who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

(or even more importantly - have been at a live rock concert) they will remember the highmoments, when the performers invite the audience to participate (sometimes stoppingsinging in the midst of the song and directing the microphone to the audience). Of course,the “rock-audience” is hardly even ”waiting” for such “invitation”, and generally themore successful the performers, the bigger and louder is the audience participation(singing along and making different kinds of supporting sounds). Singing the mostpopular hit songs along with the rock performers has long been a routine element of rockconcerts. Few who have experienced this kind of mass excitement and groupparticipation would agree that sometimes the “accompanying” sound can in fact reach anuncomfortably loud level.So, the model of relationships between the performers and the listeners varieswidely from the very passive role of the listeners, who cannot express their feelings untilthe very end of the musical composition (we may call this “the European Classical MusicModel”) to the very active participation of all present, where everyone is activelyinvolved in the performance (we may call this “Traditional Polyphonic Culture Model”).It is not hard to imagine the level of confusion that could be created by an inappropriatemodel of the performer/listeners relationship during the performance. Imagine, forexample, listeners trying to sing along and generally trying to vigorously support theperformers of a Beethoven symphony, or, on the other hand, imagine the listeners at a“Metallica” concert clapping only at the end of the songs. If the first case would beevaluated as ’total anarchy and a disastrous degrading of the values of classical music’,the second would be evaluated as a “total failure” for the rock-band.This book is mostly dedicated to research of the traditional vocal polyphoniccultures, to the traditional social model of the performance, distribution of polyphonictraditions throughout the world, their possible links to each other, and the possible originsof the phenomenon of polyphonic singing.While talking about polyphonic singing traditions, we should not forget that thereis a big group of cultures where mass participation and group singing (particularlysinging in different parts) is not so widely practised. For example, vocal polyphony wasgenerally absent in Central Asian musical cultures. For representatives of such cultureslistening to the simultaneous singing of a few different parts could be as unnatural andconfusing as listening to the simultaneous speech of several speakers. It was quite naturaltherefore, that despite the major efforts of Soviet cultural ideology during the fewdecades of the existence of the Soviet Union to create a “unified Socialist musicalculture” (with multi-part choral polyphonic singing as one of its main elements), one ofthe first things that happened in Central Asia after the “Perestroika” started was that thebig choirs were disbanded.We will concentrate on the peculiarities of the distribution of polyphonic andmonophonic traditions a bit later in this book, but I would like to stress that one of themost intriguing features of vocal polyphony is its enigmatic distribution throughout theworld’s musical cultures. For example, why there is so much vocal polyphony in sub-Saharan Africa and almost no signs of polyphony among Australian Aborigines? Or whydo the Ainus (the indigenous population of North Japan) have vocal polyphony whereasalmost no other traditional culture in East Asia practices vocal polyphony? And why isthat sometimes only a part of the culture of a country contains vocal polyphony whereas11