MARINE KAVTARADZE TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITIONAL MUSICAL CULTURES WITHIN TYPOLOGICALLY FOREIGN CULTURES

Long-range and mass migrations, contacts and mutual cultural influences occurred in all periods of mankind’s history. Beginning from the period of great geographical discoveries these processes became especially intensive. There is not a single major region in the world where the population has never migrated or where there were no changes in their content, where representatives of different groups of people did not maintain contacts and where the diffusion and transformation processes, involving at least separate elements of culture, never happened. The aim of this paper is to reveal the dynamics and regularities of the relationships between typologically different musical cultures, to characterize the transformation forms of the monodic culture in the environment of polyphonic culture, and to characterize the factors that determine them. It would obviously be unrealistic to try to give exhaustive answers to these important questions in such a short presentation. This paper represents a humble attempt to tackle the question. The interest of Georgian scholars in this topic is also caused by the special characteristic of our country. Georgia is an ancient orthodox Christian country whos