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

12the rest of the country does not practice it (as happens in China, Vietnam, India, Bulgaria,Romania, Lithuania, Greece and many other countries)?Some of these questions have been around for many decades and quite a fewscholars have contributed publications aiming at their solution. And still,ethnomusicologists are not yet sure about most of the existing answers. During the twentyyears of my own research in this field I have come to the conclusion that, contrary to thegeneral belief of musicologists and ethnomusicologists, vocal polyphony is not a latecultural development of initial monophonic singing, but was in fact a very archaicphenomenon and an integral part of the evolutionary process of the development ofhuman language and speech (Jordania, 1986a, 1986b, 1988, 1988a, 1989, 1992, 1994a,1997, 1998, 2000b, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2006). Recent years have seen an unparalleledboom in research of the origins of our species and human language, and new technicalmeans of research have come to scholars’ aid. We are now much better equipped thanever before to understand the evolutionary processes of some of the most importantcognitive and communicational acquisitions of human history.Throughout this book I will argue that the evolutionary history of human choralsinging (group singing) is closely connected not only to the evolutionary history ofhuman language and speech, but to the evolutionary history of human cognition as well.This book consists of three parts:Part 1 is fully dedicated to the detailed picture of the enigmatic distribution of thetraditional polyphony all over the world. I will try to use the wealth of publications ondifferent styles of vocal polyphony, as well as sometimes unpublished informationgenerously provided by my colleagues and will try to provide an updated picture of thedistribution of polyphonic traditions in different countries and major regions of thecontinents of the contemporary world.Part 2 is dedicated to the research of the historical perspectives of traditionalvocal polyphony through different polyphonic traditions. I will argue that the historicaldynamics show clear signs of the decline (and disappearance) of vocal polyphonictraditions in many parts of the world. I will concentrate on the multi-faceted process ofthe disappearance of vocal polyphonic traditions, I will discuss the possibility of theexistence of vocal polyphony in some long-gone civilizations, and I will attempt to raisethe elusive issue of the possible age of some of the polyphonic traditions (for example,drone polyphony, overtone singing, heterophonic polyphony, Lithuanian Sutartines andmany more). This part of the book will be mostly organized around different “CaseStudies” of different styles or interesting regions of traditional polyphony.Part 3 is fully dedicated to the origins and evolution of human choral singing inthe light of the initial development of human language, speech and intelligence. Data onthe distribution of vocal polyphonic traditions all over the world, advances in physicalanthropology, archaeology, primatology and neurology will be employed. Peculiarities ofepidemiology of speech and reading pathologies (stuttering and dyslexia), as well as theprocess of the acquisition of a phonological system by children from different regions ofthe world will be also employed. I will try to argue that the last major acquisition ofhuman evolution – the emergence of articulated speech - fundamentally affected thegeneral picture of the distribution of the traditions of vocal polyphony all over the world.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -