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148medieval organum and suggests that the medieval organum has a Syrian origin(Husmann, 1966). Elements of drone are heard on the recording of family singers fromHadramawt, Yemen (see the audio track #5 from the accompanying CD of theGarland Encyclopedia, volume 6, Middle East, where the soloist and chorus parts areoverlapping).ArmeniaThere has been a long-running misunderstanding of information about Armeniantraditional music in Western ethnomusicology. This misunderstanding started, I think,with Paul Collaer. In his widely known work on Mediterranean polyphony Collaerprovides several polyphonic examples from two Caucasian peoples – Armenians andGeorgians (Collaer, 1960:58-66). Although both Armenia and Georgia are from the sameregion (Caucasia), where they were the closest neighbors for at least a few millennia,sharing many elements of culture (including being among the first Christian countries inthe world), according to the parameter of polyphony and monophony their singingtraditions are drastically different. Georgian vocal music (discussed above) is entirelybased on a polyphonic model, while Armenian vocal music is entirely monophonic. Iremember this well-known fact has been discussed many times by Armenian andGeorgian ethnomusicologists at various scholarly meetings while they were both part ofthe former Soviet Union. So where did the examples of “Armenian polyphonic songs”come from? Both Armenian two-part songs with secondal dissonances, reproduced inarticles by Collaer (“Akhalakri” and “Shallakko”, both on page 58) are in factinstrumental melodies, performed on blown instruments by two (or three) performers,one (or two) holding the drone(s) and one playing the improvised and ornamentedmelody. By the way, the second melody from Collaer’s article, “Shallakko”, (or“Shalakho” as it is best known in Caucasia), is in fact a dance tune, and a very popularone in entire Transcaucasia. It has been widely known in Tbilisi, capital of Georgia, atleast from the end of the 19 th century, when Armenians constituted a major part of thepopulation of the Georgian capital city. I remember myself playing “Shalakho” on apiano (or sometimes on a guitar) at many parties, to the great enjoyment of my clappingand dancing friends. The popularity of this dancing tune was so big that I remembersomebody putting the madly swirling “Shalakho” melody together with the brokenchords from Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” in the 1980s, creating a new popularcrossing between the oriental scale with augmented seconds with the “Neapolitanharmony” of Beethoven’s elegiac music.The monophonic nature of Armenian musical culture is so well known that by farthe best musicological work on the history of Armenian music is entitled “History andTheory of Armenian Monodic Music” (Kushnarev, 1958). Interestingly, cited in the“references” of Collaer’s article, the title of this outstanding book is translated withoutthe word “monodic”.The only work I know of which is fully dedicated to the problem of polyphony inArmenian music is a paper of Armenian ethnomusicologist Barsegian on polyphony inAncient Armenia. The paper was delivered at the 1988 conference on traditionalpolyphony, held in Borjomi, Georgia (Barsegian, 1988). Barsegian analyzed the literary