CRRC, ARISC, and MWNO are pleased to announce the 3rd session of the Fall 2026 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
The Musical Caucasus: From Russian Orientalism to Georgian National Opera
Céleste Pagniello, Princeton University
Date: 7 October 2026, 18:30 Tbilisi time / 10:30am US EDT
This week’s session will be held virtually via this Zoom link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/LFk9r-S1Q8CCCymxcSGnhA
Nineteenth-century Russian composers inherited a Caucasus that had already been transformed into a rich imaginative landscape by Russian writers. The representation of Georgia, however, posed a persistent problem. Despite its distinct cultural traditions, Georgia was repeatedly absorbed into a generalized Caucasian Orient. In music, Russian composers situated it within a broadly conceived musical “East,” drawing upon stylistic markers associated as readily with Armenia, Persia, Turkey, or the North Caucasus as with Georgia itself. This paper examines how nineteenth-century Russian composers made the Caucasus audible through a recurring vocabulary of musical exoticism. Melismatic melodic writing, augmented intervals, drones, asymmetrical rhythms, stylized accompaniments, and particular orchestral timbres became signs of an imagined “easternness” that could be applied across the region with little concern for local specificity. Tracing this vocabulary across composers associated with otherwise competing musical institutions and aesthetic camps, including Mily Balakirev, Anton Rubinstein, and Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, reveals how stable these conventions became and how powerfully they shaped the image of the Caucasus within the Russian imperial imagination. By the time Zakaria Paliashvili began constructing a recognizably Georgian national musical style, “Georgia” had already been sounded from the imperial centre. Reading Paliashvili’s operas, which draw extensively on Georgian folk music, against this Russian Caucasian tradition therefore reveals Georgian national opera as developing through an uneasy inheritance: shaped by the compositional language of the Empire while attempting to make the diversity of Georgian musical traditions audible on its own terms.
Céleste Pagniello holds a Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University (2018), and two Master of Philosophy degrees from the University of Cambridge (2020, 2021), in music and comparative literature. She also holds a Master of Arts in Music from Princeton University (2023) where she is currently undertaking a PhD in musicology. Her dissertation, supervised by Professor Simon Morrison, is focused on the Georgian National Opera and Ballet Theatre in Tbilisi, Georgia, and its role in Russian and Soviet control of Georgia.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC), and Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC, or of MWNO.