1,497,207 views Oct 17, 2023
Tsambouna by Dimitris Athanasopoulos of the @OneManNoise channel (check out more of his awesome music there,) music and vocals by Farya Faraji, based on Georgian folk motifs.
The Epic Byzantine Series is a musical project where the sounds of modern Greek traditional music are used as a framing device for themes pertaining to the Eastern Roman Empire and the body of folklore descending from Medieval Greece. These are not attempts as historical reconstruction or even remotely concerned with approximation of the historical sound of medieval Byzantine music; all these represent is the form and status of modern Greek traditional music as it is today
I wanted to try my hand at a bit of Georgian music, and the history of Tornike Eristavi was a fascinating one to do it with. Tornike Eristavi was a 10th century Georgian noble and military general with a successful military career in his native homeland. However, he retired and became a monk at the end of his life, traveling to Greece where he settled, and founded the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos.
The song follows the basic conventions of different styles of Georgian folk music, namely the gandagana and acharuli dance forms, many of them typical of the Adjarian region. These musical forms are defined by a triple metre and similar melodic progressions also found in neighbouring cultures. Traditionally, that is before the arrival of instruments due to Russian influence like the accordion, Georgian bagpipes were one of the main instruments in these genres, although we used a tsambouna here, played by Dimitris, to represent the Greco-Georgian musical fusion of the subject. The second instrument in use is the panduri, a Georgian lute played both melodically, and to provide basic chord progressions to the song.
The final component is the usage of the famous Georgian polyphony, one of the oldest and most renowned uses of harmony in the world. Traditional Georgian harmony is characterised by drone harmony: a voice sings the fully fledged melody whilst other voices support the main vocals by repeating the same notes over a span of time, creating various harmonic intervals, usually based on fourths and fifths.
The main chorus sings a passage from the epic Georgian poem: The Knight in the Panther's Skin, one of the defining monuments of Georgian literature from the Georgian Golden Age of the 11th and 13th century when the Kingdom of Georgia reached an unprecedented peak of advancement. It was written by Shota Rustaveli, now regarded as a national poet of the Georgians.
Lyrics in Greek and Georgian:
Απ' τα βάθη μακριά, απ' την Ανατολή, ah!
Απ' τα βάθη μακριά Tα Άλογα με έφεραν εδώ
Κατάγομαι από τα βουνά της ιβηρίας,
Kαι τα βουνά τραγουδούν:
რასაცა გასცემ შენია, რას არა დაკარგულია
Mε έλεγαν εριστάβι, მეომარი
Mε έλεγαν θάνατο, Tornike τοv κόκκινο,
Kαι ξέχασα τα σοφά λόγια:
რასაცა გასცემ შენია, რას არა დაკარგულია
ნახვამდის თორნიკე πολεμιστής, τοv κόκκινο,
ნახვამდის πατρίδα μου, ნახვამდის αχ βουνά μου!
Tώρα ο δρόμος μου είναι ο δρόμος της αγάπης,
Kαι ζω με αυτά τα λόγια των βουνών:
რასაცა გასცემ შენია, რას არა დაკარგულია
English translation:
From the faraway depths, from the East,
From the faraway depths, horses have brought me here,
I came from the mountains of Iberia*
And those mountains, they sang:
"That which we give makes us richer, that which is hoarded is lost."
They called me general, warrior,
They called me Tornike the red-stained.
And I had forgotten those wise words:
"That which we give makes us richer, that which is hoarded is lost."
Farewell Tornike the warrior, the red-stained,
Farewelll, my homeland, farewell, my mountains,
Now my road is the road of love,
And I shall live by these words of the mountains:
"That which we give makes us richer, that which is hoarded is lost."
*Iberia here refers to the Georgian lands in the Caucasus, a name which was given to it in the West. It is distinct from the Iberian peninsula in Southwestern Europe.
