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CHAPTER ONE:

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: DEFINING THE TOPIĆ A Perplexing Fieldwork Dilcmma

November 2007. My arrival in Tbilisi, the Capital city of the Republic of Georgia (in Georgian, Sakartvelo), was decidedly inauspicious. Mass protests at the Parliament Building had just been broken up by the police and the military, and a State of emergency had been declared a few hours before my piane landed. After leaving the airport only to dodge tanks on the city streets, the taxi driver delivered me to the apartment I was to share with a handful of other researchers. It was 4 am and the electricity had been shut off, so no one could hear me knocking or ringing the doorbell. I spent my first few hours in the field sleeping in a dark abandoned stairwell.

Unfortunately, my arrival predicted the dismal tonę of the entirety of my first trip to the field. I knew before I arrived that I wanted to research popular musie, but once in the country I found that even finding popular musie was a challenge. It seemed to me that live performance was at the heart of ethnomusicological field methods, and therefore I needed to attend concerts in order to get started. I just could not find any, though. Scouring newspapers and magazines and listening to radio and TV ads failed to provide me with any leads: there were simply no announcements about concerts. I quickly discovered that I had no idea how to become informed about musical happenings.

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