Kriste aghdga (Karbelashvili variants - East Georgia)

The Karbelashvili family preserved the oral tradition of liturgical chant in Georgia throughout the 19th century.

During this period, the Georgian Church was under the supervision (some would call it suppression) of the Russian Orthodox Church and its appointed Exarch from St. Petersburg. Some exarchs favored Georgian Orthodox culture, frescoes, singing... but the vast majority of them did not. The seminaries were conducted in Russian, and Russian 4-part harmony chant was taught and disseminated via the seminaries. As a result, the knowledge of Georgian three-voiced traditional chant went into decline as the transmission of this music in Church institutions was usurped by Russian Orthodox cultural norms. For more on this topic, see the dissertation, "The Transcription and Transmission of Georgian Liturgical Chant" (John A. Graham, Princeton, 2015).

Petre Karbela-Khmaladze (1754-1848) studied East Georgian chant in the 1700s in the Davit Gareji Monastery and the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. His son Grigol (1812-1880) was a professional chanter and taught at the Bodbe Monastery in 1860-1861, and later at the Tbilisi Seminary for a brief period. Grigol's five sons were the last generation of highly-knowledgeable master chanters. Vasil (1858-1936), in particular, was instrumental in preserving this important school of Georgian traditional chant. After learning European notation, he personally transcribed some 500 ornamental chants. His brother Poliekvtos transcribed simple chant variants. Other composers such as Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov also transcribed chants from the Karbelashvili brothers in the 1880s.

The melodies of the Vasil Karbelashvili variants are the same as the West Georgian variants, but the lower harmonizing voices are quite different. The middle voice displays the kind of ornamentation favored in East Georgia: a flowing line that passes between one chord and the next.

There are at least two variants (if not more). Here I provide notation for "Variant #1", and "Variant #2."

Performance tips: