| There is a strange paradox in Georgia's relation to the West which has emerged in ever sharper detail with the passage of time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Geographically and culturally, Georgia is borderline but not quite fully exotic, oriental: located at the gates of Asia and the Muslim Middle East, it is one of the oldest Christian countries and a rare Caucasian nation oriented primarily towards the European sphere of influence for the last two centuries.;It is precisely this slippery boundary between comfortable familiarity and exotic impenetrability that language in Georgian song---my chief object of inquiry in this dissertation---embodies. The search for meaning in the obscure, archaic, or conventionally unintelligible often emerges concomitantly with narratives of cultural loss at moments of radical social, political, and economic upheaval or transformation, and the Georgian case is no exception. The present dissertation therefore posits the paired expressive-communicative modes of language and music as a lens for inquiry into (un)intelligibility as a salient aesthetic and political trope in the turmoil and ideological anomie of postsocialist Georgia, approaching it through a specifically music-centered ethnography of non-referential sung language, or vocables, in traditional and newer, globally oriented Georgian song. It explores variable and shifting tropes of interpretive ambiguity as produced by artist-performers and intellectuals, poets and politicians in the name of everything from trans-rational linguistic futurism to the building of civic consciousness based on a primordial, archaeological imagination of the nation, to the need to make the Georgian language-music gestalt globally accessible so that world music listeners will buy it. My specific discussion of contemporary Georgian world music poses broader questions for the discipline of ethnomusicology as a whole: How can the study of language in world music serve as a forum for the exploration of non-referential forms of intercultural communication and meaning-making? How can studies of sound and listening as such be rejoined to studies of properly musical creativity and expression, beginning from the voice itself?... |
