153. Mysteries of D/D -- Nuristan

(I've decided to drop the "Music of the Great Tradition" heading for the time being, as the drone traditions I'm now discussing do not appear to fit into that scheme.)

In the last post I discussed one of the great mysteries of comparative musicology, the uncanny resemblance between two Drone/Dissonance traditions located in two very different parts of the world -- the Balkans and Indonesia/Melanesia -- with nothing resembling either to be found anywhere in between. This is not quite the case, however, as Jordania has written of a very interesting D/D-based tradition still surviving in, of all places, Afghanistan, among the Kalash people, living in a remote, mountainous region overlapping the border with Pakistan, currently known as Nuristan. Here is an example of their very dissonant drone polyphony, as transcribed by Jordania (p. 153):

Here's another example, this time in the form of a dissonant round, quite close in structure and style to the Lithuanian Sutartines we examined in posts 128 and 136:

( The round structure becomes clear when you follow the part beginning on the fourth measure of the upper staff, with downward pointing stems, which is identical to the solo part at the beginning.) How remarkable to find such music smack in the middle of Central Asia, a zone where polyphonic vocalizing of any kind is all but unheard of. And how convenient it would be if this style could be posited as a sort of "missing link" between the Balkans and Indonesia.

The reality, however, may turn out to be even more remarkable. According to their legends, the Kalash are descended from Greek soldiers from the armies of Alexander the Great, who either deserted or were left behind in the wake of his military ventures into this region, ca. 326 BCE. While such claims are always regarded with great skepticism, according to a recent genetic study, "Investigation of the Greek ancestry of northern Pakistani ethnic groups using Y chromosomal DNA variation" (see http://hgm2002.hgu.mrc.ac.uk/Abstracts/Publish/WorkshopPosters/WorkshopPoster11/hgm0533.htm), they might very well be true: "Based upon haplogroup frequencies, 65-88% Greek admixture was estimated for the Kalash, consistent with a Greek origin for a significant proportion of Kalash Y chomosomes." This is exactly the sort of study I suggested could be carried out with respect to the D/D singers in the Balkans and Flores. And in this case it appears to have revealed a truly astonishing connection over a period of over 2,000 years! (Actually the results of the Pakistani study were mixed, with some evidence pointing to a Greek connection and other evidence not so clear. Thus the astonishing musical connection could well resolve the issue in favor of the Kalash claim.) If these results are verified, then this would be hard evidence for exactly the sort of musical survival Yampolsky declared to be "not plausible" ("in the absence of a method of notation or an elaborate pedagogical system . . . for transmitting the tradition, no music could stand still -- with no new ideas or gradual changes, no influences from outside -- for even a few centuries, let alone millennia"). On the other hand, we would still be left scratching our heads over the far more implausible connection between the Balkans and the island of Flores, as an ancient Greek connection dating from 326 BCE would be far too recent and too limited to account for Indonesia as well.

What's most important about this fascinating tale, both cautionary and inspiring, is the great potential of the musical evidence, combined with the genetic evidence, to make a difference in our understanding of some of the strangest mysteries of "deep history."

152. Music of the Great Tradition -- 52. Mysteries of D/D

The uncanny resemblance between the "drone dissonance" style duets of (mountainous) East Flores and the mountains of southwest Bulgaria and other enclaves in various regions of the Balkans have puzzled many musicologists for some time. The noted scholar Jaap Kunst was among the first to point to these striking similarities, in a 1954 study of the music of this Indonesian island, suggesting that they might have been due to a migration from the Balkans to Southern China that supposedly took place around 800 BC. According to Philip Yampolsky, who recorded and edited the Music of Indonesia series from which I took the Flores clip,

For decades, ethnomusicologists have laughted at Kunst's theory, but that may be because they've had so few opportunities to hear recordings from East Flores. In fact Kunst did not exaggerate: the resemblance is extraordinary [p. 8]. . .

[Nevertheless,] his theory requires us to accept that Balkan music came to Flores (but nowhere in between) and remained the same, both in substance and in some detail, in both places, with no subsequent contact between the cultures, for the next 2000 or 2500 years. But this is simply not plausible: in the absence of a method of notation or an elaborate pedagogical system . . . for transmitting the tradition, no music could stand still -- with no new ideas or gradual changes, no influences from outside -- for even a few centuries, let alone millennia [p. 9].

Yampolsky's reaction is especially interesting in that the bulk of his skepticism is not directed at the "nowhere in between" aspect, which for me is the crux of the problem -- but for him merely a parenthetical issue. For him, the real question is how a particular tradition could survive in an oral tradition virtually unchanged for "millennia." As I see it, there are a great many examples of musical traditions remaining virtually unchanged, not only for millennia, but tens of thousands of years. Anyone following this Blog with any degree of care should have no problem with that idea, which for me has been established beyond doubt.

For me, therefore, the really difficult, if not impossible, issue, is: by what means two such highly distinctive traditions, so incredibly close in so many respects, could have either 1. been conceived independently or 2. managed to transmit themselves over such vast distances without any trace of any similar survivals anywhere in between.

To be thorough it's necessary to add that the Flores D/D tradition is echoed, with varying degrees of similarity, by other musical practices elsewhere in the general vicinity -- specifically certain islands in Melanesia, such as coastal Manus (the "enrilank" chant), Fiji, and others as well, though at the moment I can't recall exactly where. There are also certain other similarities one could point to, involving other types of polyphonic and unison group performance styles between Eastern Europe -- particularly Russia -- and certain groups in Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, etc. We find in both areas a very interesting practice, where different elements of a choral performance will interleave their breathing to produce a continuous stream of sound. And we also find, in many instances, melodic and harmonic passages that could be heard almost interchangeably in either part of the world.

I don't see much possibility of an ancient migration from anywhere in Europe to anywhere in Oceania, though there are some theories I've heard of that I might want to explore. It's conceivable, I suppose, that at some point during the "Out of Africa" migration, circa 90,000 to 60,000 years ago, a population bottleneck of some sort could have led to the development of this D/D style, perhaps somewhere in India, followed by a split between at least two elements of this population, one eventually finding its way to the Balkans, the other to Indonesia and Oceania. But, again, it's very difficult to understand how no other traces of the same style could have been left anywhere in between.

So, we have a true conundrum on our hands. The good news is that, thanks to advances in the genetic research, it's now possible, at least in principle, to test any theory we might want to come up with. And the very specifity of this D/D style, its presence in only very limited populations in certain very specific parts of the world, would make it relatively easy to do. One would have to arrange for teams of DNA collectors to make their way to various places in both the Balkans and Indonesia and/or Melanesia to collect samples -- but only from people known to represent precisely the musical traditions we are concerned with, preferably the singers themselves. It would then be a relatively simple matter to compare various haplotypes and haplogroups from the Balkans groups with others from the Flores groups (or elsewhere from similar traditions in that part of the world). One would then compare these genetic comparisons with comparisons drawn from various groups in the world selected randomly, as a control. If the D/D singers have significantly more haplotypes or haplogroups in common than the control groups, it might be possible to take seriously the notion of a historical connection of some sort. If not, then I suppose it would be necessary to accept that such a remarkable similarity could be due to simple coincidence -- independent invention. What interests me most about this situation is the as yet untapped power of music for pointing to certain potentially significant historical connections.

151. Music of the Great Tradition -- 51:Mysteries of D/D

The remarkable style of drone polyphony associated today primarily with Bulgaria (or more accurately Southwestern Bulgaria) is paralled by roughly similar traditions to be found, as noted by Jordania, in many more or less remote enclaves of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Greece. This can be considered a true style area, rather than simply a region of drone polyphony, as it involves several highly idiosyncratic features in addition to drone. Most prominent is the stress on extreme dissonances, based on major and minor seconds, and sometimes even smaller intervals, characteristically emphasized and often sustained, generating acoustic "beats" that can produce a powerfully resonant bodily vibration, in which the singers clearly take pleasure. Since this style so prominently displays both drone and dissonance, Jordania has labeled it the "Drone/Dissonance" style, or "D/D."

While Jordania mentions several traditions in Georgia and elsewhere that tend to also feature secundal dissonances, in most cases this is an evanescent effect, not unlike similar effects in P/B polyphony, where seconds are often freely combined with thirds, fourths and fifths. This type of polyphony could, in many cases (especially where drone is absent) be explained as an offshoot of P/B. Not so with the "Bulgarian" "D/D" style, where the dissonances are emphasized and dwelt upon in a manner totally unlike anything to be heard in Africa. Other characteristics of this very distinctive style include extreme glottalization (possibly related to yodel), tremulo, free rhythm, extreme volume, and a characteristic upward glissando "glide" prominent especially at phrase endings. While drone effects can often be combined with parallel motion (usually in seconds!), the sustaining or iteration of a single note against at least one other moving part is usually a prominent feature of this style.

So what is the problem? Couldn't such a style, so clearly localized largely in one region of Europe (the Balkans) have developed as an offshoot of certain other types of polyphony in one particular corner of southeastern Europe and spread from there? Yes, I suppose it could have. The problem is that essentially the same style of singing, complete with all the features mentioned above, can be found in a totally different part of the world.

To illustrate, let's compare this example, Zamurknia Pestotin, from Bulgaria (from Vocal Traditions of Bulgaria, Smithsonian Folkways), with this, Berasi Kremet, from, of all places, Flores (from Music of Indonesia, Vol. 8, Smithsonian Folkways), a small island near Bali, halfway round the world, in Indonesia.

150. Music of the Great Tradition -- 50:Drone

Of all the various types of polyphonic vocalizing characteristic of what I've been calling "Old Europe," drone polyphony would seem to be the only one bearing no trace of the "African signature" I've been associating with the "Great Tradition." While "heterophonic" polyphony (see "stratum" no. 2 in the previous post) doesn't seem to be particularly common in Africa, its conflation of heterophonic and polyphonic elements does in fact reflect an important and highly distinctive feature of P/B, suggesting that it could be a European variant with African roots. The simpler types of parallel motion or descant polyphony described in "strata" 3 and 4 below are commonly found in various African Bantu traditions, usually associated with "call and response" interactions of a type also not uncommon in "Old Europe," suggesting either a direct influence from Africa or, more likely, musical "mutation" along parallel lines, possibly reflecting the effects of separate population bottlenecks at different times on both continents. (For an explanation of bottlenecks and musical "mutations" see post 17, "The Bottleneck.")

Drone polyphony, on the other hand, doesn't seem to share any distinctive characteristics with P/B or any other typically African practice. That's not to say it can't be found in sub-Saharan Africa at all -- certain groups, notably the Bahima and Massai, vocalize using drone effects. But judging from its relatively sparse distribution on this continent, the practice is likely to have developed many thousands of years after the "Out of Africa" migration that led to the initial population of Europe with "modern" humans.

This might not, at first, appear to be such a terrible conundrum. After all, drone is only a single trait, while the various styles I've been tracking on this blog have usually been defined as composites of two or more inter-related traits. It's not difficult to see how, as a single, isolated feature, drone might well have been "independently invented" more than once and for various perfectly understandable reasons. After all, by having most of the singers intone one or two basic pitches over and over again, it's possible to produce the euphonious effects of polyphony among groups with relatively little interest in -- or talent for -- harmonization. Or, as Jordania has suggested, drone could have developed in some instances as a hybrid, combining the polyphonic proclivities of established "Old Europeans" with the elaborated melodic development favored by west Asiatic invaders. A somewhat similar encounter could have led to the development of drone polyphony in the Medieval church, where, in this case, the "drone" part carries the original chant melody (most likely reflecting the influence of the "Eastern" church) as a "cantus firmus," in juxtaposition with "Old European" style elaborated counterpoints above and around it, as, for example, in the work of Perotin and the Ars Antiqua style generally.

Such explanations may well account for the presence of drone polyphony in many parts of Europe and, indeed, many other places in the world where drone of one type or another can be found. So far so good. No problem.

The real difficulty arises due to the presence of certain polyphonic traditions where drone is only one element in a rare complex of traits defining a highly distinctive, easily identifiable style, a unique approach to drone polyphony usually associated with certain mountainous regions of the Balkans, best known due to the enormous popularity of a CD entitled Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.

149. Music of the Great Tradition -- 49:A European Stratigraphy

The relatively "quick and dirty" overview I've been presenting in the last several posts is far from a complete picture, as will be clear to anyone who's done much research on European oral traditions. But it does, I hope, give us some idea of how the musical evidence can be used as an aid in exploring -- and even reconstructing, however speculatively -- at least some part of the complex cultural/historical "stratigraphy" of this remarkably complex and contentious continent. Let's give it a try, limiting ourselves for now to those styles we've already been discussing:

"Old European":
1. Oldest stratum, possibly dating from the earliest "Out of Africa" migration(s) of the Upper Paleolithic, and pervading the continent throughout the Paleolithic and much of the Neolithic: "contrapuntal" polyphony bearing the "African signature" associated with P/B style -- hocket/interlock, stimmtauch, canon, yodel, etc., as exemplified today in vocal polyphony as found in remote, highly "traditional" areas, such as Plekhovo, the Appenzell, Aukštaitija , the Algarve, etc.; certain types of Medieval notated polyphony; and certain types of hocketed instrumental ensemble, e.g., pipes, panpipes, trumpets, horns, bell chimes, etc.

2. Next oldest stratum, possibly a direct development from the above: "heterophonic" vocal polyphony, as a conflation of heterophony and polyphonic counterpoint; possibly with a very wide original distribution throughout Europe -- most commonly found today in the Ukraine and Russia, but also widely distributed throughout certain remote pockets of traditional culture in various parts of southern Europe.

3. Next oldest: harmonizing in parallel intervals (usually either fifths and fourths or thirds and sixths), a practice that may have developed largely in the west; as found today in Iceland, certain types of Medieval polyphony (fifths and fourths) and certain traditional regions of Britain, western and southern Europe (especially Basque country, Spain and Italy), but found also in some Russian and other East European traditions (thirds and sixths). Found also commonly in Africa, where it also appears to be an outgrowth from P/B.

4. Next oldest: various types of so-called "descant" harmonization, possibly a development from the above, but with a certain amount of oblique and/or contrary motion, found roughly in the same areas as above. Also commonly found in Africa.

5. ???????????????? Drone polyphony, possibly a survival from an ancient migration to Europe from Asia at some unknown time; proliferating very commonly today largely in relatively remote enclaves of Eastern and to a lesser extent Southern Europe. Commonly found also in other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, etc. This is the only type of vocal polyphony in Europe that does not appear to have roots of any kind in Africa.

Post Indo-european:

6. Next oldest: "Modern European" style, most clearly exemplified by the solo or unison simple strophic ballad and lyric song, with pentatonic or diatonic intervals, medium length phrases, relatively "strict" rhythms, regular meters, little to no embellishment, wide to moderately tense voices, etc., possibly stemming from an early Indo-european migration from Central Asia (where the strophic song is still of great importance); as found widely throughout Europe, most characteristically in the west but frequently in southern and eastern Europe as well.

7. Next oldest: "Elaborate" style, also referred to at times by Lomax as "Bardic" or "semi-Bardic" -- solo singing in both strophic and non-strophic forms (litany, complex strophe, through-composed, etc.), with an emphasis on chromatic intervals and in some cases microtones, longer phrases, relatively free rhythms (rubato), complex meters, moderate to extreme embellishment, tense voices, etc., possibly stemming from a later Indo-european migration, but with elements suggesting other influences from various parts of Asia at various times, including relatively recent Islamic influences as well; as found today almost exclusively in Eastern Europe, southern Spain and southern Italy.

8. ???????????????? Drone polyphony, as an amalgam of pre- and post- Indo-european traditions, combining polyphony with more or less elaborate solo melody, as described in 7, above, and with a somewhat similar European distribution.

My European "stratigraphy" is, of course, hypothetical, speculative and incomplete, omitting certain traditions that are also of great importance, such as, for example, the epic, the lament, various types of vocal and/or instrumental dance music, and important instrumental traditions, associated with, among others, the flute, the fiddle, and perhaps most important, the bagpipe.

What concerns me most in the present context, however, is the fact that it's possible to place every type of polyphonic singing into the sequence, however speculatively, with some degree of confidence -- with the exception of drone, which appears to have at least two possible explanations, neither of which is fully satisfactory, as I will attempt to explain in the following post.

148. Music of the Great Tradition -- 48:Drone

Before continuing with our discussion of drone and the "drone problem," let's take a closer look at some patterns of distribution for traditional vocal music in Europe generally. As I've argued, the most widely (though also sparsely) distributed vocal practice would seem to be the "contrapuntal" style I've been associating with P/B hocket/interlock, the style at the heart of my "Great Tradition" hypothesis. Its wide dispersal plus strong associations, in so many instances, with Africa, suggest that it could represent the oldest and deepest "stratum" of musical culture in Europe.

Drone represents another aspect of "Old European" polyphonic survival, with a very different distribution -- and little if any stylistic affinity with Africa. As we've already learned, traditional drone polyphony is centered for the most part in mountainous enclaves of Eastern and Southern Europe, but found relatively rarely in Western Europe, Britain and Scandinavia.

Another type of traditional "Old European" vocal polyphony, based largely on parallel thirds and sixths, has an almost complementary distribution, centered in enclaves of Britain and Western Europe, north, central, and south. While the influence of classical and popular "professional polyphony" is always a possibility, there does seem to be a preference for the "softer" intervals of the third and sixth in the European oral tradition, distributed in a cline decreasing from west to east.

Jordania points to yet another "Old European" style, "heterophonic polyphony," so-named because polyphonic passages tend to be interspersed with passages of unison and/or octaves, to produce a kind of "enhanced" melodic line. Caution is advised in the use of this terminology, however. While strictly speaking "heterophony" refers to a type of group performance in which all parts present a variant of essentially the same melodic line, the term has traditionally been used to describe performances where the same line is variously ornamented or embellished in different parts, often with varying degrees of rubato (rhythmic freedom), and little to no intentional polyphony. The examples offered by Jordania are not of this type. What he refers to as "heterophonic polyphony" is exemplified by rhythmically synchronized performances, with little or no rubato, in which various intervals, of the second, third, fourth or fifth, are interwoven with unisons and octaves to produce what he has described as a "thickening" of a single melody. A great many Russian and Ukranian "folk songs" employ this style, where each phrase often begins and almost always ends with a unison or octave.

While most of the examples offered by Jordania are from Eastern Europe, very similar practices can also be found in other parts of Europe and, indeed, many other parts of the world. Since, as I've already demonstrated (see post 102), polyphony and heterophony tend to be conflated in both Pygmy and Bushmen music, "heterophonic polyphony" might well be an offshoot of P/B style, possibly a development from an early version of the Old European "contrapuntal" style to which I've been referring so often. (See posts 108-111 for a description of a somewhat different type of "heterophonic polyphony," as exemplified in the structure of Javanese and Balinese gamelan music.)

Let's turn now to some of the most widespread non-polyphonic traditions of Europe, the "monophonic/unison" traditions of both solo and group singing that, in Jordania's view (and I tend to agree), most likely represent a later development, possibly stemming from the Indo-European migration(s) hypothesized by Gimbutas. Here too, we have a very interesting east-west divide. Simple strophic structures, such as the ballad and lyric song, characterized by relatively stable rhythms, medium length phrases, pentatonic or diatonic scales, little to no embellishment and moderately tense to moderately relaxed voices, are distributed according to a markedly descending cline, from the northwest and central regions to the south and east. This is the style that Alan Lomax called, significantly: "Modern European" (as opposed to the "Old European" polyphonic styles we've been discussing). More complex structures, including complex strophes, litanies and through-composed forms, often characterized by either rubato rhythms or irregular meters (such as so-called aksak or "limping" meters), medium to long phrases, narrow intervals, moderate to extreme embellishment and moderately tense to constricted voices, are distributed over more or less the same territory as drone polyphony, in a descending cline from Eastern to Southern Europe, with very few instances to be heard elsewhere on that continent.

147. Music of the Great Tradition -- 47:Drone

Some of the most important types of vocal drone polyphony are described by Joseph Jordania on pages 26 and 27 of his book. The basic principle common to all is the persistent presence, in one or more parts, of a single tone, either sustained or continually repeated, while one or more other voices sing melodically against it. While the drone is often the lowest tone, it can also be the highest -- or somewhere in the middle. While the same drone note often persists throughout an entire song, pitch changes are common in some styles. He points, additionally, to a very interesting aspect of drone performance practice that's often overlooked: in most cases the drone part is sung in unison by a group, while the moving parts are usually sung by soloists (p. 211).

As Jordania's survey makes clear, drone polyphony is unquestionably of great importance worldwide, and might well be the most frequently occurring type of traditional vocal polyphony in "Old Europe," found far more commonly today than the "contrapuntal" polyphony on which I've been focusing here. Certain especially revealing differences between the two types of musical practice are highlighted in Jordania's comparison between the contrasting vocal styles of East and West Georgia:

• East Georgia is considered to be the “kingdom” of the pedal drone . . West Georgia is mostly known as the “kingdom” of contrapuntal polyphony; . . .
• The metre is always precise in West Georgian songs, while in at least some East Georgian songs (particularly – the same “long” table songs from Kartli and Kakheti) the polyphony develops without a precise metre, in so-called “rubato” (free metre);
• A major part of the metered polyphonic songs in Georgia is based on the simple duple (2/4, 4/4) and triple metres (¾,
6/8). East Georgia uses all these metres, whereas West Georgia uses predominantly (and in some regions almost exclusively) only duple metres;
• East Georgian polyphonic songs are famous for their richly ornamented melismatic melodies. There are no ornamented melismatic melodies in West Georgian polyphonic songs at all (apart from the region of Racha, which has an obvious influence from the East Georgian singing style); . . .
• The yodel is present only in West Georgia; (217-218).

Remarkably, the combination of rhythmic precision (lack of rubato), duple meter, and unornamented melody, noted above as characteristic of West Georgia, also characterizes the hocket/interlock, stimmtauch and canonic examples we've been discussing, and is, moreover, typical for much of Africa as well, especially P/B style, where yodeling is also common. Jordania specifically associates West Georgia with the older, more traditional culture of "Old Europe," prior to the Indo-European migrations hypothesized by Gimbutas:

these migrations and major cultural and population changes during the 3rd-2nd millennia involved only the territory of East Georgia, while the territory of western Georgia, situated on the other side of the Likhi mountains (the dividing mountain range between the eastern and western Georgia) remained virtually unaffected (p. 219).

For Jordania, East Georgian drone polyphony, and by implication much of European drone polyphony in general, can therefore be explained as a hybrid of the original contrapuntal style now found only in West Georgia, and a

West and Central Asian monophonic style, with richly ornamented melodic lines, specific scales, free rhythm and non-metric time. As Tsitsishvili puts it, ". . . the [East Georgian] “long” songs represent a total transculturation of style which differs from both parent cultures, though belongs in the polyphonic music culture of Georgia" . . .

Moving through Europe, Indo-Europeans were in constant contact with the autochthonous carriers of the ancient European polyphony, so the possibility of mixture of these two different types of music (polyphonic and monophonic) must have been extremely high in many regions of Europe (pp. 219, 220).

While I can't do full justice here to Jordania's complex and nuanced treatment of the history and meaning of drone, admittedly not always in agreement with my own thinking, the notion of drone polyphony as a hybrid between two very different vocal styles, one polyphonic through and through, the other essentially monophonic/ unison; one representing a pre-existing autochthonous culture, the other the culture of a more recent, more aggressive and assertive "invader," does appear to make a good deal of sense. It's important to note, as well, that drone, while far more common than contrapuntal polyphony, is not as widely distributed. While the latter has been found (or referenced) sparsely scattered through many different parts of Europe overall, the former is found most frequently in Eastern Europe (including the Baltic states), less frequently in pockets of Southern Europe, but rarely in the rest of the continent, including Britain. (The many remarkable points of similarity between these drone traditions and drone as it appears in early Medieval polyphony cannot of course be ignored, but is a somewhat different issue, to be discussed in future posts.)

While all indications are that drone polyphony arose in Europe, therefore, as a mixture of an autochthonous contrapuntal practice with a newer monophonic/ unison style with roots in Asia, this explanation would appear to be inconsistent with the overall world picture, since drone polyphony of various types, sometimes strikingly similar to that of Eastern and Southern Europe, can be found, as Jordania himself points out, in many other parts of the world. This is a part of the problem I've already referred to, a very puzzling problem I'll be addressing in future posts.

To be continued

146. Music of the Great Tradition -- 46. Europe

In the last several posts I've been discussing some different, but nevertheless closely related, hypotheses: 1. considerable evidence points to the survival, mostly in remote "refuge" areas, of various so-called "Old European" oral traditions of polyphonic vocalizing, possibly dating, as convincingly argued by Jordania, to the Neolithic or earlier, almost certainly antedating the largely monophonic/unison "mainstream" oral vocal traditions now dominating the continent, which appear to have originated in western and/or central Asia; 2. the most unusual of these traditions, represented by a type of complex and highly distinctive "contrapuntal" vocalizing, typically featuring practices such as hocket/interlock, stimmtauch, canon, ostinato, and in some cases yodel or falsetto, would appear, due to its wide (though also rather sparse) diffusion throughout the continent, to antedate the other polyphonic vocal traditions, all of which have more limited distributions; 3. the earliest notated polyphony of the medieval church and monastery may have originated in attempts by the clergy to incorporate and adapt various types of traditional oral polyphony, as described in both 1 and 2 above, encountered among certain autochthonous populations while missionizing in remote areas; 4. the "contrapuntal" tradition considered above as possibly the oldest in Europe, due to its widespread though discontinuous distribution in that continent, has, in addition, very distinctive characteristics suggesting that it could be truly archaic, a survival from the earliest migration(s) "Out of Africa" during the Upper Paleolithic.

Strictly speaking, each of the above can be treated as independent of the other. We don't need to establish an African link to postulate either an ancient tradition of polyphonic vocalizing in "Old Europe" or a possible connection between such a tradition and the origins of polyphony in the medieval church. As Jordania has demonstrated, there is more than enough evidence within Europe itself for the survival of an "Old European" strain of polyphonic vocalizing. And as I hope I have demonstrated, with supporting testimony from music historians such as Bukofzer, Dalglish and Burstyn, there is ample evidence within Europe itself for linking medieval hocket, stimmtauch, round and canon with certain oral traditions reported in the past and still being practiced today.

What's truly remarkable, however, is that some of the strongest and most convincing points of similarity lie not within Europe, but between Europe and Africa -- more precisely, between what appears to be the oldest surviving musical practice in Europe (the "contrapuntal" style referenced in point 2 above) and the highly distinctive Pygmy/Bushmen style (P/B) I've been pointing to as the most likely source of a worldwide "African signature." For example, the Russian panpipers recorded by Velitchkina sound closer, according to Velitchkina herself, to certain examples of African piping than anything to be found in Europe. Compare this recording from Plekhovo, Russia, for example, with this, of Ouldeme pipers from the Mandara Mountains of Cameroon. Less striking, but nevertheless compelling, is the remarkable structural similarity between the Sumer Canon, as sung by St. George's Canzona, and a "round" sung by this group of Mbuti Pygmy women: Amabele-o-i-ye. Would it be too much of a stretch to compare this perhaps somewhat over-refined head-tone performance of a Medieval hocket, HoquetusMusicalisSciencia-SciencieLaudabili, with a more straightforwardly sung example of Ju/'hoansi Bushmen yodeled hocket, from the village of Dobe? We have already had occasion to compare -- in post 138 --some notated examples of Medieval hocket/interlock with a remarkably similar example of African instrumental hocket provided by Nketia. The resemblances are striking, as a visit to post 138 will demonstrate.

So, yes, I do think there is a case to be made for a "Great Tradition" with roots in Paleolithic Africa, and branches in, among other places, Europe -- leading us all the way from what may well be the most archaic musical tradition of that continent to the origins of notated polyphony in the Middle Ages -- which in turn forms the root of both the "popular" and "classical" traditions of our own time.

However, the situation is not quite as simple and straightforward as it might seem, in the admittedly somewhat biased manner I've been presenting it up to now. Because there is an important practice I haven't yet considered, that isn't so easily explained by my "Great Tradition" hypothesis. As Jordania's study makes clear, the most commonly encountered type of traditional vocal polyphony in Europe is not counterpoint, but a somewhat different practice of great interest and importance that he discusses in some detail: drone polyphony. And the problem for me is that drone polyphony, while common in a great many "refuge" areas of Europe, is in fact not at all typical for Africa south of the Sahara, and in all likelihood did not originate there.

(To be continued.)

145. Music of the Great Tradition -- 45:Europe

Before proceeding, it's necessary to point out certain problems with some of the "contrapuntal" traditions listed in the previous post. The Ligurian "Trallalero" sounds in some ways like the product of more "modern" developments, and indeed appears to have a history associating it with popular Genoese tavern music of the 19th century. As I see it, such repertoires are rarely if ever invented out of whole cloth, especially where untrained singers are involved, but including it in my survey might be a bit of a stretch, I admit. The Algarve fishermen's song is one of a kind, the only example I know of from this tradition, which makes it somewhat difficult to assess. Moreover, the Algarve region, located on the Portugese coast, is neither mountainous nor forested, nor is it an island or desert, thus hardly a "refuge" area of the type pointed to by Jordania. As the Algarve has a long history of both trade with and invasion by outside groups, including the Phoenicians, the Visigoths and the Moors, the fishermen's song could, for all we know, represent an imported tradition, rather than something native to the Iberian peninsula. To more fully assess its meaning, we would need more information regarding the history and origin of the Algarve fishermen and their culture.

Admittedly, the oral contrapuntal vocal traditions of Europe are relatively few, far between, and in some cases problematic. As I see it, what makes them especially meaningful nevertheless, in addition to their wide distribution in so many isolated pockets of the continent, is the presence, in one form or the other, of what I've called the "African signature." Thus, not only is the "interrupted distribution" (see post 143) of these closely related (see post 144) traditions throughout the continent in itself suggestive of great age (see the argument presented in post 143 and the quotation from Sapir), but the many tantalizing points of similarity with Africa -- specifically, the hocketed and yodelled run-on counterpoint so characteristic of P/B style -- raise the very interesting, though certainly controversial, possibility of an origin dating all the way back to the earliest migrations of "modern" humans into Europe during the Upper Paleolithic.

It might be a good idea, at this point, to revisit Nketia's skeptical remarks (as quoted in post 139) regarding the possibility of anyone drawing precisely this type of inference:

We are told by some historians that in Western music the hocket was a device -- indeed some of them describe it as a naive device-which showed itself in two forms: (a)in the form of interspersed breaks in one voice accompanied by semibreve movement in the other parts, or (b) in the form of divisions of a melody between two voices. The latter it is said, is to be found mainly in theoretical treatises rather than in actual music. There was a certain arbitrariness in the use of this device, but we learn that it was "a genuine attempt to obtain that particular emphasis of rhythm which is now styled staccato." . . .

In African music practice, the hocket is not merely a device but a technique of building up single or parallel linear structures in various types of interlocking patterns. The hockets are not arbitrary artistic devices; they are functional, in the sense that they arise out of melodic and polyphonic considerations. They are often a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and are used for achieving overall effects of continuity, for building up interlocking, and sometimes complex structures, out of relatively simple elements (ibid., pp. 51-52).

Nketia dismisses the use of hocket in Western music as a mere "device," "to be found mainly in theoretical treatises." As we have learned, this is most certainly not the case. As Dalglish and others have demonstrated, hocket was an especially important and indeed pervasive feature of both Ars Antiqua and Ars Nova polyphony. The preposterous notion that hocket originated as some sort of attempt to produce "what is now styled staccato" is no doubt a reflection of the difficulty so many musicologists have had in accounting for the existence of a practice that appears so odd and so out of place in the context of their expectations regarding the liturgical music of the time. There is nothing in what Nketia says about African hocket in the last paragraph that could not also be said about European hocket, both oral and notated. The notion that the European hocket was "merely a device" is an unwarranted and incorrect assumption. To my knowledge, Nketia never made any serious attempt to study this practice outside of Africa, in "the West" or anywhere else, so his comments may well be pure speculation.

To be fair, at the time Nketia wrote this essay there was no reason to associate African and European traditions of any kind, since there was no basis for connecting the history of the two continents at so early a period, or, indeed, at any time prior to it. Almost all archaeologists and paleontologists were in agreement that Africa and Europe had entirely different histories, with Europeans in all likelihood descended from earlier pre-homosapiens humans from the same continent, either identical with or closely related to European Neanderthals. Our picture of world prehistory has now changed, so radically and so abruptly that many anthropologists, not to mention musicologists, remain either unware or in a state of confusion regarding the most recent findings and the profound implications they bring with them.

144. Music of the Great Tradition -- 44:Europe

Of all the various types of traditional vocal polyphony to be found or reported in Europe, only so-called "contrapuntal" polyphony seems more or less evenly distributed throughout the continent as a whole. It is also the most thinly distributed, so its presence can all too easily be overlooked. This most complex of all polyphonic types has been found or reported, to my knowledge, in the following areas:

1. West Georgia generally; 2. certain isolated villages of European Russia, near the Ukrainian border, notably in Briansk, Kaluga and Kursk -- also isolated areas of the Komi Republic, Serbia, Rumania, and Lithuania ("hooted" vocalizing associated with panpipe playing, as reported by Olga Velitchkina and Ruta Zarskiene); 3. the Appenzell region of the Swiss Alps; 4. the "Tralalero" tradition of Liguria, in Northern Italy; 5. the "highland" region of Eastern Lithuania (associated with the sutartine tradition); 6. the Algarve region of Portugal; 7. medieval Wales (as inferred from the writings of Geraldus Cambrensis); 8. certain forms associated with medieval liturgical music, such as the rotus, rondellus, chace and caccia -- and practices such as the round, canon, stimmtauch and hocket/interlock, thought by some medievalists, with good reason, to have originated in oral traditions.

While it could certainly be argued that each of the above represents a unique, independently developed musical practice, such an interpretation seems unlikely, for several reasons. As with traditional polyphonic vocalizing generally, the contrapuntal type appears in almost all cases to be found in remote, isolated pockets, well off the beaten path, associated with other traditions generally thought to be ancient or archaic, often centered in the sort of mountainous or heavily forested areas where we would expect to find the survivals of any region's oldest traditions. In addition, many of these contrapuntal practices are linked by other highly distinctive musical features, such as: the presence, either common or sporadic, of "resultant" effects, produced by hocket/interlock, stimmtauch or both; and the presence, either common or sporadic, of either yodel or falsetto singing (falsetto was singled out by certain church leaders as one of the "excesses" of medieval hocket; falsetto is an important feature of the Tralalero tradition; the vocalizing of the Russian panpipers documented by Velitchkina is "hooted" in a manner very close to yodel; yodel is a common feature of polyphonic vocalizing in the Appenzel and West Georgia; yodel was associated with certain types of "popular" medieval polyphony by Bukofzer).

There are also in many cases strong associations with certain types of instrumental hocket. The panpipers studied by Velitchkina and Zarskiene sing as they hocket together on their pipes. Lithuanian sutartines can be played by hocketing pipe or trumpet ensembles in addition to being sung. Similar ensembles of horns or trumpets have been reported for Russia. Alphorns in Switzerland and elsewhere could have played together in hocketing ensembles at one time (though at the moment this is only a conjecture). There is (or was) an important tradition of panpipe hocket in Georgia. Finally, we have an intriguing quotation from Adam de la Halle associating medieval hocketing with both folksong and panpipes:

Adam de la Halle uses the term in the highest voice of a polyphonic motet. He relates how four young fellows, when they hocket, make percussive sounds faster than the panpipes. They also dance together, beating on the floor while hocketing. ("Quant il hoquetent Plus tost clapetent Que frestel Li damoisel... Et quant il font le moulin Ensamble tout quatre Et au plastre batre En hoquetant" [Tischler, 3:74-6, 4:83-4; Adam de la Halle p. 202-5].) (See http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/culture/music/hocket.html)

143. Music of the Great Tradition -- Europe

It's important to understand that the pattern I've been discussing involves all forms of traditional vocal polyphony in Europe, not only those on which I've been focusing in the last several posts (the ones apparently displaying an "African signature"). As Jordania demonstrates, societies where polyphonic vocalizing of any type comes more or less "naturally," as part of a long established tradition, tend to be found in relatively isolated "refuge" areas, such as mountainous regions, islands, forests, etc. -- and this appears to be a continent-wide phenomenon, extending to the British Isles as well. Surrounding these isolated pockets of polyphony we find very different musical traditions, where solo singing and/or group vocalizing in unison and octaves are the rule. Both traditions appear to be "old" (I'm disregarding more recent "popular" forms for the moment), but the striking difference in their distribution -- the one continuous and "mainstream," the other discontinuous and marginal -- could be an important clue, not only to their relative age as distinct musical practices, but to our understanding of European pre-history generally.

The noted anthropologist Edward Sapir wrote as follows regarding such patterns:

For chronological purposes, cases of the interrupted distribution of a culture element are of particular importance. In a general way, a culture element whose area of distribution is a broken one must be considered as of older date, other things being equal, than a culture element diffused over an equivalent but continuous area. The reason for this is that in the former case we have to add to the lapse of time allowed for the diffusion of the element over its area of distribution the time taken to bring about the present isolation of the two areas, a time which may vary from a few years or a generation to a number of centuries. . . [T]he interrupted distribution of a culture element gives us a minimum relative date for the origin of the culture element itself. The element must have arisen prior to the event or series of events that resulted in the geographical isolation of the two areas ("Time Perspective in Aboriginal American Culture, a Study in Method." Geological Survey Memoir 90: No. 13, Anthropological Series. Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau (1916), p. 41).

Thus, it would appear that the tradition of polyphonic vocalization pointed to by Jordania is likely to have pervaded much of Europe at some time in the distant past, prior to the advent, during a later period, of the monophonic/unison tradition destined to marginalize it. As we've learned, Jordania, following Gimbutas, associates such polyphony with "Old European" culture, and "monophony" with the migration into Europe of a more agressive, and successful, "proto Indo-european" culture. But the situation isn't quite that simple, because there is more than one type of traditional polyphonic singing in Europe, and each, as Jordania notes, is distributed somewhat differently. In what follows, I'll be drawing on information gleaned from Jordania's book, but with a somewhat different interpretation.

I want for now to focus on three of the most important types of traditional polyphonic vocalization in Europe: 1. Drone polyphony (one voice holding or repeating the same tone as one or more others sing melodically along with it), usually emphasing intervals of the 4th and 5th -- and, in many cases, dissonances based on both major and minor seconds; 2. parallel polyphony, sometimes in 4ths and 5ths, but also, in certain areas, 3rds and 6ths; 3. "contrapuntal" polyphony, involving two or more rhymically and melodically independent voices.

All I have time for today. Stay tuned.

142. Music of the Great Tradition -- 42:Hocket

Follow the evidence! And there certainly is evidence, as we have seen. The most important pieces of evidence, from a medieval historian's viewpoint, are undoubtedly the various types of round, canon, stimmtauch and hocket, as found (or reported) in various oral traditions in various parts of Europe, and certain similarly organized examples of early notated polyphony, as found in manuscripts from monastaries and churches in Western Europe and Britain (see previous posts). From the broader standpoint of the comparative musicologist, the strong resemblances between certain examples from both traditions and certain basic features of African music, especially the Pygmy/Bushmen tradition I've been focusing on, are of special interest and potentially far greater importance.

But what are we to make of such similarities? Isn't it possible to simply sift through the repertoires of various traditions that interest us, looking for similarities that could prove our point and overlooking differences that could undermine it? This sort of strategy, often ridiculed as "cherry picking," has been used to "prove" all sorts of dubious theories. To meaningfully "follow the evidence," therefore, we must first of all not fall in love with any particular theory simply because it appeals to us or seems "logical" and "reasonable." And second of all we must make every attempt to critically evaluate the evidence we are considering, to be sure we are not simply cherrypicking the "best" bits and tossing all else aside.

While clearly the notion of a "Great Tradition," as I've been describing it here, appeals to me, it may surprise you to learn that I am not in love with it -- and am perfectly willing to admit I could be wrong. What's most important about such a theory, as I see it, is not whether it is "true" in some literal, absolute sense, but the extent to which it can be profitably explored -- and whether or not it can be tested. And one of things I like about the ways in which comparative musicology can be conducted in the 21st Century is that certain things that in the past were only a matter of conjecture can in fact, for the first time -- to some degree at least -- be put to some sort of meaningful test. For one thing, there are many more recordings, field studies and regional overviews available than ever before and, thanks to the Internet, much of this is now easily accessible. For another thing, we have, in the form of the Cantometrics methodology, a tool that enables us to take both similarities and differences into account, and on a wide range of possibilities, from the local to the regional to the global. Finally, thanks to dramatic advances in the understanding of our DNA, we can check certain musical hypotheses against the findings of anthropological genetics.

From our standpoint at present, the most important regional overview can be found in the recently published book from which I've so often been quoting, by Joseph Jordania. And one of the most insightful quotes from Jordania's book may well be the following:

Most importantly, there is one very important common feature that unites most of the European polyphonic traditions. Mountains, large forests, islands- these are all geophically isolated regions. . . This fact suggests that mountains do not help to create polyphony . . . but as geographically isolated regions, they help polyphony and other elements of the culture to survive [212-213].

Thus, what is most significant about the comparisons I've been drawing between certain examples from contemporary "folk" traditions and other examples from historical sources, is that, in almost every case, the "folk" examples are drawn from oral traditions associated with exactly the sort of "isolated regions" pointed to by Jordania. The musical traditions we have been examining, therefore, have not simply been "cherry picked" from wherever I've been able to find some sort of music that "sounds right," but represent very specific practices to be found in very specific regions of the continent, regions that can, indeed, be associated with what Gimbutas referred to as "Old Europe." When we find this sort of pattern, with a clearly identifiable, highly distinctive, practice found widely dispersed throughout some of the most marginalized, isolated regions of an immense territory, it seems likely that the practice in question must at one time have been far more widespread, and what we now find are variants, surviving in what can only be called "refuge areas."

141. Music of the Great Tradition -- 41:Hocket

My motto in dealing with fundamental issues such as similarity vs. difference; the superficial vs. the meaningful; what is likely, what is unlikely, etc.; is very simple: follow the evidence. In that spirit, let's continue our survey of various types of hocket, both Medieval and not, with the focus, this time, on listening.

Here are two clips from the CD Monastic Chant -- 12th & 13th C. European Sacred Music, as performed by the Hilliard Ensemble. First, from Hocquetus 'Mediolano' Sanctus. Second, from HoquetusMusicalisSciencia-SciencieLaudabili. In both cases, the hocketing is intermittent -- and relatively simple, with notes from a single melody alternating between the two upper voices. It's worth noting that in both cases the hocketed segments are melodically disjunct in a manner roughly consistent with P/B hocket. Moreover, as the Hilliard singers employ a remarkably pure headtone, this performance has a quality surprisingly close to P/B style yodeling.

Of special interest for several reasons is an anonymous three voice motet from the Montpellier Codex, dating from 13th Century France: Amor Potest. Here's how the opening looks (as transcribed by N. Nakamura, from the Maucamedus website):


While the opening is not (yet) hocketed, it exhibits at least three traits characteristic of both certain types of European "folk" polyphony and P/B: 1. The use of voice-exchange (stimmtauch), a device not unusual for Medieval polyphony (but common also in the oral traditions of both Europe and Africa), in which the highest part is alternately sung by each of the two voices, which regularly cross one another. Compare with stimmtauch as expressed in the Lithuanian sutartines Mano vainikas and Ko tu kad berželi. Continual part-crossing of this kind can produce resultant effects strikingly similar to those of hocket. 2. The design of the lowermost "tenor" part, continually repeating the same three notes to produce an ostinato effect, similar to both the lowermost pes of the Sumer canon and certain types of African polyphony, both vocal and instrumental. 3. The continual repetition, with variation, in the piece as a whole, characteristic of both "Old European" folk polyphony (viz. the above mentioned sutartines) and many types of African music generally.

The repetition becomes especially prominent in the concluding section, characterized by continuous interlocked hocketing in the two upper parts (reproduced here from the same source as above):


The following clip (from the CD set Music of the Gothic Era) begins just prior to the segment notated above): Amor Potest (conclusion).

In the light of everything we've been discussing thus far, especially Shai Burstyn's remarkably apt invocation of Giraldus Cambrensis (see below), it's difficult to see Amor Potest as other than either a transcription or adaptation of some sort of oral "folk" polyphony, more or less along the lines of the Sumer canon, only this time with the vernacular text completely replaced by a more acceptable one, in Latin. There is certainly very little trace of the learned (two syllables) in this work, with its many blatant voice leading "errors," obsessive repetition of brief motives, and continuous "run-on" phrasing, with no cadences whatsoever during the entire last section until the very end. The last two are especially interesting as they invoke not only the varied repetition and continuous vocalizing so characteristic of P/B, but also certain aspects of the practice of Leoninus and Perotinus, the two leading "learned" composers of 12th and 13th century Europe. Note also the tendency, found throughout this repertoire, to present hocketed segments without text, using only meaningless vocables, again remarkably close to Pygmy/Bushmen norms. So common was this practice in Medieval music that some scholars have simply assumed most hockets must have been intended for instruments alone.

Compare the ending of Amor Potest with the stimmtauch, hocket, repetition, "run-on" phrasing, nonsense vocables -- and yodeling -- to be heard in the conclusion of the Georgian work song already presented in an earlier post, as sung by the Rustavi Choir: Garuli Naduri. Compare also with an equally remarkable example from the opposite end of Europe, the coastal Algarve region of Portugal -- a traditional song sung by fishermen as they pull up their nets, characterized also by stimmtauch, hocket, repetition, vocables and continual, run-on phrasing: Leva-Leva. (From Smithsonian Folkways, Anthology of Portuguese Music, Vol. 1: Tras-Os-Montes and Vol. 2: Algarve.)

140. Music of the Great Tradition -- 40:Hocket

In his essay on African hocket, Nketia goes out of his way to make the sort of point that, for almost all the musicologists of his day, both "ethno" and "historical," amounted to a creed: thou shalt not equate musical traditions from different places (or times) simply because they happen to sound (or look) alike. Thus, Nketia feels compelled to write that he has "been guided merely by a resemblance between this procedure in African music and a practice in Medieval European music to which the term originally referred. It is not implied that there is any direct historical connection between them" (ibid., p. 51). He then continues (see last post), giving several reasons why African and Medieval hocket must be regarded as fundamentally separate and distinct, with little to no possible historical connection.

The basic injunction is sound. One must certainly avoid making too much of what might well be superficial similarities. But the methodology necessary for critically examining such similarities to determine whether they are, indeed, superficial -- or not -- has for a great many years been actively discouraged. I'm talking, of course, about comparative musicology (not to mention Cantometrics). Nketia was already going way out on a limb, even in 1962, in claiming that essentially the same procedure could be "commonly found in African musical practice" generally. To go on to even consider the possibility that African and Medieval European hocket could have common roots would have been entirely too much.

As far as Ethnomusicology is concerned, the situation has only worsened over the years, to the point that all but the most narrowly focused comparative research is rarely seen anymore. However, the situation with respect to the rest of the world has changed. Dramatically! Thanks largely to important breakthroughs in anthropological genetics, all sorts of possibilities for considering and reconsidering various similarities and patterns -- of social structure, archaeology, culture, language, etc. -- have arisen and are being enthusiastically explored. Only musicology is lagging behind, saddled with dogmas that have become hopelessly outdated and clearly irrelevant.

139. Music of the Great Tradition -- 39:Hocket

No one got it. (Admittedly I didn't allow much time, sorry.) That last example is from Africa, transcribed by J. H. Kwabena Nketia, in an essay highlighting the extraordinarily widespread use of hocket in that continent: "The Hocket-Technique in African Music" (Journal of the International Folk Music Council, Vol. 14. (1962), p. 47).

An illustration of the hocket-technique as used in Ghana in the music of flute ensembles is provided by an extract from a recording of the Builsa who live in the Upper Region of Ghana. In this particular ensemble, three short notched flutes are used, all of them with two or three finger holes. They are graded in pitch, so that one can speak of treble, alto and tenor flutes (ibid., p. 46).

As is evident from both this example and several of the medieval examples in the previous post, it's not always easy to distinguish hocketing from the interlocking of parts, and often the distinction simply breaks down. In some cases, hocket manifests itself in an extreme form, where each voice or instrument contributes only one note at a time, as in the first example from the previous post or, to invoke a more commonly known practice of today, a bell choir. In other cases, the interaction can be more complex. Often there is a tendency to break up not simply the melody, but the musical texture as a whole, in an interplay of tightly coordinated interweaving parts, to produce a characteristic overall effect often described as a resultant.

In any music in which the principle here discussed is applied in whole or in part, the resultant -- a complex of pitch- or tone-contrasts in a defined sequence, operating within the framework of an equally defined pattern of rhythm -- is of particular importance. Each player must have both a general awareness of the resultant, as well as the knack of coming in at the right moment. . .
Analysis of music employing the hocket-technique-whether in its simple or
more elaborate forms-must emphasize the resultant (or groups of resultants) by showing the interdependence of the separate instruments or the links, both horizontal and vertical, which bind them into an integrated whole (ibid., p. 51).

Nketia goes on to add the following very interesting comments, reflecting both an awareness of the striking resemblance to European medieval traditions and a skepticism regarding its meaning that was typical for his time -- and remains typical today. Since he raises an issue fundamental to the whole question underlying my very different notion of a "great tradition," it's important to quote him at length:

In conclusion, the concern of this paper has been to demonstrate the "interlocking" principle, so commonly found in African musical practice, and based on the use of hockets. In adopting the term hocket for describing the examples discussed here, I have been guided merely by a resemblance between this procedure in African music and a practice in Medieval European music to which the term originally referred. It is not implied that there is any direct historical connection between them. Moreover, a difference both in attitude to the hocket and in its application is discernible between the two hocket-traditions. We are told by some historians that in Western music the hocket was a device -- indeed some of them describe it as a naive device-which showed itself in two forms: (a)in the form of interspersed breaks in one voice accompanied by semibreve movement in the other parts, or (b) in the form of divisions of a melody between two voices. The latter it is said, is to be found mainly in theoretical treatises rather than in actual music. There was a certain arbitrariness in the use of this device, but we learn that it was "a genuine attempt to obtain that particular emphasis of rhythm which is now styled staccato."

In African music practice, the hocket is not merely a device but a technique of building up single or parallel linear structures in various types of interlocking patterns. The hockets are not arbitrary artistic devices; they are functional, in the sense that they arise out of melodic and polyphonic considerations. They are often a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and are used for achieving overall effects of continuity, for building up interlocking, and sometimes complex structures, out of relatively simple elements (ibid., pp. 51-52).

138. Music of the Great Tradition -- 38:Medieval Hocket

I left off last time with a cliffhanger, which I will now proceed to complete: "The whole question of hocket, its origins and the reason for its existence would seem to be a complete and total mystery, unless . . ." unless hocket represented an attempt to incorporate certain traditional "Old European" musical practices of the peasantry into the mainstream liturgical repertory. This isn't very different from the explanation offered by Burstyn with regard to the Sumer canon, which also, as he argues, is likely to have roots in polyphonic traditions already popular in the back streets and countryside. This would explain the continual complaints on the part of so many church leaders, as though hocketing represented the encroachment of an alien and uncouth "popular" element into the sanctum of serious church worship.

Now might be a good time to consider some specific examples of what I've been talking about (the images will be expanded if you click on them). First, from the "Orb" website, on the Medieval Hocket, by Mary Wolinski, an excerpt from the Conductus, Dic Christi Veritas:

In this simple type of note-by-note hocket (center of the page), it's easy to see how the melody, b-d-d-e-d-c-e-e-c-c-d, is divided between the two alternating upper voices.

Here are some examples of more complex types of hocket, from Earnest H. Sanders' "The Medieval Hocket in Practice and Theory," (The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 2., Apr., 1974, p. 247.):

As illustrated above, hocket is not limited to a simple note-by-note interchange of parts, but can in many cases involve the closely co-ordinated polyphonic interlocking of brief motives between two (or more) parts.

Compare the above with the following:

In this case, I've removed the pipe parts from Olga Velitchkina's transcription of two Russian panpipers singing as they play, from the village of Plekhovo, as presented in an earlier post (#127). Focusing exclusively on the vocal parts, we can more easily see how they exemplify both types of hocket presented above, the note-by-note type and the motivic interlock type.

Let's consider as well the following example of interlocking hocket, this time in three parts:

I wonder if there are any musicologists out there who'd be able to figure out where this one is from? Anyone out there who'd care to venture a guess before I reveal my source?

137. Music of the Great Tradition -- 37:Medieval Hocket

One of the most mysterious and controversial elements of Medieval European "professional polyphony," both then and now, was the practice known as "hocket." Even the term itself is controversial. Some believe it to be derived from the French word for "hiccup," others from the Arabic iqā'āt or al-quat', meaning "cutting," and others from the Latin occare, meaning to harrow or break off. Regardless of its derivation, the term was widely used from the 13th Century on to designate a type of musical composition or performance characterized by the breaking up of a melodic phrase into two or more short interlocking or interweaving segments, to produce the disjointed and disconcerting "hiccup" effect that most likely gave it its name.

In the staid, sober context of Medieval liturgical music, the odd, syncopated, "jazzy" effects of hocket would seem to have been out of place, to say the least. And there were, indeed, a great many complaints, throughout the period, from clerics who descried it as "flippant, uncouth" and even "depraved." Nevertheless, the practice was popular and the works of a great many of the most notable 13th and 14th century composers were replete with hockets and hocket-ridden passages.

In the words of William Dalglish, the hocket

was not, as some modern writers have intimated, a technique of purely subordinate import. Indeed, in certain music of the late ars antiqua, its use bespeaks a degree of ingenuity and sophistication rivaled only by the isorhythmic motet in its most advanced development. To misunderstand the hocket is to overlook much of significance concerning the craft of composition and the art of improvisation in the music of medieval Europe ["The Hocket in Medieval Polyphony," The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 3. (Jul., 1969), p. 344].

While the hocket has often been treated in the context of "learned" (two syllables) composition, as an exploration of certain rhythmic possibilities opened by new developments in notation, its origin, according to Dalglish, was not due to the efforts of trained composers, but more likely stemmed from an older tradition of "improvisation":

[M]y intention is to demonstrate something of the probable importance of improvisation in the musical life of the Middle Ages by establishing that hockets were first extemporized by singers and only later written down by composers ["The Origin of Hocket," Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 31, no. 1, spring 1978].

Dalglish doesn't make clear exactly what he means by "improvisation," nor does he make much of an effort to explain who the "singers" were or why they might be interested in improvising hocketed passages. The whole question of hocket, its origins and the reason for its existence would seem to be a complete and total mystery, unless . . .

136. Music of the Great Tradition -- 36:Grounded Rounds

As Shai Burstyn's essay (see previous post) raises issues of special relevance to the traditions I've been exploring, I'll be rooting around in his text just a bit more. Though his background is traditional historical musicology, not ethnomusicology, he demonstrates an awareness of the "ethnic" context that I find especially heartening:

Examples of Malakkan music making, among others, show that canonic singing, harmonically reducible to a stationary triad, is prevalent in non-European cultures. Some medieval European examples exhibit related traits. Rounds may be found in contemporary European folk polyphony, such as the East Lithuanian sutartine. It is therefore arbitrary to argue the unique historical position of Sumer on the ground of the fortuitous hard fact that it is the only such composition we possess. Since Gerald specifically defines Welsh and Northumbrian polyphonic singing as indigenous, attempts to elucidate his meaning must assume an oral tradition and should also consider the possibility of improvisation [p. 140].

Since Burstyn mentions the Sutartine, let's take this opportunity to compare some examples with the Sumer canon. While the Lithuanian rounds aren't exactly improvised, they are certainly excellent examples of an oral polyphonic tradition as rooted in peasant life as the music so colorfully described by Burstyn's Gerald. The sutartine Išjos brolutėlis is considerably simpler -- and also more dissonant -- than the Sumer canon, but the basic idea seems quite similar. I'll refer you to the website created by Skirmantė Valiulytė, where it has a page of its own, complete with both notation and audio clip. Here's another example, from the same website: Ko tu kad berželi. The notation is a bit tricky to decipher, since it's the melody on the second staff that takes the lead.

If the Sumer canon, with all its many ramifications for the history of early "Western" polyphony, can be related so convincingly to "Old European" traditions in Wales and Lithuania, can we take things a step farther by going all the way back to the (alleged) roots of the (alleged) "Great Tradition" in Africa? In other words, can anything similar be found among the Pygmies and Bushmen? Do they too sing canonically, in something resembling a round? My answer is simple: yes, of course they do. Here's one example of a Pygmy "round," sung by three Mbuti women, as recorded in the Ituri Forest by Hugh Tracey: Amabele-o-i-ye. (From the CD, On the Edge of the Ituri Forest, SWP 009/HT 03). (Be patient, as it takes a little while for the round "proper" to begin, on the words Amabele-o-i-ye.) The Bushmen can also sing canonically, as in the following example, as transcribed by Nicholas England [“Bushman Counterpoint,” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 19, 1967].
The Bushmen example is particularly interesting, as the second part responds at the interval of a fourth below, in a form that music theorists would call a "tonal" answer, something encountered far more often in "learned" (two syllables) music than anywhere in the oral tradition. Note also the presence, on line three, of a pes, i.e., an independent part "grounding" the canon much as the pes does in the Sumer example.

I'll leave you for now with Burstyn's remarkably perceptive concluding remarks:

In spite of accumulating research concerning the relations between non-learned oral and learned written musical traditions in the middle ages, major reference works and recent histories of Western music still betray, by and large, a strong bias towards reliance solely upon the written sources. As is becoming increasingly clear, this stance is bound to leave unanswered many crucial questions relating to the influence of medieval oral musical traditions on the written heritage, and to afford only partial, possibly distorted, understanding of the documented music.

Handschin recognized that Sumer, "not being in the line of 'normal' evolution as reflected by musical theory, cannot exclusively be subjected to criteria taken from this quarter."' F urthermore, he made the correct assessment that "try as we may to insert the Summer Canon into the historical process, some degree of isolation will remain in any case... because.. .our historical knowledge is beset with gaps, and this most of all in the domain from which the Summer Canon comes, i.e., that of nonlearned [two syllables] music." Recognizing the paramount importance of non-learned traditions for a better historical understanding of medieval music may, through closer attention to the methods and findings of ethnomusicology, lead in time to answers to vexing questions concerning the origins of chordal formulations and the detailed ways in which chordal perception came to be expressed in harmonically-pregnant melodic formulas.

135. Music of the Great Tradition -- 35:Spring has come!

"Sumer" was apparently the word for "spring" in the Wessex dialect of Middle English. And "is" meant something closer to the German "ist" than the English "is." So "sumer is icumen in" actually means something like "Spring is come." I.e., "Spring has come." And since spring actually has come. Or soon will -- when it gets just a bit warmer . . . (sigh) -- I decided to make that my heading for today.

This well-known and often debated 13th Century "rota" is one focus of a fascinating essay on medieval British polyphony by musicologist Shai Burstyn: "Gerald of Wales and the Sumer Canon" (The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 2, No. 2. Spring, 1983). Gerald of Wales, or Giraldus Cambrensis, was a medieval (c. 1146-c. 1223) archdeacon, famous for his writings on Welsh history and culture. According to Burstyn, "Gerald's musical comments and Sumer are, I believe, related and may illuminate one another. I shall endeavor to interpret Sumer, and the musical tradition I take it to represent, in terms of Gerald's frequently quoted description of Welsh Polyphonic singing:"

[N.B. (added on March 28): to my chagrin I've recently discovered that Shai Burstyn is male, not female. This just goes to show how much I have to learn not only about names -- and making assumptions based on them -- but also about the current state of music history and the historians who inhabit it, a field that I must admit I have not kept up with for several years. I'll now proceed to correct my mistake in this and the other posts where it appears. Sorry.]

He quotes his comments at some length, in both the original Latin and an English translation. Here are some highlights from the latter:

As to their musical euphony, they [the Welsh] do not sing uniformly as is done elsewhere, but diversely with many rhythms and tunes, so that in a crowd of singers such as is the custom among these people, you will hear as many different songs and differentiations of the voices as you see heads, and hear the organic melody coming together in one consonance with the smooth sweetness of B flat. . .

[Both the Welsh and the northern British] have acquired this peculiarity [i.e., singing in parts] not by art but by long usage which has made it, as it were, natural. Moreover, it prevails in both countries and is now so deeply rooted there that nothing musical is performed simply but only diversely among the former people [i.e., the Welsh] and in two parts among the latter [i.e., the north British]. And what is more remarkable, children scarcely beyond infancy, when their wails have barely turned into songs observe the same musical performance [pp. 135-136].

Gerald's comments on the musical habits of the Welsh closely resemble Jordania's descriptions of Georgian singing:

I remember, during my fieldworks in Georgia (mostly during recording sessions at a traditional “supra” feast) I would often realise that all present were contributing to the choral singing (sometimes including myself). So, although this may sound bizarre to some readers, in the societies with a tradition of polyphonic singing there often are no listeners at all, as all the members of the event are actively involved in the music making . . . (p. 10).

(Could it be a coincidence that Wales, like Georgia, and so many of the other places in "Old Europe" where polyphonic traditions survive, is a mountainous "refuge" area?)

Gerald's description of the Welsh singing "diversely with many rhythms and tunes, . . . [with] as many different songs and differentiations of the voices as you see heads . . . ," which, for Burstyn, "seems to describe singing in which the active parts are heard as independent from, though presumably coordinated with, one another" could easily be a description of African Pygmy or Bushmen group vocalizing, where everyone present typically joins in with his or her own independent part.

Burstyn considers and rightly rejects various interpretations that associate Gerald's comments with heterophony, singing in parallel parts, etc.:

More plausible is the idea that what Gerald describes is the singing of
a rondellus, rota, or at any rate some polyphonic technique based on voice
exchange. Assuming this voice-exchange texture to rest on a pes will bring
us still closer to Gerald's description. As Sumer is in fact a four-part rota
over a two-part rondellus pes, this interpretation clearly draws the work
into the sphere of the type of polyphonic singing possibly described by Gerald [p. 138].

Burstyn also considers the possibility that the Sumer canon could be a "learned" (two syllables) composition. "Even if it were possible to prove that Sumer is a composed piece (in the conventional meaning of this term) it would still not necessarily follow that it differed stylistically from contemporary music of oral tradition [p. 139]." Which brings us to the matter of the "corrected" and original versions, as mentioned in my previous post. To judge from the corrected version, which is the one usually reproduced, one might conclude that this is indeed the work of a trained composer, as the upper parts, at least, seem free of the sort of "errors" that can so easily creep into "folk" polyphony. The original version, however, contains exactly this sort of thing -- note for example the parallel unisons between the upper two parts in measure 5. Similarly "awkward" unisons can be found between the 1st and 5th parts in measure 3, even in the "corrected" version. It's useful to note, by the way, that Sumer, while usually described as a four part canon over a two part ground, can, according to Burstyn, "be sung by as many as twelve singers" [p. 149]. In other words, it can be performed as a true round, or perpetual canon, with no real ending, very much in the tradition of well known rounds such as "Three Blind Mice" -- and also in the tradition of Pygmy/Bushmen polyphony, also performed as a continuous flow of interlocking parts, with no end in sight. When performed in 12 parts, by the way, Sumer would indeed contain many "awkward" parallels and duplications, at the unison and octave, of the sort that could be expected in a true "folk" performance, but would be forbidden in an "art" work.

134. Music of the Great Tradition -- 34:Monks and Missionaries

Some of the earliest notated examples of medieval "professional polyphony" (to use Jordania's term), in a style known as organum, stem from monasteries located in the same sort of elevated, hilly or mountainous regions where so many remnants of "Old European" culture have survived: St. Gall, in one of the highest cities of Switzerland, located between Lake Constance and the same Appenzell region where the oldest types of polyphonic Alpine yodeling have been recorded (see post 129); St. Martial, near Limoges, in the "Massif Central" mountain range of Auvergne; Las Huelgas, in Northern Spain, located on a high plateau with an elevation of almost 3,000 ft.; Santiago de Compostela, in Galicia, northwest Spain, a province described as "hilly", and filled with "wild countryside and mountains." This could certainly be a coincidence. However, Catholic missionaries have a long history of incorporating "pagan" customs to encourage conversion, and there are a great many well known instances where local musical practices have become associated with Christian worship.

A good example of this sort of practice would seem to be the famous 13th century English rota (or "round"), Sumer is icumen in, usually considered as either of "folk" origin, or inspired by "folk" performance practices common in England at the time. As you can see, the manuscript bears both a secular text, in the Old English vernacular, at the top, and, underneath, a completely different liturgical Latin text, as though familiar "popular" music were being used to make it easier for the congregation to relate to Catholic liturgy. Such practices are common in many Christian churches today.

This is the earliest example we have of a notated round or canon and, interestingly, it is presented in a manner that has become standard for such musical structures from then on. Only the basic elements are notated, in this case the principal melody, on the first six staves, and the melody of a second canonic pes, or "ground" on the bottom-most staff. The red cross on the first line indicates where the second voice is to enter, singing the exact same melody from the beginning as the first voice sings the next section. And so on, as other voices enter at the same time interval. In other words, what you are seeing is not a full score, but only the melodic material and the rule (or "canon") that tells the singers what to do. To make the resulting counterpoint clear, I've concocted the following score, representing the first 6 measures (assuming 12/8 time):

Here's a clip from an excellent performance, on the CD "Medieval Songs and Dances," by the group "St. George's Canzona." Note that the bottom two staves contain the "pes," a second canon of two bars that "grounds" the four part canon above it.The excerpt begins with two statements of this pes, before the upper voices enter. By the way, my score is based on the original version, complete with "rule violations" subsequently corrected by someone who overwrote the original. While the "corrected" version is better known, the original interests me more, as will be made clearer in the next post, where I'll have much more to say about this remarkable work.

133. Music of the Great Tradition -- 33:Monks and Missionaries

At this point it's probably a good idea for me to explain once more what I mean by the "Great Tradition." In my "Echoes" essay, and many of my earlier posts to this blog, I was mainly concerned with tracking a distinctive "African signature" roughly along the path of the hypothetical "Out of Africa" migration. This represented an attempt to explore the possibility that certain important traces of early African musical culture (what I've called P/B, or Pygmy/Bushmen, style) survived into the Twentieth Century, among certain indigenous and "folk" societies in various parts of the world. What concerns me most in this regard is the question of whether such traditions could represent survivals from the Paleolithic era.

When speaking of the "Great Tradition," however, I am attempting to move on, beyond that point, to a consideration of a more speculative, and even radical, possibility: the notion that certain mainstream musical traditions of today could be rooted in the same Paleolithic practices -- and that the connections between "then" and "now" can actually be traced. By mainstream I mean the "classical" and also the "popular" music of "The West," both traditional and modern (including but not limited to jazz, gospel, country, rock and even rap). (Certain non-Western "mainstream" practices are also relevant here -- I have already examined the complex and sophisticated multi-layered Indonesian gamelan tradition in posts 107-116.)

Thus, for me the Great Tradition could represent something truly unique, and also, indeed, "Great," if in fact it would be possible to accept that certain aspects of the value system and cultural practice of our oldest fully human ancestors may have continued down through the eons as part of a tradition that has persisted, and even in a sense flourished, to the present day.

Over the course of a great many posts (all the way back to number 99), I have gradually been putting various pieces of this idea together -- and now, finally, I am ready to consider what has too often been regarded as an unbridgeable chasm -- the gulf between the so-called "folk" or "ethnic" traditions of the world and the allegedly self-contained, self-engendered "art" music of "The West." I can do no better at this point than quote once again from Joseph Jordania's remarkable study of the European polyphonic traditions:

The time when music historians believed that polyphony was invented by the medieval monks and actually were trying to explain the presence of vocal polyphony in traditional music of people from different parts of the world as a result of the influence of European missionaries has long since gone.
Siegfried Nadel and particularly Marius Schneider were among the first musicologists who reversed our understanding of the origins of European polyphony and wrote that the historical process of the influence between professional and traditional polyphonies must be reversed; it is not the medieval European professional polyphony that influenced the emergence of polyphony in traditional cultures via missionaries, but, on the contrary, it was traditional polyphony that had a crucial influence on the emergence of medieval European professional polyphony [p. 207].

Already in 1940, no less an authority than the noted musicologist Manfred Bukofzer pointed to a great many "popular" practices that could well be related to some of the earliest manifestations of polyphony in the Medieval monastery and church. He points, for example, to the traditional Tvisongvar of Iceland. "These duets are still sung, and they differ very little externally from primitive organum in fifths. . . The Tvisongvar are performed very slowly, as the Musica Enchiriadis tells us organum was sung" ("Popular Polyphony in the Middle Ages," The Musical Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 1, 1940, p. 32).

Bukofzer refers in the same essay to the remarkable "popular" canon, "Sumer is icumen in," notated in a document dating from about 1240, "which consists of a two voice ostinato or pes with a four-voice canon above it; the whole thus being in six parts. That is, for the period, an unheard of number of voices . . . It might seem remarkable that such a complicated form as canon should be connected with popular music. We know, however, that successive entrances of the same melody in different voices occur in primitive non-European polyphony" (p. 34). Indeed they do!

Bukofzer cites other forms of "popular polyphony" such as the Gymel, the Ductia, the Chanson de Geste, the polyphonic Rondeau, the practice of fauxborden, and, of special interest from our perspective: the "hocket" (I'll have a lot more to say on this connection in future posts). "From the hocket combined with the canon, which we have already encountered as a popular type, there developed the so-called chace (or Italian caccia), a kind of program music, the texts of which describe hunting scenes and other scenes in daily life" (p. 41).

He continues, considering one of the most common elements of "Old European" polyphony, as elucidated by Jordania: the drone. "We do not know the manner and place of origin of the drone, which exists in the Orient as well as the Occident. . . . The vocal drones of the yodels in the Canton of Appenzell (Switzerland) are examples of great antiquity. That yodels of some sort were sung in the early Middle Ages is attested by a 4th century chronicle, which describes how a missionary was killed and how the ringing of many cowbells and the sound of the Alpine horn and yodels accompanied the ceremony of execution" (p. 48).

Despite all the many examples offered by Bukofzer, he remains skeptical regarding the touchy matter of popular influence on "artistic" forms. For example, he views the chace, "in spite of this popular background . . . [as] musically a very stylized and purely artistic form. It might well be cited as evidence that something may at first appear to us to be popular, but in reality not be so at all" (p. 41). He concludes his essay by asserting "that this popular polyphony was not such as might have sprung up at any time and any place among the folk, but was something that, influenced by the art music which it reciprocally affected, could have flourished only in the Europe of the Middle Ages" (p. 49). As has already been demonstrated in so many of my previous posts, and especially the very detailed and meticulously researched reports in Jordania's book, Bukofzer was almost certainly wrong.