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Tbilisi Ivane Javakhishvili State University

Institute of Classical, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies International Research Centre of Traditional Polyphony

Joseph Jordania

WHO ASKED

THE FIRST QUESTION?

The Origins of Human Choral Singing,

Intelligence, Language and Speech

Logos 2006
2

To the memory of Valeri Pavlovich Alexeev and

Malkhaz Abdushelishvili

© Programm "Logos", 2006

© Joseph Jordania, 2006

ISSBN 99940-31-81-3

Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University

13 Chavchavadze ave.

0179 Tbilisi, Geogria

Tel.: (+995 32) 22 11 81/ 25 02 58

Fax: (+995 32) 22 11 81

E-mail: greekstudies@caucasus.net

3

Contents

Foreword and acknowledgements 8

PART I World Styles of Traditional Polyphony 22

Foreword 22

Question of terminology and classification 23

Vocal Polyphony in Africa 30

Sub-Saharan Africa (Rhythm; Unity of singing and dancing; Tone languages and polyphony; Characteristics of sub-Saharan polyphony 31

East Africa 36

Central Africa 37

South Africa 39

West Africa 41

Madagascar 43

North Africa 44

Sahara 45

Conclusions 46

Vocal Polyphony in Europe 47

Vocal Polyphony in Eastern Europe 49

Russia 49

Polyphonic traditions of minorities of Russian Federation 54

North Caucasian minorities

(Abkhazians; Adighis, Balkarians and Karachaevis; Ossetians;

Chechens and Ingushes, Dagestan) 55

The Volga-Ural region minorities of Russian Federation (Mordva; Komi; Mari; Udmurtia; Tatarstan; Bashkiria; Chuvashia) 62 North European minorities of Russian Federation 67

Jews and Rom 67

Ukraine 68

Belarus 72

Georgia (vocal polyphony in Georgia; General and regional characteristics; East Georgia; West Georgia; Improvisation in western Georgian polyphonic songs; Traditional polyphony in Svaneti; Religious music; Urban music; Scale system; Melody in polyphony; Singing men and singing women; Conclusions) 74

Balkans 105

Romania 105

Bulgaria 106

Serbia 108

Montenegro 109

Bosnia and Herzegovina 110

Croatia 111

Slovenia 112

Macedonia 113

Albania 114

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Greece 116

Vocal Polyphony in North Europe 118

Baltic region 118

Lithuania 119

Latvia 123

Estonia 124

Finland 125

Iceland 126

England 128

Wales 129

Scotland and Ireland 130

Sweden 130

Denmark and Norway 130

Vocal Polyphony in Central Europe 131

Poland 131

Slovakia 131

Czech 132

Germany 132

Austria 133

Switzerland 134

Belgium and Holland 135

Vocal Polyphony in Western Europe 135

France (Breton, Corsica) 135

Portugal 137

Spain (and Basques) 137

Italy (Sicily, Sardinia) 139

Conclusions 142

Vocal Polyphony is Asia 143

Vocal polyphony in the Middle East 144

Pearl divers of the Persian Gulf 145

Polyphony in Jewish music 146

Armenia 148

The Bedouins, Egypt, Turkey 149

Central Asia: Overtone singing 149

Tajikistan (and Kazakhstan) 151

Afghanistan: Nuristan 152

North Asia 154

East Asia 155

Japan: Ainus 155

China 158

Chinese minorities 158

Tibet 160

Taiwan 161

South-East Asia 163

Vietnam 163

Nepal, Burma 164

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South Asia: India (Assam; Southern India) 164

Conclusions 166

North America: Vocal Polyphony among Native Americans 167

Northwest Coast 167

Eastern Coast 168

Southwestern 168

Plain Indians 168

South America 169

Q'ero 169

Amazonian region 170

Conclusions 172

Polyphonic singing on Pacific Islands 172

Polynesia 172

Tonga 173

Tahiti 174

Smaller islands 174

Melanesia 175

New Guinea 175

Micronesia 176

Australia 176

Conclusions of the first part 176

PART II Comparative Perspectives 178

Introduction: Dialog between regional and comparative studies 178 Brief review of comparative studies and ideas 181

Section 1. Methodological Issues 185

"They sound so similar", or how could we compare polyphonic traditions 185

What is more stable: Language or music? 187

What are the stable and mobile elements of musical culture? 189 Set of stylistic parameters of polyphonic cultures 193 Section 2. Practical Issues. Regions, Styles, Peoples, Migrations: Historical dynamics and comparative perspectives 197 Case Study #1. What happened to the vocal polyphony in Khevsureti? 198 Case Study #2. Historical dynamics: Appearance or disappearance? 200 Case Study #3. Who can drink milk? Or the origins of European professional polyphony 203

Conclusions for the previous two cases 209

Case Study #4. Drone and horses: Ancient European family of vocal polyphony and the Indo-Europeans 210

Legacy of singing Indo-Europeans 217

East Georgia: Listen what the "long" table songs can tell us 217 European mix: Indo-European contribution to ancient European polyphony 220

More about mixed styles: Age matters 221

More mixture: The influence of European professional polyphony 223 6

Conclusions 224

Case Study #5. Heterophony 225

Case Study #6. Lithuanian

sutartines 229 Case Study #7. Overtone singing of Central Asia 235

Case Study #8. The Nuristan polyphony 240

Case Study #9. Ainu polyphony 247

Case Study #10. Southeast Asian polyphony 251 Case Study #11. From Atlas Mountains to Bahrain 252 Case Study #12. "I'll follow the sun" Round-the-world travel ticket and the vocal polyphony of Native Americans 255 Case Study #13. Vocal polyphony in ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia and

Mesoamerica 261

Case Study #14. Polynesian polyphony 273

Case Study #15. The Beatles: Ancient sounds in hit parades 277 Unity of the music creator and the performer 278

Writing music together 278

Performance style 281

The performance as a social experience 281

Harmony of The Beatles songs 282

Dissonances 286

Drone 287

Vocal harmonizing 288

Conclusions 288

Conclusions of the second part 289

Part III Singing, Questioning, Thinking, Talking, Stuttering 293

Brief summary instead of introduction 293

Sounds of the ancient choir: Primordial vocal polyphony 294

Few preliminary questions and answers 297

Singing ape 299

Singing rabbit and the Lion Dance: Origin of the rhythm 302 Singing in peaceful times: Towards the origins of human language 311

Gestural theory of language origins 315

Pitch based language: singing, whistling, drumming 317

Whistle languages 318

"Language" of African drums 320

Tone languages 320

Pitch language: The first dead language in human history? 321

Is music an enigma? 324

Small question to Noam Chomsky 326

Has anybody asked a question? Language and intelligence 327

Questions in music: Musical dialogue 329

Few basic questions about questions 330

Why do we ask questions? 331

7 What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questions have given to human individuals? 331 What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questions have given to human groups? 332 So, who asked the first question: Or "Interrogo ergo cogito" 333 Is asking questions a uniquely human ability or do we share this ability with few other species? 334 Where did the phenomenon of question came from - are there any evolutionary prerequisites for the questioning behavior? 338 Who could answer the first question when it was formulated? 339 Is question one of the higher functions of syntactic structures? 340 Is there a genetic component for questioning behavior? 341

Questions and mental retardation 342

Questions and Genie: Do we learn to ask question? 342

Questions, apes and children 343

Questions and protolanguage 344

How do we learn to ask questions? 345

Question of chronology: When was the ability to ask questions born? 346

Let's Talk: Origin of Speech 347

What can vocal polyphony tell us about the origins of speech? 348

Language and Homo sapiens 351

Correlation with the paleoanthr

opological data 352 Choral polyphony and the theories of human origins 355 Tone languages and the asynchronous model of speech origin 356

Music, Speech and Stuttering 358

Speech, choral singing and stuttering 359

Stuttering in different cultures: A shadow of "milk-drinking syndrome" again?361

What about stuttering among Chinese? 364

Official attitude towards prevalence studies 367

Reasons? Plenty of them! 370

Conclusions 371

PS: What about polyphony? 372

Developmental Dyslexia 373

"My child said today 'biscu-it'": Cross-Cultural Aspect of the Acquisition of

Phonological System 374

From polyphony to monophony: Belated Appendix to the "Case Study #3" 376

Conclusions: Any more questions? 378

PostScript: Moral and Ethics Issues of the Study of Vocal Polyphony 381 Appendix: Conferences, Seminars and Symposia on Traditional Polyphony 386

References 397

Index 438

8

Foreword and Acknowledgments

April 26, 1977, Tuesday, was a sunny day in Tbilisi, capital of the former USSR Republic of Georgia. I was coming down from the mountain 'Mtatsminda' (lit. "Saint Mountain"), an impressive 500 metres high mountain range that dominates the very centre of Tbilisi. I was accompanying my guest, a musicologist student from the Lvov Conservatory (Western Ukraine) Natalia Shvets, who happened to be at the graduate students' conference, which was taking place at that time at Tbilisi State Conservatory. Walking down the narrow and steep streets of old Tbilisi, I was teaching Natalia the beautiful Georgian healing song "Batonebo" ["Lords"]. Everything was going well, Natalia had a good musical ear and soon we were able to sing the tantalising dissonant harmonies of the healing song together. The only problem was that, as with most of the Georgian traditional songs, Batonebo needs at least three singers to convey all three necessary parts of the song. Well, there we were - only two of us, walking down the empty street of Old Tbilisi and singing two parts of the three-part song. And then suddenly, "out of the blue" sky of that Tbilisi spring afternoon came the bass voice complementing the full three-part harmony of the healing song. We looked around and there he was, a Georgian male in his thirties, leaning over the balcony on the second floor on the left side of the street and helping two lone singers with the bass part. We waved to each other and continued on our way down the street, still accompanied by his bass. This is by no means a "life-changing experience" (particularly in Georgia where almost everyone sings in harmony), but I still remember it as one of the nice moments of life, when a song suddenly brings together people who never met before. Actually, the real reason I can pinpoint the exact day when this happened after so many years is because I have been writing a diary every (well, almost) single day for the last 30 years. My good friend and colleague, arguably the most influential ethnomusicologist of the Soviet Union, Izaly Zemtsovsky from Sankt Petersburg (currently at Stanford University) had a somewhat similar experience in Abkhazia, the north-western part of

Georgia. Let us listen to how

he described his experience in his own words: "... I would like to share with you what I saw in the hamlet of Gudauta in the summer of 1978: an Abkhazian, dozing as he waited for the bus, in his sleep immediately began intoning a drone as soon as he heard the distant sound, barely audible in the cavernous empty waiting room, of a solo voice singing in the manner of his native land, a song that required a drone." (Zemtsovsky, 2006a). [For non-professional readers - the "drone" is a long sustained sound, often (but not always) sung as the lowest part of a polyphonic song.

Drone can be played on instruments as well]

The following tongue-in-cheek story comes from the decorated Georgian traditional singer and the leader of the world-renowned Rustavi Choir, Anzor Erkomaishvili. Let us listen to his own words: "A big group of artists of Georgian Philharmony arrived from Tbilisi to our village [Anzor Erkomaishvili's native village is

Makvaneti, in Guria, the mountainous Black S

ea-side region of western Georgia]. After their performance a traditional 'supra' [banquet-like Georgian traditional feast at a long table with toasts and singing] was organise d in the spacious room of 'Kolkhoz' [Soviet Collective Farm] officials. We (village singers) were also invited. The guests from the State Philharmony toasted our singing and said they enjoyed Gurian traditional songs very much, although I somehow had an impression that at that moment the guests were 9 more enjoying the traditional 'Honey-Vodka', home-made by Kasiane Bersenadze. As the feasting reached its highest point, one of the guests, a professional opera singer, started singing, announcing beforehand that he was going to sing for us the aria of 'Abdul the Arab' [from the opera 'Tale of Shota Rustaveli', by the Georgian composer Dimitri Araqishvili]. Ilarion Sikharulidze [a well-respected Gurian traditional singer who was at the table] waited for a while, and when he lost faith that the lone singer would be supported by any of his own friends or colleagues, he himself gave a supporting high harmony to his singing. Tele Iobishvili [another traditional Gurian singer who was at the feast as well] supported the aria by the bass part. I should confess that the result was not bad at all, particularly considering that two out of the three performers had no idea of the song they were singing. 'This is an "aria" from the classical opera and should be performed alone', announced a professional singer with mild annoyance in his voice as the song came to an end. 'Well', came the reply from Ilarion Sikharulidze, 'as we Georgians say, it is a pity for a man to be alone while eating, as for singing, I have never heard of a song that has to be sung alone'" (Erkomaishvili, 1988:56). Georgia was widely known for its rich polyphonic traditions in the former Soviet Union. "Two Georgians and a bottle of red wine is already three-part singing" was a popular Russian saying. But of course, such stories of compulsory group participation to complement the harmony of a polyphonic song do not come from Georgia alone. It would be natural to expect that in most of the cultures with traditional polyphonic singing, you would come across similar stories of people joining in singing to complement the harmony, sometimes in the most unusual circumstances. Our good friend, Bulgarian ethnomusicologist Boryana Alexandrova, told me a family story that took place in the 1970, during the "Silver Wedding" of her own uncle, Mladen Angelov, an ardent singer of Bulgarian traditional songs. In the midst of the most sacred part of the ceremony, while standing with his head leaning forward and covered with the sacral cloth by the local priest, to the common laughter of everyone present at this memorable moment, the "silver groom" suddenly starte d singing a drone to support the priest's recitation (personal communication from December 27 th , 1987). I also vividly remember Dunia Rihtman, ethnomusicologist from Bosnia (now in Israel), singing along quietly during the concert of Georgian polyphonic songs on

November 14

th

1986 in Borjomi, Georgia, during the International Conference "Problems

of folk polyphony". Conforming to the etiquette of a conventional performance, Dunia was trying not to be loud, but I was sitting next to her and I could clearly hear her droning along to the unknown (for her) Georgian songs. By the way, I was droning as well. Exactly the same way as I was quietly harmonizing to the (unknown to me) Hungarian monophonic melodies at the Kechkemet music festival in Hungary on August 27, 1977.

Co-participation in a musical performa

nce can happen without singing. As a matter of fact, singing along is not the most widely spread form of co-participation (particularly in western cultures). The most universal (and the most natural and economical) way to "join in" the musical flow must be joining the beat of a musical piece by simply tapping, finger snapping or even just making a swinging movement using any part of the body. This phenomenon is so widely spread in human societies that it often escapes our attention. Representatives of some cultures are particularly prone to the urge of "joining the beat". I remember how amazed was my friend, musicologist and singer Irina Bavkun from the Novosibirsk Conservatory, when she went to a concert of Russian 10 classical music together with a big group of African exchange students. According to Irina's words, "every time, as soon as there was a more-or-less rhythmic section in the music (compositions of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and other Russian "classic" composers were performed at that evening), there was a vigorous rhythmic tapping coming from our guests" (personal communication of 28 March, 1979).

Why it is so pleasurable to move our

body following the rhythm of a musical piece (often without even noticing this) or to sing along with our favourite song? This is one of the questions that I will try to answer on the pages of this book. The problem of a listener's behaviour during the performance, or, in more "scholarly" words, the relationship between the "performers" and the "listeners" is a fascinating topic by itself. In some musical styles the gap between the performers and the listeners is immense, and in other styles and cultures there is hardly any difference at all. Let me give a brief description of the performer/listener relationships of some of the best- known musical styles. If you have ever been at a live performance of any of Beethoven's magnificent symphonies, or heard pieces by any other "c lassical" composer, you might notice the strict rules of behaviour for listeners at the performance of classical European music. The listeners at a classical music concert must remain absolutely silent for the duration of the playing. They are not supposed to clap even during the break between the parts of the symphony (you must wait until all the parts are finished!), let alone any more emotional expression of excitement during the performance. In this style of music (Europeanquotesdbs_dbs26.pdfusesText_32

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