This particular song is what’s known as a “table song”, characterized by three vocal lines, mostly homophonic. In this tradition, the melodic direction of the independent vocal lines has no concern for their resulting harmonies, flying in the face of everything we learned from our counterpoint books. So, what we have is impeccable voice leading with a harmonic mixed bag: sometimes they’re swooningly gorgeous, and sometimes they clash like crazy. You never know what you’re going to get from beat to beat.

Go on, give a listen ….

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Meanwhile, in reading up on Georgian music, I came across the web site of Village Harmony , where more examples of this amazing music can be sampled.

Here’s an example called Khasanbegura: a feast of surprises for your Western-trained ears. Also, poke around on the Village Harmony site for more examples of wonderful stuff.

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Georgian Voices, by the Rustavi Choir, is perhaps one of the best known (and perhaps best) recordings of Georgian choral music. You can hear a lot more excerpts on the Amazon.com page for this recording (including another version of Mival Guriashi).