century BCE to the eighteenth century, as well
as the Arab Caliphate (seventh to tenth centuries) and Ottoman Turkey
(fifteenth to eighteenth centuries),30 the social-political life particularly of
southeastern Georgia was under a direct influence from the Persian and
Islamic worlds.31 Georgia was predominantly a peasant and rural society
and, from early Middle Ages until the late nineteenth century, the towns
30
See chaps. 7–21 in Giorgi Melikishvili, Ocherki Istorii Gruzii, tom 1: Gruzia s Drevneyshikh
Vremen do IV veka N.E. [Essays on the History of Georgia in Eight Volumes, volume 1: Geor-
gia from the Earliest Times to the 4th Century A.D.], ed. Giorgi Melikishvili and Otar Lortki-
panidze (Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1989), 245–60, 271–4, 294–306, 226 (in Russian); Anri
Bogveradze, “Rannefeodal’nye Gruzinskye Gosudarstva v VI-VIII vv.” [Early Feudal Geor-
gian States in the Sixth to Eighth Centuries], in Ocherki Istorii Gruzii v Vosmi Tomakh, tom II:
Gruzia v IV-X Vekakh [Essays on the History of Georgia in Eight Volumes, vol. 2: Georgia in
the Sixth to Tenth Centuries], ed. Miriam Lortkipanidze and David Muskhelishvili (Tbilisi:
Metsniereba, 1988), 141–88 (in Russian); Miriam Lortkipanidze, “Tbilisskii Emirat” [The
Tbilisi Emirate], in Ocherki Istorii Gruzii v Vosmi Tomakh, 339–53; Ronald Grigor Suny, The
Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
31
As a result of Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century, the regions of southwest Georgia
such as Samtskhe Saatabago and part of Guria (today’s Achara, Meskheti, and Javakheti [the lat-
ter two regions are often referred to as one, Meskhet-Javakheti region]) were Islamized and, in the
view of Georgian nationalists, lost their Georgian and Christian identity. When Russia colonized
of eastern Georgia were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians,

Azeris, Persians, and other foreigners.32 Multi-ethnicity, thus, has a long
history in southeastern Georgia, and traces of its tremendous effect on the
character of the musical culture are audible in today’s duduki dasta

music.
Georgia’s ultimate decision to be politically oriented toward the West
dates from the end of the eighteenth century, when the eastern Georgian
kingdom, desperate to defend itself from Ottoman Turkey and Persia,
signed the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783, which placed the Kartli-Kakheti
kingdom (of eastern Georgia) under Russia’s protection. Russia annexed
Georgia in 1801, proclaimed it as a province (gubernia), and soon the
whole of Georgia became Russia’s colony. After a short period of indepen-
dence (1918–21), Georgia became part of the Soviet Union. The turn from
the multi-ethnic and hybrid society of eastern Georgian towns and Tbilisi
to a mono-ethnic nationalism was largely caused by the demographic-
cultural and social-economic changes that occurred in Georgia as a result
of Russian colonization, capitalism, Russification, and the emergence of a
national movement from the nineteenth century. At that time, large num-
bers of rural Georgian nobility and peasantry, desirous of joining the grow-
ing workforce of administrative bureaucracy and proletariat, started
moving to Tbilisi (the capital, then and now). In a city where bi- and
tri-lingualism was commonplace, they “came into contact with people of
different cultures. One’s ‘Georgianness’ now had to be affirmed more con-
sciously. In the multi-ethnic context of Tiflis [the old name of Tbilisi], the
boundaries between ethnicities had to be defined and redefined.”33
In Tbilisi and other towns, ethnic Georgians, especially those from the
western provinces, also came into contact with Persian and Armenian musical
the Caucasus at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Muslim Georgians of Meskhet-Javakheti
and Achara, fearing Russia’s and Christian Georgians’ revenge for their adoption of the Islamic
faith and Ottoman rule, immigrated to Turkey where they established Georgian villages. See Paul
J. Magnarella, with contribution by Ahmet Ozkan, The Peasant Venture: Tradition, Migration, and
Change among Georgian Peasants in Turkey (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company,
1979), 14–6. Stalin deported Georgian Muslims (Turk Meskhetians, as they are called) from
Meskheti to Central Asia in 1944, out of a presumption that they would back Turkey during World
War II; their repatriation to Georgia caused very controversial responses from Georgian politi-
cians and national leaders, some of whom, again, feared that their resettlement would create eth-
nic problems, and that Turk Meskhetians would support Muslim culture and Turkey rather than
Christian and pro-Western Georgia. Georgian political leadership also expressed fear that settling
Turk Meskhetians in the Armenian populated area of Meskhet-Javakheti) would cause unrest in
the region. See “Ethnic Affiliations. Meskhetians,” European Country of Origin Information Net-
work. Human Rights Issues, http://www.ecoi.net/doc/en/GE/content/4/2276, accessed June 4,
2006. Azeris are ethnic Azerbaijani rather than Georgian Muslims.
32
Suny, 38.
33
Suny, 115.
cultures that were completely different from the choral-polyphonic forms of

their village communal music-making. When the rising patriotic intelligen-
tsia looked for sources of national and cultural identity by the beginning of
the nineteenth century, the music of Tbilisi and surrounding towns as well
as rural areas was, paradoxically for their quest, a complex amalgam of
Armenian and Azeri-Persian styles and repertoires played by professional
and amateur musicians of Armenian, Georgian, Azeri, Persian, Kurdish,
Greek, and other ethnic backgrounds. From the nineteenth century this cul-
tural amalgam was further elaborated by contact with the Georgian poly-
phonic song tradition and with European and Russian influences.34
From the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of ensem-
bles and musicians who practiced Azeri-Persian and Armenian-derived
hybrid styles, genres, and performance forms of urban vocal-instrumental
music declined. They were labeled as “foreign” in the increasingly mono-
nationalistic and Europocentric letters published in popular newspapers
and periodicals, and by musicologists and politically-active writers.35 In
contrast, rural polyphonic song, as it came to epitomize Georgian ethnic-
ity, was one of the main desired ingredients—alongside Western classical
and modern music—in the making of Georgian national classical sym-
phonic and operatic music. Such music embodied an idea of progress and
of modernity, with roots in the ancient and rural autochthonous past. As
the educated elite and scholars became familiar with the ideologies of Ori-
entalism, modernity, European-Western superiority, and theories of the
evolution of civilizations during the late nineteenth and especially twentieth
centuries, the intelligentsia and musicologists also perceived polyphony as
a more European phenomenon than was the monophonic and monodic
Middle Eastern music.36 What in Georgian academic writings is defined as
“oriental” (aghmosavluri), is actually a variety of highly hybrid styles of
popular music, as implied in a definition like “Persian-Arab-Georgian
34
For the introduction of European and Russian musical culture and educational institu-
tions in Georgia see Araqishvili, Kartuli Musika: Mokle Istoriuli Mimokhilva [Georgian Music: a
Brief Historical Study] (Kutaisi: Adgilobrivi Meurneobis Stamba, 1925) (in Georgian); Inga
Bakhtadze, Kartuli Musikalur-Estetikuri Azris Istoriidan: XIX Saukunis Meore Nakhevari [The
History of Georgian Music-Aesthetic Thought: The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century],
(Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1986) (in Georgian); Gulbat Toradze, Kartuli Musikis Istoria, Tsigni I
[The History of Georgian Music, Book 1] (Tbilisi: Ganatleba, 1990) (in Georgian).
35
Disfavor of the “oriental” was also instigated by the Russian viceroyalty in Tbilisi, who
appeared as civilizers of “backward Asiatic people,” and who preferred that Italian opera be
heard instead of the “semi-barbarous sounds of Persian music” popular a few years before their
arrival. See Suny, 93. Russian representatives had close ties with the Russified and at least
externally Europeanized local Georgian nobility and intelligentsia.
36
Araqishvili, Kartuli Musika, 22; Araqishvili, “Svan Folk Song,” in Essays on Georgian Eth-
nomusicology (International Research Center for Traditional Polyphony of Tbilisi V. Sarajish-
vili State Conservatoire, 2005), 56 (reprint in English).
song” (Persidsko-arabo-gruzinskaya pesnya).37 It is this hybridity and the

perceived presence of an “oriental” sound, alongside elements of so-
called “cheap” popular styles, that makes this music a “conflict zone” for the
national ideology, with the latter’s emphasis on the alleged intact authen-
ticity and European-ness of the polyphonic music (with its connections to
Christendom38), and on progressive Western classical and modern music.
NATIONALISM AND THE ESSENCE OF GEORGIAN MUSIC
As the Georgian patriotic elite of the nineteenth century set out to cre-
ate an “awakening” of the nation from its centuries of self-oblivion,
music became one of the expressive forms that had to manifest a dis-
tinctively Georgian character. Therefore, it became necessary to
define which type of music best represented the Georgian nation. An
idea of rural folk song in the Herderian and European sense, in which
national song had the power to represent universal human culture, the
specific people’s character, and the historical drama,39 was discovered
and revived in Georgia too. The first collections of Georgian folk
songs appeared in the 1870s and 1880s,40 and folk song was imagined
as an expression of the Georgian people’s psychology, and of a pure
Georgian character and taste.41 The polyphonic singing that accompa-
nied the customs and agrarian life of the largely peasant, ethnic-Georgian
society in the villages became the “cultural-historical physiognomy of
Georgian music.”42
37
Araqishvili, Kratki Ocherk Razvitya Gruzinskoi Kartalino-Kakhetinskoi Narodnoi Pesni [A Brief
Study of the Development of the Georgian Kartli-Kakhetian Folk Song] (Moscow: K. Menshov,
1906), 285 (in Russian). See also Archil Mshvelidze, Kartuli Khalkhuri Kalakuri Simgherebi [Geor-
gian Folk Urban Songs] (Tbilisi: Georgian Department of the Muzfond [Musical Fund] of the
USSR, 1970) (in Georgian); Barnovi, 1974; Tamar Meskhi, “Georgian Town Polyphony Songs,” in
Problems of Folk Polyphony: Materials of the International Conference Dedicated to the 80th Anniver-
sary of the V. Saradjishvili Tbilisi State Conservatoire, ed. Rusudan Tsurtsumia (Tbilisi: Tbilisi State
Conservatoire, 2000), 135–42 (in Georgian with English summary). Russian popular music of the
post-socialist period has become a new source for the cassette industry in Georgia today and is
widely played in the buses and minibuses (called marshrutka) that run in and between towns and
villages.
38
From the eighth to ninth centuries an elaborate tradition of polyphonic church chanting
and liturgy developed in Georgia. First it was introduced from Byzantine and Syria as a one-
part canonical chant system, but it was later polyphonized by Georgian church musicians.
39
Philip Bohlman, The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History
(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2004), 42–3.
40
Araqishvili, Kartuli Musika, 41, 50; Otar Chijavadze, “Kartuli Musikaluri Kultura XIX
Saukuneshi” [Georgian Musical Culture in the nineteenth Century], in Toradze, Kartuli
Musikis Istoria, 74.
41
Bakhtadze, 88.
42
Bakhtadze, 94.
In 1886, Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907), a Georgian writer and one of

the founders of the Georgian liberal-democratic nationalist movement, pub-
lished his letter on “Georgian folk music.” It was inspired by the first concert
of Georgian polyphonic songs performed by the “Kartuli Koro,” a choir

formed in 1885 by Lado Aghniashvili, a Georgian public activist and the
educated son of a Georgian priest.43 In his letter, Chavchavadze made a clear
distinction between Georgian rural polyphonic and Asian types of music,
saying that “a Persian does not like our three-part song because he does not
understand it.”44 While Chavchavadze intended to distinguish Georgian
polyphony both from European and Asian (Persian) music, his implicit con-
cern was to dissociate Georgia from Asia, for the author believed that
“Europe has left Asia behind,” and that Georgian polyphony could be “a
completely new phenomenon in the history and theory of music,”45 to be
acknowledged by Western cultural hegemony. It is symptomatic that, a hun-
dred years after the publication of Chavchavadze’s letter, a tendency to
“overcome the oriental influence” in Georgian music was identified, devel-
oping Chavchavadze’s thesis of a significant “typological” difference
between Georgian polyphony and Persian monophony.46 This tendency,
interpreted as the only way toward the creation of a unique and healthy clas-
sical national music, still defines musicological thought in Georgia.47
It was assumed that the rural folk music of ethnic Georgians was supe-
rior to urban music. The intolerance toward urban music had to do with an
attribution of negative social values—such as the absence of a Western-
style musical education, an association with lower-class uncivilized soci-
ety, and “oriental” Muslim backwardness—similar to negative perceptions
of the “oriental” Ottoman Turkish cultural heritage in Bulgaria.48 Accord-
ing to Imedi (“Hope”), the popular national-socialist newspaper of the
1880s, the urban music was “either distorted, or comprised solo songs of
the kinto [a low class of workers and craftsmen in Tbilisi]49 or Persian
baiati. Therefore, we can only call folk song those songs that are sung by
rural people . . . . Fortunately, the people, which has always been the
defender of its national characteristics . . . protected and preserved its pure
43
Chijavadze, 78–9.
44
Ilia Chavchavadze, “Georgian Folk Music,” in Essays on Georgian Ethnomusicology, 20.
45
Chavchavadze, 19.
46
Bakhtadze, 91–109.
47
See Rusudan Tsurtsumia, Twentieth-Century Georgian Music: Originality and Value Orien-
tation (Tbilisi: Tbilisi State Conservatoire, 2005).
48
Buchanan, “Wedding Musicians,” 206.
49
Kinto, who often entertained the public by playing and singing in the streets, were often
viewed as “dishonest” (tricksters) in contrast with the qarachogheli, another class of Tbilisian
craftsmen in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were known for their honorable,
manly (katsuri) behavior and respected by their fellow citizens. The qarachogheli often held
feasts with the duduki dasta and ashugh singers.
Georgian song tunes.”50 For the radical nationalists, rural songs had noth-
ing in common with what they described as the “Persian croaking that
fills the streets of the city.”51 The Soviet era saw an even more stringent
adherence to, indeed, an institutional endorsement of ideas of monoethnic

nationalism and its cultural expressions. This included the establishment
of the State Ensemble of Song and Dance, the Cabinet of People’s Cre-
ativity (established in 1936, renamed The House of People’s Creativity in
1937 and, currently, The Folklore State Center of Georgia), and village
and regional choirs that openly promoted the rural polyphonic and ethnic
Georgian folkloric tradition. In Soviet times, the Persian-Azeri and Arme-
nian heritage in Georgian culture was further marginalized and disguised,
as Ziegler writes: “Urban music in the oriental style was now called the
‘Song of Old Tbilisi’ to avoid any social and ethnic conflicts and to find a
purely national term for this kind of music, which was no longer per-
formed by Georgians and was not considered typical of Georgian musical
culture.”52 Despite the fact that the Ministry of Culture in Soviet Georgia
and the Professional Association of Art Workers recognized and even
commissioned duduki dastas to boost soldiers’ spirits during the Great
Patriotic War (1941–45), duduki music was largely marginalized. None-
theless, while apparently missing from the educational institutions and
cultural policies, the “Song of Old Tbilisi” and Persian-derived baiati
have survived in the expressive culture of a large part of the population.
An attempt to separate an indigenous Georgian urban music from a for-
eign urban music in Tbilisi is palpable in the few articles written on the
subject of urban Oriental music. It clearly points to the desire to disguise
the ethnic-cultural hybridity of southeastern Georgia. For example, Msh-
velidze, the expert on Georgian urban music, distinguishes between the
historically earlier, local, ethnically-Georgian branch of the urban ashugh
music and the art of the Persian-Azeri ashughs, which, in his words, was
introduced beginning in the seventeenth century. Noting the lack of
important social concerns in the poetry, he associated the music of the
baiati-mughamat style with the “exaggeration (‘hypertrophy’) of feelings,
emotions of a person who lacks willpower [nebamikhdili, lit. lack of free
will], a contemplative perception of life [tskhovrebis ch’vret’iti agh-
kma],” similar to the emotions of sentimentality, tears, passive fatalism,
and private self expressed in Arabesk. In contrast, local Georgian ashughs
50
Cf. Bakhtadze, 96.
51
Cf. Bakhtadze, 95.
52
Susanne Ziegler, “East Meets West: Urban Musical Styles in Georgia,” in Historical Stud-
ies on Folk and Traditional Music: ICTM Study Group on Historical Sources of Folk Music: Con-
ference Report, Copenhagen, April 24–8, 1995, ed. Doris Stockman and Jens Henrik Koudal
(Copenhagen: Danish Folklore Archives, Museum Tusculanum Press, 1997), 157. See Bar-
novi, 20–1, 25–6.
featured “self-controlled sensibility, healthy emotions and optimism.”53

Drawing such a clear boundary between the Georgian per se and the
Persian branches of “oriental” ashugh music does not seem very convinc-
ing, given the fact that a large majority of Tbilisian professional musi-
cians (and the general population) were of non-Georgian and mixed
background and, as the author himself admits, Tbilisi was an international
center of Transcaucasia from before the seventeenth century. Therefore, a
non-Georgian population and influences were significant here before the
seventeenth century. Feasting and drinking are characteristic motives in
both ashugh poetry and duduki music, through which men achieve the
carefree emotional state of dardimanduli and keipi, in which they tran-
scend everyday concerns and submerge themselves in thoughts of women
or the despairs of love, as expressed in a much-circulated saying among
the dasta musicians and their audiences, “ghvino, duduki, kalebi” (“wine,
duduki, women”).54
EASTERN GEORGIAN URBAN SONG VERSUS WESTERN

GEORGIAN RURAL POLYPHONIC SONG
“Oriental” styles are widespread in eastern Georgia, while it is the west-

ern provinces that are seen as providing most of the country’s polyphonic
song tradition, which is “entirely polyphonic” and viewed as being of
“greater interest from a scholarly point of view.”55 This is despite the
presence of an elaborate three-part drone singing tradition in the Kakheti
province of eastern Georgia, which is also the source of national pride and
scholarly interest.56 The similarities, as well as the differences, in the use
53
For Arabesk see Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 109–10, 142–7; For Georgian ashughs see Mshvelidze, 12.
54
There might be some homology between the state of mind achieved through the consump-
tion of alcohol at Georgian feasts and the mystic communion with God inherent in sama and
sema (religious music and dance in Sufi thought and practice), the language of which is absorbed
and redefined in Turkish Arabesk. See Stokes, The Arabesk Debate, 215–7; Feldman, 109. There
might be a link between the Sufi sama and sema and the Georgian ritual round dance sama and
samaia, which was performed by mixed or single sex groups in different ceremonial contexts. See
Lilly Gvaramadze, Gruzinsky Tantseval’ny Fol’klor [Georgian Dance Folklore] (Tbilisi: Khe-
lovneba, 1987), 123–33 (in Russian). Scholars are beginning to investigate the connection
between the Georgian feast and the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. An example of this is the
paper, “Liturgical Nature, Appraisals and Table Chants of the Georgian Traditional Feast,” pre-
sented by Nino Gambashidze, Giorgi Gotsiridze, and Manana Shilakadze at the Third Interna-
tional Symposium on Traditional Polyphony, held in Tbilisi, September 25–9, 2006.
55
Araqishvili, “Georgian Music: A Brief Historical Review,” in Essays on Georgian Ethno-
musicology, 27 (reprint in English).
56
Polyphonic choral singing today survives in some parts of the Kakheti dialect area of east-
ern Georgia, while it is almost extinct among the populations of the Kartli and especially the
Meskheti areas.
of harmony in European and Georgian polyphonic musics have been

noted,57 and the Georgian people were represented as the only bearers of
polyphony among the Caucasian and Transcaucasian peoples (this state-
ment has been proved wrong today). West Georgian polyphonic song
simultaneously represents what is pure, uncontaminated by the Oriental
influence, uniquely national (tsminda erovnuli), and simultaneously
European, while the eastern Georgian baiati, duduki, zurna, or accordion
embody the hybridity of the foreign (utskho) and the Asiatic. Such per-
ceptions are reinforced by the complete absence of Middle Eastern musi-
cal forms in western Georgia. The only West Georgian province where
duduki has spread is perhaps the Imereti dialect area, which is at the bor-
der between northwestern and southeastern Georgia. Thus, in a subtle and
implicit way, the macro-level West-East (Europe-Asia) and national-
foreign dichotomies have been reproduced implicitly at a micro-level
within Georgia, between the western and eastern regions.
The overmapping of macro and micro levels comes to light in informal
conversations with duduki players and musicians who practice the so-called
“foreign” styles. Several east-Georgian musicians expressed the view that
the increasing influence of western Georgians in the politics of the country
beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century was responsible for
the growth in popularity of polyphonic singing and the decline of that of the
duduki, zurna, and the oriental styles of music.58 According to some eastern
Georgian musicians, the focus on polyphony and Western classical music
denies the obvious presence of music that is closer to the people’s hearts.59
Since this instrument [he referred to both duduki and zurna] is not popular
in Samegrelo or Guria [western provinces], and now they [western Geor-
gians] dominate the higher positions in some fields, they say it’s not
ours . . . .[I]t may not be the instrument of Makharadze [the Soviet name
of the central town Ozurgeti of Guria, western Georgia; see map in
Figure 1], but it is the instrument of Tbilisi, Kaspi, Khashuri [eastern
Georgian towns], and Zestaponi [the western Georgian town in the
Imereti dialect area at the border with eastern Georgia].60
From the beginning of the twentieth century, a new tradition of playing

in an ensemble of three duduki was introduced, which often includes
57
Araqishvili, Georgian Music, 22; Shalva Aslanishvili, Narkvevebi Kartuli Khalkhuri Simgh-
erebis Shesakheb [Essays on Georgian Folk Songs], vol. 1 (Tbilisi: Khelovneba, 1954), 187–90
(in Georgian).
58
Nino Tsitsishvili, National Unity and Gender Difference in Georgian Traditional Song-
Culture (Ph.D. dissertation, Monash University, 2005), 267.
59
Interview, Tbilisi, July 9, 1999.
60
Interview, Tbilisi, April, 29, 2006.
Figure 1. Map of Georgia. (Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps.)
western-Georgian three-part songs61 and seems to have developed as an

adjustment to the predominantly polyphonic culture of western Georgia and
the growing pro-Western inclinations of the political and cultural elites.
This polyphonization of the duduki dasta can be interpreted as the Western-
ization and improvement (both at the macro-European and micro-Georgian
levels) of the oriental music, and certainly facilitated the acceptance of the
instrument by the people of the western provinces. Paradoxically, the con-
tribution of non-Georgians was decisive in this musical transformation, and
particularly the role of Khachik Talgaukov62 (1907–62), who, as some Geor-
gian players say, was a Tbilisian musician of Greek nationality, a statement of
61
Alavidze, 60.
62
Barnovi, 11; Alavidze, 60. Because of ethnic discrimination as well as Russification
policies, many Armenians, Kurds, and Azeris changed their names to ones with Georgian
or Russian suffixes. Thus, Bagramiants became Bagramov, Mantashov became Mente-
shashvili, Amirkhanian became Amirkhanov or Amirkhanashvili. Many jokes were circu-
lated among the ethnic Georgians during the post-Stalin era, expressing the titular
nationality’s position toward ethnic “inferiors.” According to one popular joke, a Kurd
comes to a town’s municipal bureau in order to change his surname from Bagrationi (a
Georgian royal dynastic name) to Dadiani (the name of the royal dynastic princes of
Samegrelo, in western Georgia). The serviceman at the bureau asked the Kurd why he
wanted to change his name as he had already changed his Kurdish surname into the Georgian
royal name a few years ago. The Kurd answered: “Well, yes, but when they [Georgians] ask
me what was my name before Bagrationi, what should I answer?” (The assumption here is
that Georgians would guess from the Kurd’s physical appearance and accent that he is of
Kurdish nationality).
doubtful credibility, as his first name is clearly of Armenian origin, and his
surname does not have any evident Greek connotation.
MUSICAL IDENTITY, ETHNICITY, AND AMBIVALENCE
The ambivalent status of “Oriental” music arose out of the discrepancy

between the national elite’s support of “pure” Georgian folksong on the
one hand, and the fact that the same educated elite in the nineteenth cen-
tury still enjoyed listening to Persian and Armenian sazandari,
mughamat, and ashugh art and considered it as part of their culture.63 The
sense of this discrepancy persists today, and is what the Georgian political
scientist Ghia Nodia has identified as elitist qualms about the future of
Georgian identity: that being “European-oriented” does not actually make
Georgia “European.”64
For example, Georgian noblemen commonly played and sang to the
accompaniment of Persian instruments, such as the tari, which they kept
in their homes.65 Araqishvili writes that the Georgian musician Kharlampi
Savaneli, who established the first musical school (1874) in Georgia, was
a patriot who protected the treasures of Georgian culture, and as a sign of
this protection he would gather the old sazandari musicians and listen to
their music.66 Ilia Chavchavadze, the father of Georgian nationalism and
the patriot who made a clear distinction between Asian monophony and
Georgian polyphony as two incompatible types of culture, is believed to
have liked the mughamat-baiati, and, particularly, mugham dava. A story
behind this mugham tells how a thirsty camel in a caravan stopped in the
desert and would only rise to its feet again after the camel herder played
flute and sang mugham dava. Ilia Chavchavadze symbolically compared
this story, attached as it is to the Persian-Azeri mugham dava, with the
national awakening of Georgia.67
The term “Persian-Georgian baiati,” used at the end of the nineteenth
and beginning of the twentieth centuries,68 also points to the lack of
strictly-defined boundaries between Georgian-ness and Eastern-ness and
to the hybridity of the urban styles cherished by the elite. When it came to
the scholarly definition of a national musical culture at the end of the
63
Araqishvili, “O Gruzinskykh Muzikal’nykh Instrumentakh,” 190–1; Barnovi, 14.
64
Ghia Nodia, “Georgia’s Identity Crisis,” Journal of Democracy 6/1 (1995), 106; Nodia,
“The Origins of Georgia’s “Pro-Western Orientation,” Newsletter of The Berkeley Program in
Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies Graduate Training and Research Program on the Contemporary
Caucasus 2 (Fall, 1996), 5–6.
65
Araqishvili, “O Gruzinskykh Muzikal’nykh Instrumentakh,” 190.
66
Araqishvili, Kartuli Musika, 43–4.
67
Barnovi, 14.
68
Araqishvili, “O Gruzinskykh Muzikal’nykh Instrumentakh,” 189.
nineteenth century, however, the same poets and intellectuals dismissed

baiati and Eastern-Persian musical characteristics as foreign, unaccept-
able, and forcibly imposed on Georgians, for such a dismissal seemed
necessary for the creation of a uniquely Georgian national music. Para-

doxically, they were now writing against a culture that was long experi-
enced as part of Georgian social life, and which many poets and public
activists admired. This signified the shift of the elite’s political-cultural
orientation from Asia to Europe and the West.69 To rationalize this turn,
the nationalist poet Akaki Tsereteli expressed the idea that Georgians
only liked the Georgian words of baiati (mughamat), while disliking its
foreign tunes and oriental sound.70 Repercussions of this idea can be
heard in the rhetoric of today’s duduki dasta musicians, who sometimes
explain baiati as “their tune and our words.”
DUDUKI MUSICIANS AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF

GEORGIAN IDENTITY
In this section I explore two of the manifold ways through which dasta
musicians try to overcome this socially and politically constructed con-
flict. The first is their attempt to nationalize “foreign” musical styles and
instruments through newly-invented or discovered historical accounts,
“facts,” myths, and anecdotes. History is adjusted to make the sound of
the Arabic, “foreign,” “Tatar,” or Persian seem Georgian and to legiti-
mize it in the context of official nationalism. Styles and repertoires that
were dismissed and labeled as non-Georgian are transformed stylistically
and imagined as “truly” Georgian, and dasta musicians adopt a new, more
hegemonic and “legitimate” repertoire of polyphonic songs and styles.
Formerly marginalized dasta musicians can then be rightfully represented
in media and academic accounts of Georgian national music equally with
proponents of rural polyphonic song.71 In contrast to the nationalizing
69
Here I shall differentiate between the elite, who used music as a source of poetic inspira-
tion, entertainment, and intellectual-ideological discussions, and musicians and the low class
population of eastern Georgia, for whom music had a more practical meaning as a professional
vocation and as marking important events of the life circle (weddings, deaths, village festive
celebrations). The elite quickly dismissed “Oriental” music when the time came to become
national, Westernized, and exclusionist; the low classes (working class urbanites and peasants)
in contrast, continued practicing and consuming the various hybrid musical forms until the
present day, for Westernization and the benefits of nation-building were rather less relevant to
their lives than was the world embodied in and punctuated by dasta music.
70
Bakhtadze, 93–4.
71
The exclusive national status of the polyphonic song is apparent from the UNESCO’s
proclamation of Georgian polyphony as a masterpiece of an oral and intangible heritage. See
UNESCO, First Proclamation of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity,
2001.
tendency, the second bridge over this conflict involves the cultivation of a
cosmopolitan attitude by some dasta musicians, creating a different world
of sensibility. Some of these musicians live in regions with a high concen-
tration of ethnic minorities, and a consequently higher intensity of culture

contact. Within such hybrid cultural contexts, musicians are understand-
ably unwilling to adopt the rhetoric of national purity and exclusiveness.
Literature on related topics concerning the interface between music,
identity, political ideology, aesthetics, and cultural heritage emphasizes
the Gramscian notion of hegemony as a form of cultural leadership in
which certain ideas dominate over others,72 as a relationship between
dominant and subordinate, hegemony and identity, in which musicians
negotiate between their individual, internalized sense of self and localized
worldviews and the realities constructed by their government. As a result,
cultural and human identities at any given moment are heterogeneous,
fluid, and dynamic.73 Considering the multiplicity of identity expressions
and experiences possible in Georgia, neither of the two positions distin-
guished above (nationalistic or cosmopolitan) is insular. Within their pri-
marily nationalistic-purist or cosmopolitan-hybrid attitude, musicians
perform and talk about music in ways that point to their ambivalence and
flexibility in being at once Georgians and human beings, citizens and
musicians, nationals and cosmopolitans. Both nationalists and cosmopoli-
tans among the duduki musicians adopt attitudes of creative transforma-
tion and synthesis; they themselves can function as agents of long-term
cultural convergences that may result in an influx of new musical styles
and repertoires.74
Despite this Gramscian ambivalence over identity and multiple alle-
giances, there seems to be a notable difference in terms of repertoire,
playing styles, and ensemble structure, as well as attitudes and discourses,
between the musicians in Tbilisi and the surrounding areas on the one
hand and musicians in the rural, especially southeastern, parts of Georgia
on the other. In the capital Tbilisi, which is the home of the Georgian
political elite and cultural intelligentsia and cradle of pro-Western orien-
tation, the discourse employed by duduki dasta musicians sounded much
more nationalistic and purist, and, thus, reflective of the elite’s Western
orientation and the ideological policies of the Ministry of Culture, than
did that of dasta musicians in the south-east part of Georgia (where I also
recorded dasta music), which has a high concentration of the Azeri
diaspora and is only 30 kilometers away from the Armenian border. As
72
Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 7.
73
See Buchanan, “Metaphors of Power,” 384.
74
Margaret Kartomi, “Preface” in Music Cultures in Contact: Convergences and Collisions,
ed. Margaret Kartomi and Stephen Blum (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994), xi.
far as the structure of the ensembles is concerned, those in the southeast

of Georgia share more similarities with the traditional Middle Eastern-
Azerbaijanian and Armenian ensembles, comprising a solo duduki
(damkvreli), a drone duduki (damkashi), and a doli drum. In contrast, the

ensembles from Tbilisi often comprise three duduki, a drum, and an
accordion. The inclusion of the accordion makes the whole tuning of the
Tbilisi dastas sound more tempered and European. The tendency toward
Westernization and European influence is audible in the three-part har-
monic arrangements of Georgian three-part polyphonic rural and urban
songs, while it is completely absent in the duduki ensembles on the south-
eastern periphery.
The difference between the nationalized and polyphonized Tbilisi das-
tas and the more Middle-Eastern sounding peripheral ensembles was
demonstrated by the two completely disparate versions of the same song
that I recorded and heard from a Tbilisi dasta in 200275 and then from a
dasta in Dmanisi in 2006. The Tbilisi version was based on a clearly tonal
harmonic progression in B flat major: dominant seventh on B flat, the
tonic 6/4 on F, dominant seventh on F resolving onto the tonic major triad
on B flat (see Example 1). The song is in 3/4 meter. The Dmanisi version
in contrast comprised an ornamented solo duduki improvisation in a free
meter based on a local version of the makam (baiati) rast mode from G
sharp (see Example 2). It seemed that the attitudes and perceptions of the
duduki players from the periphery generally revealed more integration
with the non-Georgian (Armenian and Azeri-Persian) music. These musi-
cians earn their livelihood by playing at weddings, funerals, and other
Example 1. The chord progression of a song played by the duduki dasta in

Tbilisi, 2002.
Example 2. A mode derived from the song of the ashugh Ietim Gurji,
“Lamazebis Khelmtsipev” [the king of beauty], performed by the duduki
dasta from Dmanisi.
75
See track 6 on the CD “Soinari” (Discography) for the Tbilisi dasta version.
events in their multi-ethnic communities, where they come across and

collaborate with Greeks, Azeris, and Armenians, both the musicians and
the broader community members.76 They absorb styles and repertoires of
foreign ethnicities from these encounters and collaborations. For exam-

ple, one of my informants in southeast Georgia played with Azeri musi-
cians at weddings and knew many Azeri tunes and songs.
All the duduki musicians whom I met were most cautious when speak-
ing about the national and cultural affiliations of the musical style and
repertoires they play. Musicians with a clear Georgian ethnicity77 were
often reluctant to comment on and acknowledge the presence of Middle
Eastern (i.e., Persian, Azeri, or Armenian) links in their music. By
76
The sense of historical rivalry and animosity toward ethnic minorities increased some-
what in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, as radical leaders of nationalist and independence
movements dramatized ethnic rivalry. Zones of ethnic tensions in Georgia are Dmanisi, Mar-
neuli, and Bolnisi, south of Tbilisi (see map in Figure 1), with their high concentration of Azeri
Muslim population, and the region of Javakheti (with its center in Akhalkalaki), with a 91 per-
cent Armenian population that fled there from Turkey in the first half of the nineteenth cen-
tury. In contrast with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, no serious armed conflicts have occurred in
these regions. However, there has been civil unrest and the general alienation of the population
from the Georgian leadership. Ethnic minorities in these regions speak Azerbaijani or Armenian
respectively and sometimes Russian as a second language, but rarely Georgian. In Javakheti
they have used Armenian and Russian currency, receive Russian and Armenian TV and radio
programs, and learn Armenian history at schools. The Armenians there hardly feel as Georgian
nationals. While Georgians and ethnic minorities generally live peacefully as neighbors, there
was ethnic unrest in Dmanisi-Marneuli in 1987, instigated by the radical-nationalistic
movement, which promoted the ideology of “Georgia is the land of Georgians” (and all the rest
are guests), subsequently depriving the Azeris of an equal right to own the land. In other
regions, perceptions of discrimination have been entertained by elites rather than initially orig-
inating from among the population, especially in the autonomous regions of Abkhazia and
Ossetia. See Svante E. Cornell, “Autonomy as a Source of Conflict: Caucasian Conflicts in
Theoretical Perspective,” World Politics 54 (2002), 245–76, 259; see also Paul Jackson, “Eth-
nicity, Decentralisation and the Fissile State in Georgia,” Public Administration and Develop-
ment 24 (2004), 75–86; Rostom Sarkissian, “Javakhk: Socio-Economic Neglect or Ethnic
Unrest?, Diplomacy and World Affairs, DWA Discussion Paper No. 101, 2002; at: http://
departments.oxy.edu/dwa/papers/101b.pdf, accessed June 16, 2006; Natalie Sabanadze,
“Armenian Minority in Georgia: Defusing Interethnic Tension,” European Center for Minority
Issues, Brief #6, August 2001, at http://www.ecmi.de/rubrik/59/issue+briefs/, accessed June
16, 2006. “Javakh,” Javakheti’s Armenian national organization, has expressed demands for
the region to secede from Georgia and join Armenia, which, for political-diplomatic reasons
does not openly support such demands. Poor economic conditions, monoethnic nationalism,
and under-representation in the Georgian government are among the major reasons for ethnic
tensions.
77
There are instances where musicians and/or individuals have a mixed ethnic background,
in which case their sense of ethnic belonging can be ambiguous. In some cases, individuals of
an Armenian ethnic origin have become Georgianized; i.e., their grandfathers or fathers have
changed their non-Georgian names into Georgian ones, have abandoned previous ethnic-
cultural habits, and adopted Georgian ways of life. Some people try to conceal their back-
ground, as it is more prestigious to be a Georgian than to be an Armenian or an Azeri.
default, in conversation, musicians expected me, an ethnically Georgian

musicologist, to be a nationalist, to favor rural polyphonic songs over
duduki and baiati, and to be critical of their “oriental” connections. Dur-
ing one recording session at a restaurant in Tbilisi, my fieldwork request

that they should “play something Azerbaijanian” was met with suspicion
and hesitation by the musicians: Could I be trusted and their non-Georgian
repertoire revealed? The leading musician in the dasta (comprising three
duduki, accordion, doli and a singer) exclaimed, by way of proving his
Georgian-ness, “Let’s sing Mravalzhamier,” a Georgian polyphonic
urban song in a European style. It turned out that the dasta often played
three-part polyphonic songs on three duduki (see Example 3). When I
asked why the dasta played and sang polyphonic songs, the same musi-
cian replied, revealing the official voice, “The audiences understand what
good music is.” He made a clear distinction between the Georgian and the
Azeri versions of baiati, referring to the latter pejoratively as Tatruli, and
requiring that the group play baiati rasti on the words of Ioseb Grishashvili,
the Georgian Soviet poet and connoisseur of the urban Tbilisi musical
Example 3. Makharia, a Megrelian polyphonic song played by the duduki

dasta, Tbilisi, 2002.
tradition (Example 4), rather than the baiati kurti (bayati kurd), suggested
by another musician in the ensemble.
Georgian baiati has modal, rhythmic, and melodic commonalities with
the Arab maqam modal system, Azerbaijani mughamat, and Persian

dəstgah. Many modes (maqams or baiati as Georgians call them) and
their characteristic techniques of melodic elaborations such as sobe and
gushe are shared with the Arab and Persian maqam and dəstgah-
mughamat, including the names of modes: baiati rasti, baiati shuri, baiati
qajari, baiati kurti, segah, hijaz shustari (sustər). However, in the process
of a disparate historical development, the Georgian modal system came to
differ from its Arabic, Azerbaijani, and Persian prototypes. In Azerbaijan,
Example 4a. Song in the mode of baiati rasti played by the dasta in Tbilisi,
2002.
Example 4a. (Continued).
the mughamat system is fully reflected in the finger-board of the tar,

while the Georgian baiati modes are played and conceptualized on the
duduki finger holes. Shuri, segah, rasti, and chahargah are also the names
of fingerholes on zurna and duduki.78 As in the Persian dəstgah or the
Arab and Turkish maqam/makam system, each baiati has its own starting
note, though the starting notes of Georgian baiati are different from those
of the identically named makam tetrachords in the Middle Eastern system.
78
Ivane Javakhishvili, Kartuli Musikis Istoriis Dziritadi Sakitkhebi [The Main Questions of
the History of Georgian Music], 1st ed. (Tbilisi: Pederatsia, 1938), 206 (in Georgian).
Example 4b. The European-influenced section of the song played by the

same dasta, in Example 4a.
For example, baiati rasti is always on B flat (the principal note on the
duduki), baiati shuri is on C, and segah is played in two modes: The first
is similar to the maqam on the tetrachord kurd (according to the Arab
modal system) from B, modulating into D (see Example 5). The non-metric
duduki patterns of the baiati rasti (Example 4a) explore various tonal
possibilities in different branches of the mode, returning to the tonal cen-
ter each time, in a manner similar to the successive non-metric melodic
patterns that move around the central tone of each new sobe (a tonal
branch of a mugham). The fluctuating slides between the major and minor
versions of steps in a scale are also common features in both Georgian
Example 5. Segah, played by the duduki dasta from southeast Georgia.
and Middle Eastern music. The doli drum is added in the second half of
the song, a faster rhythmic-metric section that is sometimes called təsnif
(a metrical genre), as in Azerbaijan. Here, the three-part harmonic pro-
gressions played in regular meter by the three duduki—such as V-IV
minor-I (in Example 4b)—show a clear tendency for Westernization in
this Tbilisi-based duduki dasta.
To prove their Georgian identity, as opposed to unwanted foreign eth-
nicities, musicians from Tbilisi sometimes avoided mentioning Azeri and
Armenian ethnicity and referred to them as magat (“them”), or “those
whom we are suspicious of.” Instead of speaking of the similarities
between Georgian and Armenian or Azeri duduki, zurna, and baiati,
Georgian dasta musicians emphasized and essentialized differences
between “our” multi-part playing style (khmebshi dakvra) (as in Example 3)
and “their” monophonic playing style. The latter is viewed as easy, while
playing in parts is perceived as being a more difficult and, by implication,
a superior skill that Azeris cannot achieve:
They [Azeris] don’t want to hear a Georgian melody, because Georgian

melodies are three-part [polyphonic], and they don’t understand these
parts. When he [an Azeri musician] has to play in thirds with another
player, he can’t distinguish this third from the intervals of a fourth and a
fifth. That’s why one player plays solo, and the other drones, this is the
easiest way. Whatever they come up with melodically fits in [in relation to
the drone]. But as soon as we turn to Georgian three-part tunes (samkh-
miani melodia), say, something as simple as “Tsitsinatela” or “Suliko”
[Europeanized urban songs of western Georgian origin with tonic-domi-
nant-subdominant harmonies], well, it’s simple for us but not for them,
they can’t comprehend it. It may take me a month to teach them.79
Ambivalence towards foreign and hybrid cultures is apparent in state-

ments made by Georgian dasta musicians, such as “Baiati is neither
Azeri, nor Iranian, nor Armenian. It is something intermingled alto-
gether.”80 By making such comments, musicians try to eliminate the
79
Interview, April 18, 2006.
80
question of the association of certain styles with ethnic inferiors, for such
identification creates conflict with their sense of being Georgian, as
largely shaped by the official ideology of nationalism. Contradictorily,
the musician quoted above explained to me that he can immediately dis-

tinguish between the Armenian, the Azeri, and the Georgian styles of
playing: “We are folklore experts, we can notice immediately what is
Armenian and what is urban [Georgian], by its color and character; Azeri
is entirely awful, without any good intonation.”
National ideologues manipulate the Georgian population’s animosity
toward its minorities by exploiting, for example, the fear that Muslim
Azeris’ high birth rates can lead to the extinction of the Georgian ethnic-
ity, or the memories and reality of historical-territorial rivalry with the
Armenians, or the possible pollution of society by state-less and, by
implication, culture-less and “inferior” Kurds. In parallel to the historical-
political rivalry with Armenia, Georgian duduki players also resent the
Armenian duduk players’ international popularity. While some Georgian
duduki players correctly note that Tbilisi was the center of duduki tradi-
tion, they are reluctant to admit, or are perhaps ignorant of the fact that
many Tbilisian musicians affiliated with special musical guilds
(saamkaro) were of Armenian background. And it is Georgia’s official
patronage of the polyphonic song (not the Armenian musicians) that has
contributed to a gradual decline in the learning and playing of duduki in
the country, depriving the Georgian duduki players of an equal claim to
its ownership internationally.
Ambiguously though, expressions of animosity toward Armenian
duduk players are often counteracted by the Georgian musicians’ desire to
include musicians of Armenian origin in the Georgian cultural narrative.
For example, some Georgian players resent the fact that the well-known
ashugh Sayatnova (1712–95), who was Georgia’s penultimate king
Erekle’s court musician and is much respected among the Georgian das-
tas, is claimed by the Armenians. Georgians acknowledge that Sayatnova
was Armenian by origin, but put forward the counterclaim that his mother
city was Tiflis (Tbilisi).81 This argument hardly helps to resolve the dispute
since, while modern Tbilisi is the center of Georgian culture, Armenians
view the city as the largest Armenian cultural center in the Caucasus,82
based on the fact of its predominantly Armenian population until the end
of the nineteenth century. Despite the rivalry, many Georgian musicians
have developed an “underground” collaboration with and admiration for
Armenian, Kurdish, or Azeri musicians, which comes to the surface
cautiously in informal conversations and points to the formal denial but
81
Mshvelidze, 19.
82
Manuk Manukian, “Music of Armenia,” in Danielson et al., 734.
informal acceptance of the non-Georgian musical heritage and its non-

Georgian practitioners.
The duduki is not the only instrument that is displaced in contemporary
cultural rhetoric and official practice. Many musicians say that the zurna
is unfashionable today. It was formerly used for wedding celebrations
among the Azeris, Armenians, and Kurds, as well as among the majority
of eastern Georgians, but it has always been an unwelcome instrument at
the festivals organized by the state, possibly because of its loud, piercing
sound and Middle Eastern associations. (Nowadays zurna is often
replaced with clarinet among Georgian and Azeri wedding musicians but,
like the zurna, the clarinet is unwelcome at official and elite events).
Some articulate Georgian musicians have expressed irritation at such pol-
icies; one commented, “You may play zurna at the festival-Olympiad, but
you won’t get any assessment for that . . . . They play zurna in China, in
Japan, in Yugoslavia, in the whole East, and here some bigots forbid us to
play . . . they just ignore it, which is the same as to ban it.”83 The same
player (quoted above) distinguished between the Georgian zurna, which
is played in pairs, and the Kurdish zurna, which is played as a solo instru-
ment, both accompanied by the doli.84 The distinction between the one-
and two-zurna playing styles is used by musicians and scholars to mark
the multi-part, progressive, and national character of the Georgian zurna
(compared to the solo, and by implication, simpler playing style of the
Kurdish zurna). As the above-mentioned musician said in conversation
with me, a Kurdish zurna player (mezurne) whom he knew personally
brought him his zurna and said: “Zurab [the name of the Georgian musi-
cian], this is a Georgian zurna and I can’t use it, so you can have it,” a
comment that points to the contradictory co-existence in the Georgian
musician’s parlance of the Other-ness of Kurdish zurna and the friendly
collegial relationship with the Kurdish musician in question in his lived
experience. The Georgian musician was very disappointed that the western-
Georgian members of the state dance ensemble in which he played duduki
asked him to demonstrate Kurdish music when they saw he had a zurna.
He answered with resentment (as he said to me), “this is not a Kurdish
instrument and you can’t play Kurdish music on it.” Many western
provincial Georgians, having encountered the highly hybrid culture of
eastern Georgia in Tbilisi, think of zurna and duduki as essentially non-
Georgian, being unaware of the fact that both have a long tradition in the
eastern Georgian provinces.
83
April 29, 2006.
84
According to other sources, zurna (accompanied by doli) was once played as a solo instru-
ment by Georgians too and a second zurna was added later. See Javakhishvili, 204.
The exclusion of and ambivalence over zurna and baiati is not surpris-
ing given that the emphasis of official organizations such as The Folklore
State Center of Georgia is still, even today, on the “development of state
policy on folklore, adherence to authenticity, and the continuation of the

seventy-year-long tradition [since the establishment of the center under a
different name (the Cabinet of People’s Creativity) in 1936] with a mod-
ern worldview.” One of the Center’s priorities is the “restoration of inter-
action between the villages, districts, regions and the center,”85 thus
confirming the continuation of the Soviet-type national policies. Accord-
ing to this centralized policy, musicians who participate in official festi-
vals have to negotiate their repertoire with their local culture
representative, who ensures that it meets the requirements of authenticity
and nationality (erovnuli), a procedure that points to the continuation of
censorship. Thus, dasta musicians must play traditional folklore, which
means that their repertoire should be more Georgian and thus different
from that of the ethnic minorities. As one Georgian historian has
described the political climate of post-socialist Georgia, this is the
replacement of a communist with a national ideology.86 However, this
seems to be more than national ideology; it represents the continuation of
a monoethnic nationalist philosophy that began in the nineteenth century.
RESOLVING THE CONFLICT: NATIONALIZATION OF THE

FOREIGN OR COSMOPOLITANISM?
Stephen Blum has written that “. . . musicians and scholars in many parts
of the world have faced conflicting demands made by spokespersons for
cultures described as ‘modern’ or ‘traditional’, . . .‘national’ or ‘local’;
and so on. People often act out these conflicts and explore possible reso-
lutions in musical performances.”87 For many Georgian academics or
musicians, sound features that seem to be shared between Georgians,
Armenians, and Muslim Azeri or Kurds have created ambivalent feelings
over and an ambiguous status for the Oriental heritage. While Oriental
hybrid styles persist in the practices of the lower working classes of east-
ern Georgia, official and scholarly discourses about this kind of music
are strikingly absent, as if they have never existed. It may be true that, at
a broad intellectual and philosophical level, the national elite, official
folklore organizations, and academics often accept other ethnicities and
their expressive cultures as entitled to equal rights and treatment, and the
85
The Folklore State Center of Georgia; at: http://www.folk.geo, accessed June 20, 2006.
86
Vakhtang Erkomaishvili, Eri da Ideologia [Nation and Ideology] (Tbilisi: The University
of Tbilisi Press, 2000), 74–7 (in Georgian).
87
Blum, “Conclusion: Music in an Age of Cultural Confrontation,” 254.
issue of ethnic-cultural discrimination does not exist. However, value

hierarchies clearly emerge in informal conversations and official elite
musical practices, and these ethnicities either have the stigma of a
perceived lower status or are seen as challenging Georgia’s civilized

European-ness, independence, and territorial integrity. Experts on ethnic
conflicts have also expressed the idea that
even though the Georgian constitution [formally] provides for equal

treatment of minorities and the legislature has all provisions against
discrimination [including folk organizations that represent ethnic
minorities at regional music festivals], more work has to be done for
the enforcement of those provisions and, more importantly, for the
building of the civil society and inclusive understanding of Georgian
citizenship.88
NATIONALIZATION
Some Georgian scholars and musicians have “resolved” or dealt with the
conflict between the ideal of a “pure” Georgian music and the historical
reality of multi-faceted musical identities by ignoring the fact of hybridity
and culture contact, or rather diminishing its significance, “amputating”
whatever “other” it contains and, in parallel to this, attempting to nation-
alize, that is, Georgianize, the foreign elements.
A well-established thesis of Georgianization holds that Asian and
Arabic instruments “have lost their original face,”89 the defining fea-
tures of Persian dəstgah/mughamat have been completely eradicated,
and this art ultimately ceased to exist in Tbilisi,90 or elements of
imported foreign music have been adapted and subordinated to the
rules of the original Georgian folklore.91 Musicians who play duduki
and baiati often point to the Georgian characteristics of the baiati style
and attempt to prove the “pure” Georgian origin of the duduki, claim-
ing as essentially Georgian those non-Georgian musicians who have
contributed to their development and popularity in Georgia. So, for
example, one musician told me, referring to Bagrat Bagramiants
(Bagramov) (1850–1938), a Tbilisian dasta leader, singer, and player,
“He is of Armenian descent but, can you believe it, he always sang
88
Sabanadze, 6–7. As a result of the new minority policies, Azeris of southeast Georgia in
Bolnisi and Marneuli will soon receive Georgian news programs on TV in their native Azer-
baijani language (June 2006).
89
Barnovi, 10–1.
90
Bakhtadze, 107.
91
Grigol Chkhikvadze, Kartuli Khalkhuri Musika [Georgian Folk Music] (Tbilisi: Sabchota
Sakartvelo: 1965), 9–10.
songs based on Georgian rules” [my emphasis]. Such claims are made
despite the fact that Bagramiants sang Armenian (as well as Georgian) rep-
ertoire.92 The nationalization discourse ambiguously serves both to justify
the presence of non-Georgian musicians in Georgian territory as well as to

express the fear and belief that in some cases, Armenian musicians have
unfairly appropriated Georgian culture and are “selling” it as Armenian.
History, myths, and historical anecdotes are often reconfigured to
endorse the national origin of the duduki. As one musician said in conver-
sation with me, “In Tbilisi composers are not interested in duduki, they
think it is tatruli (Azeri); but that’s not true, duduki is a purely Georgian
instrument.”93 While some Georgian and Soviet scholars consider duduki
as a Middle Eastern or Arabic instrument,94 contemporary Georgian
duduki players strongly believe that it is “Ours.” They hypothetically situ-
ate the origins of the duduki in prehistoric times in the Kolkheti Valley,
where the first western Georgian states emerged; alternatively they trace
it to the ancient Sumerians some five thousand years ago.95 Such hypo-
thetical suggestions, based on archaeological findings of end-blown
instruments and narratives of an historical-mythical character, empower
musicians, materializing cultural heritage and locating the imagined pro-
totypes of the duduki on the territory of Georgia.96
While nationalism helped to fabricate the language of exclusion and
difference, musically and technically it also resulted in, and was the rea-
son for, culture contact, stylistic transformations, and the creation of a
new Georgian sound, which, according to nationalists, no longer bears
traces of Arabic, Persian, or Armenian culture. As an adjustment to the
growing monoethnic nationalism and immigration of the non-Georgian
population from Tbilisi, the performance of sazandari with its emphasis
on mughamat gradually vanished, and only historical narratives and
memories of its distinguished practitioners can be found.97 Instead, the
two-duduki dasta enlarged by a doli and singer appeared toward the end of the
92
See Before the Revolution: A 1909 Recording Expedition in the Caucasus and Central Asia by
the Gramophone Company (CD TSCD921, Topic Records Ltd., 2002), tracks 6 and 7.
93
Fieldwork, April, 2006.
94
Most writers wrongly identified oriental links as Arabic: See Araqishvili, Georgian Music, 33;
and Ia Kargareteli, Mokle Popularuli Samusiko Entsiklopedia [A Short Popular Musical Encyclope-
dia] (Tbilisi: Sakhelgami; Sastsavlo Pedagogiuri Sektori, 1934), 29 (in Georgian). In fact, Georgian
duduki dastas, sazandari, and baiati were related to Persian, Azerbaijanian, and Armenian music,
with which Georgians have had more direct contact since the early middle centuries and even before.
95
According to personal communications with musicians.
96
Many songs and anecdotes are drawn on to prove the duduki’s Georgian rather than
Armenian provenance. To my comment-question that people of other ethnicities also play duduki, a
Georgian player answered, “Sure, we play violin too, but that doesn’t mean that we invented it.”
97
For the biographies of some sazandari musicians, see Barnovi, Musicians of the Old Tbilisi;
on duduki, see Alavidze, 61.
Figure 2. The duduki dasta Soinari, Tbilisi, 2002.
nineteenth century, and in the first half of the twentieth century three-
duduki, doli, singer, and accordion dastas appeared (Figure 2), which
could adopt and arrange the three-part Georgian rural songs (as in Exam-
ple 3). In the 1950s to 1960s, a bass duduki was created to play the bass
line of these three-part compositions. Such “transculturation” of instru-
mentation resulted in substantial changes and innovations of repertoire by
comparison to the more traditional dasta repertoire of the mughamat,
baiati, and ashugh singing. Multi-part pieces played in duduki dasta have
attained more legitimacy than the baiati because of their resemblance to
rural polyphonic song; their chords and homophonic structure are closer
not only to the rural polyphony but also to Western European concepts of
harmony and polyphony. In Georgia, where today most people, including
dasta musicians, acknowledge the need for a Western political-social ori-
entation, the music of baiati and duduki is a constant reminder of the
country’s Eastern ties, hence the need for a nationalizing language and
transculturation that attempts to overrule this Eastern heritage.
COSMOPOLITANISM
Musicians who move in the circles of and are engaged with official cul-
tural-administrative organizations, such as the Ministry of Culture,
Conservatorium of Music, and State music festivals, or are part of main-

stream state ensembles of dance, have adopted the language of national-
ization and the denial of foreign-ness more readily. Professional duduki
players in rural areas whose primary occupation is playing at weddings

and other events have shown little engagement with the discourse of ultra-
nationalism, especially in the regions of multi-ethnic populations. They
serve the practical needs of the communities among which they live,
rather than acting as spokespersons for defining the place of Georgian
culture in the national agenda or reinventing national narratives. While
they have a sense of local identity and of the difference between the
Georgian, Armenian, Azeri, or Greek styles, there is rarely a mono-ethnic
patriotic imagination behind this sensibility. As one duduki player said: “I
don’t care about those officials and concerts;98 I am a musician, I am a
man from Dmanisi [see map in Figure 1], I focus on my music, my busi-
ness is to make music.”99 These professional musicians often play in
ensembles with non-Georgian musicians, thus reaching musicians of the
officially undesirable classes and ethnicities via human relations and
practical economic considerations. One amateur musician-friend and
accordion player-singer, when trying to explain that his loyalties lay with
the humane rather than ethnic ideals, quoted from a popular Georgian
song: “sadats ginda iq ilotse, katsi iqav katsurio” (“pray wherever you
wish, but be a real man” [which means that it does not matter what nation-
ality or faith you are, as long as you are an honest person]). However,
even with their cosmopolitan attitude, such musicians have to defer to
nationalism: At weddings they may play the clarinet and mugham associ-
ated with the Muslim social world, but at state-organized festivals they
play an exclusively Georgian duduki repertoire and the “Songs of Old
Tbilisi.”
While pro-nationalist duduki players who are engaged with the state-
controlled traditional music shy away from revealing their collaboration
with and links to Armenian and Azeri repertoires and musicians, those
who live in the areas of compact ethnic minorities speak Azerbaijani and
Armenian (depending on the region) and play at celebrations of the Azeri
and Armenian communities. Some of them have collaborated with the
Azeri players at the House of Culture (the Soviet regional center which used
to monitor cultural life of a region) until the growing under-representation
of the ethnic Azeris and negligence of social-economic problems led to
tensions and many Azerbaijanis left the region. Instead of Azeri music
98
The musician here meant concerts of the Festival-Surveys, which started in 1927 when
they were called Olympiads. They were transformed into the Georgian National Survey-Festivals
in the post-Soviet times.
99
Fieldwork, May, 2006.
ensembles, an ensemble of Svanetian (western Georgian mountainous area)

song is now active in the House of Culture, instilling the indigenous Geor-
gian sound. As one Georgian musician said ironically, “Formerly we would
play an Azerbaijani song after a toast at a feast, but now if I play it, they
[Georgians] may break my forehead.”100 Echoing this irony, an accordion
player from Kartli said, “The people of eastern Georgia absorbed Persian,
Arabic, and Turkish music and they should be free to expose these influ-
ences regardless of ethnic differences.”101
Soviet national policies such as the one expressed in a well-known slo-
gan “national in form and socialist in content”102 tended to choose a major
musical form for each republic as representative of its people’s musical
culture. As a result, it is now stereotypical to associate Georgians with
polyphonic choruses, Armenians with duduki, and Azerbaijanis with
mugham. Such an idea also governed the meeting of cultural dialogue and
cooperation organized by UNESCO in 2003.103 Today such a definition
of cultural boundaries sounds like defining political borders between
these neighboring and often rival nations. The privileging of polyphonic
singing today is further influenced by the growing awareness and appreci-
ation of Georgian rural polyphonic styles in Western Europe, America,
and Japan. Since the collapse of the USSR, singers and choir leaders from
these countries have frequently visited Georgian rural singers and
recorded polyphonic songs.104 Already at the beginning of the twentieth
century, German and Austrian comparative musicologists had turned to
Georgian polyphony in search of the origins of European polyphony.105
100
Fieldwork, May, 2006.
101
Tsitsishvili, 267.
102
See Marina Frolova-Walker, “National in Form, Socialist in Content: Musical Nation-
Building in the Soviet Republics,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 51/2 (1998), 331–71.
103
See Dialogue among Civilizations: Caucasus, June 3–8, 2003, Lithuania, organized by
Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO in cooperation with UNESCO Division on Cul-
tural Policies and International Dialogue (UNESCO Office in Moscow, Council of Europe); at
http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001393/139314M.pdf, accessed June 16, 2006.
104
Georgia: The Resounding Polyphony of the Caucasus. From the series “Music of the Earth”
(CD MCM 3004, Victor Company of Japan, 1997); O Morning Breeze: Traditional Songs from
Georgia Sung by Trio Kavkasia (CD LC 05537, Naxos World, 2001); Kavkasia: Songs of the
Caucasus Sung by Trio Kavkasia (CD WTP 5178, Well Tempered World, 1995); Drinking Horns
and Gramophones, 1902–1914: The First Recordings in the Georgian Republic (CD 4307, Tradi-
tional Crossroads, 2001); Mravalzhamier: Traditional Georgian Songs Recorded Live in Australia
and New Zealand (CD BOÎTE 013, 2004); Golden Fleece: Songs from Georgia (CD MCD 127,
Move Records, 1999); Géorgie, Polyphonies de Svanétie: Recordings, Notes and Musical Tran-
scriptions by Sylvie Bolle-Zemp (CNRS and Musée de L’Homme, 1994).
105
Siegfried F. Nadel, Georgischer Gesänge (Berlin: Lautabteilung, 1933); Ziegler, “Kavkasi-
uri (Kartuli) Mravalkhmianoba Germanulenovani Samusikismtsodneo Literaturis Sarkeshi”
[The Caucasian (Georgian) Polyphony in the Light of German Musicological Literature], Sab-
chota Khelovneba 1 (1989), 125–31 (in Georgian).
As a result, the vocal polyphony of Georgian villages as sung by the state,

regional, and independent choirs is, today, what epitomizes Georgian cul-
ture for Western consumers—singers, composers, and community choir
leaders looking for new sources of inspiration, exoticism, and reper-

toire—as well as for nationalists. The eastern-Georgian hybrid styles
associated with ethnic minorities and Persian heritage have been left out-
side the country’s musical representation. Today more Georgian poly-
phonic choirs travel abroad compared to duduki dastas and hence, as a
duduki player from Tbilisi said, parents prefer to take their children to
singing and dancing lessons because they are more likely to travel
abroad.106 In the light of the above, it is symptomatic that the entry on
Georgia in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music107 is in the Europe
rather than the Middle East volume, where other cultures of south Tran-
scaucasia such as Armenia and Azerbaijan are to be found. Such a distinc-
tion of cultural spheres, between those which represent Georgia and those
which do not, however, makes it difficult for Georgian dasta musicians to
emulate their southeastern neighbors in duduki playing and Middle East-
derived forms of professional musicianship. Professional musicianship
became strictly confined to state-funded and Western-based classical and
modern performance practices, while rural polyphony became identified
with the similarly state-sponsored “folklore” (people’s self-creativity). On
the other hand, dasta musicians obtained most of their income from the
more lucrative sphere of playing at weddings as a kind of second econ-
omy. Officially marginalized, they became more successful financially.
CONCLUSIONS
Today, ideas of deference and commitment to national identity and the con-
ception of national purity, expressed by the nineteenth-century writer-
politician Ilia Chavchavadze as “Fatherland, Language, Faith” (Mamuli, Ena,
Sartsmunoeba), still exert rhetorical and spiritual power in Georgia. In the
context of globalization, modern pluralism, and aspirations for membership
in the European Union, and as a result of the Western-led international com-
munity’s demands that Georgia meets its requirements as a signatory to the
Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National
Minorities (FCNM),108 such deference to exclusive nationalism in political
106
107
Joseph Jordania, “Georgia,” in The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music, vol. 8, Europe,
eds. Timothy Rice, James Porter, and Chris Goertzen (New York and London: Garland Pub-
lishing, 2000), 826–49.
108
Jonathan Wheatley, “The Status of Minority Languages in Georgia and the Relevance of Mod-
els from Other European States,” European Center for Minority Issues (ECMI), working paper #26
(March 2006), 16; At: http://www.ecmi.de/rubrik/58/working+papers/, accessed June 10, 2006.
life yields to efforts to resolve conflicts that have accrued due to their neglect
and, alongside other factors, have prevented the achievement of territorial
integrity and democratic political-economic changes in the country.
The field of national culture (erovnuli polklori), which has served

as one of the key sources for the creation of a unified national identity,
is more resistant to change. As an abstract, emotional-temporal, and
seemingly nonpolitical experience, music has been more capable of
retaining the archetypal sentimental side of patriotism, hence implic-
itly legitimizing “our” world against “theirs.” While social analysts
and political scientists in Georgia have started taking steps toward a
deconstructionist and critical understanding of Georgian society and
culture,109 musical culture in general and Georgian music in particular
have not yet become a subject of critical social analysis in Georgian
musicology. On the contrary, polyphonic song has been elevated to
the status of the nation’s esoteric cultural icon. Official folklore orga-
nizations, including the Folklore State Center of Georgia and the
International Center for Georgian Folk Song, provide “activities for
the rescue of the Georgian folklore,”110 a redemptive language that
identifies polyphonic song as the most valued cultural icon that needs
protection and, by inference, characterizes other musics as those from
which it needs to be protected. The discourse of national folklore ver-
sus foreign (in its different hybrid forms) provides a site for flexible,
complex, and often contradictory responses and overlapping identities
among scholars and especially practicing musicians, leading individu-
als to develop various ways of resolving the conflict. Some musicians
have adopted a more nationalist position in line with the hegemonic
musicological and center-generated ideology; others have demon-
strated more flexibility, acceptance, and even relatedness to the ethnic
Other. Nationalization and cosmopolitan attitudes may seem to be two
opposite ways in which musicians and scholars in Georgia attempt to
make sense of and resolve the ambiguity between the ideology of
nationalism and the diverse social-cultural milieu in which they live.
As opposite as these two attitudes seem, however, neither is intact, nor
can they be arranged in a sterile binary pair, and the complex interac-
tion between the national and foreign makes Georgian duduki musi-
cians’ experiences a multi-faceted amalgam of responses to a dynamic
political-ideological environment. This amalgam of experiences points to
the difficulty of drawing a clear boundary between the Georgian and the
foreign in a social milieu where East and West, modern and traditional,
109
Nodia, ed. Kartuli Supra da Samokalako Sazogadoeba [Georgian Feast (supra) and Civic
Society] (Tbilisi: Caucasus Institute for Peace, Democracy and Development, 2000) (in Georgian).
110
http://www.folk.ge/about.php, accessed June 15, 2006.
overlap and where cultural worlds are under constant selection, exclu-
sion, and inclusion by the state and elite. As a result, dasta musicians
have to practice a heritage shared with Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran
while pretending that it does not exist.
GLOSSARY
Ashugh/ashughi/ asiq/aseq—a folk poet, singer, and a player in Tran-

scaucasia, Turkey, and Iran.
Baiati—a Georgian term for mugham and a genre of love song. In the
Middle Eastern modal system, bayati is one of the maqams.
Balaban—a double-reed aerophone with a cylindrical bore in Azer-
baijan, similar to duduki.
Chahargah—a baiati mode and a fingerhole on the zurna and the duduki.
Daira—a round frame drum.
Damkashi—a duduki player in the dasta who provides the drone.
Damkvreli—a solo duduki player in the dasta.
Dardimandi—the carefree emotional state achieved by men during the
drinking feasts. Alternatively, dardimandi may signify a person who is in
such an emotional condition. Dardimandi is often achieved when the
feast is accompanied by the music of duduki dasta.
Dasta—a type of ensemble commonly hired to play at weddings and
other celebrations in eastern Georgia, and comprising two or three duduki,
dhol, singer, and more recently, accordion.
Dastalughi—is a refrain of song which contains the main motive of a
poem in the ashugh repertoire.
Dava—a mugham.
Duduki/duduk⎯a double-reed aerophone with a cylindrical bore,
widely used in the Middle East and Transcaucasia, mostly in ensembles.
Has eight or nine finger holes.
Dəstgah—a large cycle of mugham in Persia and Azerbaijan.
Doli/dhol/daule—a double headed cylindrical drum played with sticks
or with hands.
Kalakuri—[lit., urban]. Songs or instrumental pieces on the topics of
love, homeland, and feasting performed by duduki dastas. It also signifies
a genre of urban songs based on Western harmonies that substantially dif-
fers from the kalakuri of “Oriental” derivation.
Hijaz—a maqam tetrachord with a characteristic augmented second
between the second and the fourth steps. In Tbilisi it is called ijazi,
and is often an alternation of the tetrachords such as kurd, bayati, and
hijaz as occurring in the Middle Eastern system. Ijazi also implies an
instrumental piece with an extensive modulation plan played by two
duduki.
Kemanche/kemancha—spike fiddle.
Kinto—a low class of male workers and craftsmen in Tbilisi.
Makam/maqam—see mugham.
Medole—a doli player (in a duduki dasta).

Mugham/mughamat—from the Arab maqam, a polysemous term signi-
fying a mode, genre, and a form of musical-melodic development in
Azerbaijani and Central Asian musical theory and practice.
Mukhambazi—a Georgian poetic form and a local permutation of
mughamat.
Naghara—a small kettledrum played in pairs, also known in Georgia
as diplipito.
Ney—an Iranian and Turkish end-blown flute.
Ney or mey—a double-reed aerophone with a cylindrical bore in Turkey,
similar to duduki.
Qarachogheli—a caste of artisans in Tbilisi in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, who were known for their honorable, manly (katsuri)
behavior and respected by their fellow multi-ethnic citizens. The qara-
chogheli often held feasts with the duduki dasta and ashugh singers.
Rasti—a Georgian baiati. Rast is a mode in the maqam modal system.
Santur/santuri—a trapezoidal zither struck with two mallets.
Saz/sazi—a long-necked fretted Turkish and Azerbaijani folk lute or
any instrument.
Sazandari—an ensemble of kemanche, tar, naghara, and singer.
Sazə ndə—an instrumentalist in Azerbaijan.
Segah—a popular Georgian song in a baiati mode.
Sama, samaia—a Georgian ritual round dance performed by mixed- or
single-sex groups in different ceremonial contexts.
Sama, sema—religious music and dance in Sufi thought and practice.
Shikaste—a song played by duduki dastas in Georgia.
Shuri—a Georgian baiati. Shur is a mode in the maqam modal system.
Tar/tari—a long-necked lute with a body in the shape of a figure-eight.
It was widely played by the Armenian and Azerbaijanian professional and
folk musicians.
Təsnif—a metrical genre in mughamat.
Zurna—a double-reed aerophone with a conical bore widely spread in
the Middle East, Balkans, and Asia; has a loud sound often used for out-
door events. It usually has nine finger holes.
DISCOGRAPHY
Soinari: Folk Music from Georgia Today. Weltm, catalogue #

SM15102, CD #1413401 1993.
Soinari (Ksovrelebi). Sano Studio, ETCSS-0158, 2003, Tbilisi.
Tamarioni: Satrpialo. Sano Studio, ETCSS-0144, 2003, Tbilisi.

Before the Revolution: A 1909 Recording Expedition in the Caucasus
and Central Asia by the Gramophone Company. Topic Records Ltd.,
2002, TSCD921.
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SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATION-

The study of the relationship between music and ideology in recent

INTRODUCTION: THE STATUS OF DUDUKI ENSEMBLES

that rhetorics of national superiority and ethnic purity are attached to

In Georgia today, musical expressions of nation-building and monoeth-

DUDUKI ENSEMBLES: THEIR INSTRUMENTS, REPERTOIRE,

In this article I will discuss the musical constructions of nationalism

Azerbaijan and Armenia.11 The traditional repertoire of duduki dasta

[lit., “urban”] songs or instrumental pieces on the topics of love, home-

santur,18 naghara19 and singer [khanende]). But whereas sazandari per-

musicians left to pursue their musical careers in Armenia and Azerbaijan,

While Georgian duduki musicians in Tbilisi today continue to prac-

these genres utilized makam modes, as is apparent from the practice of

tendency of complex hybridization of styles and genres in the Middle

THE STATUS OF DUDUKI IN THE MODERN NATION STATE

Based on my analysis of field recordings, interviews, Georgian aca-

place in the Georgian experience than in that of the European West,

MUSIC OF THE CITY, MUSIC OF THE VILLAGE: ORIGINS AND

of eastern Georgia were largely inhabited by Muslims, Armenians,

character of the musical culture are audible in today’s duduki dasta

cultures that were completely different from the choral-polyphonic forms of

song” (Persidsko-arabo-gruzinskaya pesnya).37 It is this hybridity and the

NATIONALISM AND THE ESSENCE OF GEORGIAN MUSIC

In 1886, Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907), a Georgian writer and one of

of Georgian polyphonic songs performed by the “Kartuli Koro,” a choir

adherence to, indeed, an institutional endorsement of ideas of monoethnic

featured “self-controlled sensibility, healthy emotions and optimism.”53

EASTERN GEORGIAN URBAN SONG VERSUS WESTERN

“Oriental” styles are widespread in eastern Georgia, while it is the west-

of harmony in European and Georgian polyphonic musics have been

From the beginning of the twentieth century, a new tradition of playing

Figure 1. Map of Georgia. (Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps.)

western-Georgian three-part songs61 and seems to have developed as an

MUSICAL IDENTITY, ETHNICITY, AND AMBIVALENCE

The ambivalent status of “Oriental” music arose out of the discrepancy

nineteenth century, however, the same poets and intellectuals dismissed

necessary for the creation of a uniquely Georgian national music. Para-

DUDUKI MUSICIANS AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF

tration of ethnic minorities, and a consequently higher intensity of culture

far as the structure of the ensembles is concerned, those in the southeast

(damkvreli), a drone duduki (damkashi), and a doli drum. In contrast, the

Example 1. The chord progression of a song played by the duduki dasta in

events in their multi-ethnic communities, where they come across and

foreign ethnicities from these encounters and collaborations. For exam-

default, in conversation, musicians expected me, an ethnically Georgian

ing one recording session at a restaurant in Tbilisi, my fieldwork request

Example 3. Makharia, a Megrelian polyphonic song played by the duduki

the Arab maqam modal system, Azerbaijani mughamat, and Persian

Example 4a. (Continued).

the mughamat system is fully reflected in the finger-board of the tar,

Example 4b. The European-influenced section of the song played by the

Example 5. Segah, played by the duduki dasta from southeast Georgia.

They [Azeris] don’t want to hear a Georgian melody, because Georgian

Ambivalence towards foreign and hybrid cultures is apparent in state-

the musician quoted above explained to me that he can immediately dis-

informal acceptance of the non-Georgian musical heritage and its non-

policy on folklore, adherence to authenticity, and the continuation of the

RESOLVING THE CONFLICT: NATIONALIZATION OF THE

issue of ethnic-cultural discrimination does not exist. However, value