The Georgian traditional musical culture, both the folklore and the church music, is, first of all, vocal art of amazing beauty. Its particular feature is a complexly organized combination of many voices in an integrated flow of sound, which moves everybody who has even immersed into it.
The core element of the Georgian song tradition is its sacred music. Georgia adapted Christianity along with the foundations of the Byzantine culture, especially those pertaining to music as far back as in the 4th century A.D., having developed them into an original, brightly distinctive world of choral music. Luckily, this treasury was preserved by the Georgians up to the present day. The sacred hymns were sung also among the common people outside of church service; their numerously repeated exclamations of glorification alilo convey to us the sublimity of Orthodox Christianity and the genuine happiness of believers.
The folk music grew out of the soil of sacred chants; similarly to church music it was passed along from generation to generation directly by means of a live singing tradition and regularly accompanied activities of work, hunting, weddings, funerals, historical or heroic events, military campaigns, popular amusements and dance. There exist historical documents from the period between the 6th and the 4th centuries B.C. which give due mention to the presence of labor, marching and dancing round songs in the lives of Georgians. Wandering singers of historical lays, the mestvire, were simultaneously the creators of music and poetry, improvisers, singers and performers on musical instruments.
