‘I was born twice,’ said the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin. ‘In Kazan I opened my eyes to life, and in Tbilisi to music.’ The city where he began his career in 1894 may have had a thriving operatic scene, but what made it one of the most musical cities on earth – and still does today – was its unique polyphony.

On my first visit to Tbilisi I went up to the fourth-century Narikala fortress, symbol of the nation’s independence, where I found a group of young men with tear-stained faces, clutching bottles of vodka and singing a slow choral lament. This was their way of mourning a friend who had just died in a car crash, and would I like to join them for a shot?

It being a Sunday, I then walked down to Sioni Cathedral, past magazine vendors selling classical sheet music. In the surrounding streets impromptu circles of middle-aged gents were singing folk songs in immaculate three-part counterpoint. Inside the cathedral, amid a blur of bells, candles, incense, and more tear-stained faces, three choirs – one male, one female, one mixed – were taking it in turns to ramp up religious fervour with a non-stop stream of the three-part harmony which the eleventh-century Georgian philosopher Ioane Petritsi had compared to the Holy Trinity.

This was in 1997, before capitalism had discovered Tbilisi, and when it was still effectively a Soviet city. In those days, every Georgian adult could join in complex three-part drinking songs with an accuracy which no amount of liquor could damage – the music was hard-wired into their DNA. And when I watched a children’s choir being taught a new song full of awkward jumps and dissonances, I sensed the truth of that: within an hour, without a score, they had not only mastered it, but had each learned all three parts. This was a society in which the distinction between amateur and professional singers scarcely existed. Although young Georgians now listen to the same pop music as millennials do everywhere else, you can still count on this polyphonic facility in all Georgians over fifty.