title: __Svan Funeral Dirges (Zär): Cultural Context
Creators: name: Mzhavanadze, Nana
name: Scherbaum, Frank
Publisher: name: LaZAR
Year: 2020
Subjects: Volkstümliche Musik

description: In the village of Lat’li (in Georgian Lat’ali, see Figure 1) in Upper Svaneti there was a funeral of Pridon, the venerable and revered doctor who had served the community over decades. Sima Chamgeliān, an elderly woman from Lat’li as she, together with a group of the villagers, approached the body of Pridon laid out in the room, wept over the deceased. At first she was relatively quiet but gradually grew louder and dramatic, manifesting itself in a tense vocalisation and increased weeping and sobbing. She ended every phrase of her weeping with a refrain exclamation ‘way, Pridon!’ (woy, Pridon!) that would be followed by the mourners (women) with loud, utterance-type sobbing. In the beginning Sima was reciting and praising good deeds and grace of the deceased; then she asked Pridon to take good care of her relatives and other villagers who had passed away and asked him to let them know how difficult the life on earth turned with them. When Sima finished, there emerged a procession of men led into the room by an elderly male. Like Sima, the old man also cried over the dead body, lamenting the sorrow and loss of the villagers using powerful vocabulary and emotions. From time to time he would strike his forehead. The attendees would respond every phrase with utterances and sobbing. In the meantime, under the tree outside, there was a small table with a little food, wine and ‘haraq’’ (a local type of vodka made from fruit). There, some men were sitting on the wood ramps. From time to time they would stand up around the table, take their hats off and begin to chant a three-part ‘song’ without words called zär. The sound of the zär was difficult to describe as music as such. The men were vocalising specific vowels and utterances in very slow tempo moving mainly stepwise up and down from one pitch to another and articulating with a very powerful, loud, somewhat gloomy and tensed voices. The short phrases consisting of only vowels would with utterance type interjections such as “woy” or “wuy”. Gradually the zär chanters intensified the sound via increased tension and enhanced volume. Performance of zär did not seem no to be linked and coordinated with above described solo and responsorial keening. Sometimes only mourners inside the house would wail while zär chanters outside rested and vice versa. Once in a while one also could hear crying utterances from inside while the men were chanting outdoor. Shortly afterwards another procession approached the gate, with several men walking in front and chanting zär. These were the men from the next-door village of Lenjār (see Figure 1) doing a zär variant from their own village (so called “Lenjār zär”). When they finished their zär as they got to the house, they entered the room to pay a farewell tribute to the deceased and to express condolences to the family. Then they came out to the yard and joined the group of zär chanters. This pattern repeated for the third time when another group of men came from villages of Lower Bal (region of Upper Svaneti below the Bal ridge, see Figure 1) and sang the Lower Bal variant of zär. Eventually all the three groups of chanters would alternately chant zär from their own communities until the body was taken out of the house to walk the deceased off on his journey to the eternal home. Although all the zär are believed to be different, to our ears they sounded quite similar. In the early afternoon as people started to escort the coffin to the cemetery, the choir sang Ts’mindao Ghmerto, the Trisagion hymn in Georgian and walked the deceased to the graveyard where they did zär for the last time again.