The misty, rolling foothills that rise from the Black Sea to the Caucasus mountains might seem an unlikely origin point for radical experimentation in recorded sound. Yet from 1916 to 1966, European and Soviet musicologists stretched the limits of recording technology, trying to capture the musical traditions of Guria, a region of Georgia in the South Caucasus. Their experiments aimed to isolate the three vocal parts of Gurian multipart singing—commonly called polyphony—allowing them to transcribe, preserve, and analyze its complex musical form. These recordings, unknown or ignored by previous scholars, offer a counter-history of technological progress, running in parallel to the development of stereo and multitrack recording techniques in western Europe and North America. Key to this history is the concept of polyphony, which emerged first as a description of late-medieval sacred music, but in the nineteenth century gained currency as a universal category of musical form, one to which European culture had a special claim. Georgian vocal music has long been celebrated as polyphonic, and many Georgians today embrace this label with pride, a marker of European status for a nation and people long considered only peripherally European, both geographically and ethnically.

In my monograph in progress, Dissected Listening: Race, Nation, and Polyphony in the South Caucasus, I attend to the archive of these media experiments, bringing them into conversation with histories of European music theory and anthropological discourses of race, nation, and evolution. While polyphony has come to dominate discussions of Georgian music since the early twentieth century, the term’s associations with Eurocentric and white-supremacist theories of cultural evolution have never been explored in depth. Likewise, the application of multichannel techniques to this music—using multiple phonographs and early consumer tape technology—reveals a persistent colonial logic of spatial control and taxonomic dissection. Throughout the scenes of recording detailed in my dissertation, I excavate the concept of polyphony as it operates in different historical and political moments, while tracing a subaltern history of multichannel recording technology.

There are three main historical moments to be explored in the monograph. The first, in 1916, took place in a prisoner-of-war camp in Austria-Hungary. An anthropological survey of Russian-army prisoners documented the different “racial types” present in the camp, Georgians among them. As part of this research, the first multichannel recordings in history were made, when three phonographs simultaneously recorded three men’s voices. Interweaving the stories of the Austrian scholars and the Georgian soldiers, I show how this encounter produced new ethnographic knowledge about Georgia, while also fixing Georgians within the dominant racial and evolutionary hierarchies of the day. The second moment was in Leningrad in the 1930s, when a team led by E. V. Gippius made recordings of songs from the same region of Georgia, now a part of the Soviet Union. Adopting a multiple-perspective technique inspired by early Soviet cinema, I give voice not only to the scholars and singers involved, but also to the prevailing theories of music and language that conditioned their production. Although the recordings themselves were largely forgotten, they crystallized a moment when Georgian nationhood was being defined in relation both to its traditional past and its Soviet future. The third moment, finally, concerns the voice of a single man, Artem Erkomaishvili, who in 1966 overdubbed himself singing three-part Georgian Orthodox church chants, helping preserve an oral tradition for which he was the last living representative. Serving as an icon of what was lost during decades of Soviet rule—in both musical and religious terms—these tapes have been restored, remixed, and revered by many. Throughout the dissertation, voices once separated sound together again, as the story of Georgian music in the twentieth century illuminates the complex interworking of musical form, national ideology, and mediated techniques of listening.