Tone Glow Presents "Georgian Polyphonics"
Tone Glow, Cinema Guild, and e-flux will co-present films by Soso Chkhaidze & Otar Iosseliani, as well as a live performance from Georgian composer Giorgi Koberidze on March 21st in New York
“The decline of culture in musical terms—if you will excuse a bit of my own historicism—is the devolution from polyphony to monophony.” —Igor Stravinsky
Tone Glow, Cinema Guild, and e-flux are excited to present “Georgian Polyphonics,” a screening of Soso Chkhaidze’s Old Georgian Hymns (1970) and Otar Iosseliani’s Ancient Georgian Songs (1969), followed by a performance from Georgian composer Giorgi Koberidze, who most recently performed the soundtracked for his brother Alexandre Koberidze’s film Dry Leaf (2025). Last year, Giorgi also released the album Forests, Tales, Cities, Forests (2025). Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Saturday March 21 at 3pm. Tickets can be found here.
Georgian polyphonic song is one of the longest-tenured musical traditions across human history, with scholars placing its origin before the arrival of Christianity in Georgia in the 4th century CE. The practice consists of 15 regional choral variations, each made up of their own chemistry of staggered melodies, interlocking vocal threads, and folklore. Its lineage today travels even in a bottle launched “into the cosmic ocean,” with the chant Chakrulo having been included as one of the Voyager space craft’s 29 representative musical compositions selected for the contingency of extraterrestrial contact.
Electronic and classical composer Giorgi Koberidze experiments with an eclectic palimpsest of Georgian polyphony and Caucasian instrumentation, painting tradition over with modernity and vice-versa. This program mirrors that aim by pairing the performance with two films that delve into the tradition’s history.
Films
Soso Chkhaidze, Old Georgian Hymns (1970, 31 minutes)
Working with the Georgian polyphonic ensemble Rustavi and composer Anzor Erkomaishvili to resurrect the countryside’s derelict monasteries, Chkhaidze films eroded structures and faded biblical paintings caressed by sunlight, evoking the ambivalence of a besieged culture despite Georgia’s extant link to antiquity. Building on themes from his earlier work, Kolkhida—where Chkhaidze assigns the famed national myth of Jason’s quest to find the Golden Fleece in Colchis a negligible value in proportion to the land’s permanence—Chkhaidze here examines and historicizes Georgia’s identity as one of the earliest adopters of Christianity.
Otar Iosseliani, Ancient Georgian Songs (1969, 21 minutes)
Under the premise of documenting for the sake of preservation the various forms of Georgian religious chanting, a distinct kind of sonorous psalmody passed over from generation to generation, Otar Iosseliani captures a snapshot of a not-so-distant past that coexists with the world we might know yet transports us to what it used to be.
Artists
Giorgi Koberidze is an electronic and classical music composer from Georgia. He currently serves as a professor of music at Tbilisi State Conservatoire, and Ilia State University. Giorgi's work is rooted in the Georgian musical tradition, cross-pollinating indigenous instrumentation with electronic and western classical timbres. He recently won first prize in the Tbilisi Conservatoire Composers Awards, and received Georgia's most prestigious cultural gong, the Tsinandali Award. His music can be found at Bandcamp here and here.
Otar Iosseliani (1934-2023) was born in Tbilisi. Admired by Andrei Tarkovsky, he studied music and math before taking a directing course in 1955 taught by Alexander Dovzhenko at the Moscow National Institute of Cinematography (VGIK). His thesis film, April (1962) was banned by Soviet censors for its depiction of petit-bourgeois materialism. His breakthrough feature, Falling Leaves (1968), was awarded the FIPRESCI prize at Cannes. His films feature an intricately layered polyphony of dialogue, song and sound, a form without which he would have been “unable to make films.”
Soso Chkhaidze (1937-1992) was born in Tbilisi. He studied polygraph engineering before attending VGIK and beginning a career in TV and documentary. His first short, Kolkheti (1967), is about the gradual dissolution of a village in the Georgian floodplains. His first feature, Shepherds of Tusheti (1978), follows a sheep herder through the northern mountains during seasonal migration, imbricating what Alexandre Koberidze calls “pure reality and pure cinema” through a combination of non-professionals and one lead actor. His last film, Shvidkatsa (named after a type of polyphonic performance ensemble), was completed posthumously by his wife, Nana Zurabishvili, in 2025.