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171the Indian melodies continue without harmony where they are sung at all. In unusualcases, Indian communities employ some form of harmony that may have its origins inChristian music, as among the Kayabi (strict parallel fifths) and the Javae of Brazil, andthe Moxo of Bolivia (Olsen, 1976). In Guyana, among the Akawaio, the Makushi, andthe Patamona, unusual music was developed for the syncretic religion known asHallelujah (Butt Colson, 1971)” (Seeger, 1998:131).The influence of European classical music, including the wide use of parallelthirds, is particularly evident in the singing traditions of the Europeanized Mestizo(Romero, 1998:483). Heterophonic and canonic singing is mentioned among theVenezuelan Indians. Free rhythm is quite common in solo songs, but polyphonic songs(particularly accompanying dances) have a strict rhythm and metre (Brandt, 1998:525).In Venezuela, “In the plains and surrounding areas, especially in the states ofApure, Carobobo, Cojodes, Guarico, Lara, Portuguesa, and Yaracuy, the Holy Cross isvenerated by performances of three-part polyphonic pieces (tonos) usually sung by men,sometimes unaccompanied, but more often accompanied by one or more cuatros. Themusic and texts came from Spain during the early days of the colony. Most harmonicsinging in Venezuela is in two parts (usually at interval of a third), but plains wakes usemore complex polyphony, unique in Latin America. The lead singer (guia ‘guide’)usually sings a solo phrase and is then joined by two other men improvising a harmonicresponse – a higher part (falsa, and contrato and other names), and a lower part (tenor,also tenorete)” (Brandt, 1998:534).The profound influence of colonial Spanish music on highland Maya is felt in thesurvival of the “late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century style ‘falsobordone’ settings, inwhich a plainchant melody is transposed to a higher octave and harmonized below inthree or four parallel parts – a texture still cultivated in Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala”(O’Brien-Rothe, 1998:652).The influence of the African population on the musical traditions of SouthAmerica was truly profound. Africans were brought from different regions of Africa asslaves to South American plantations, and they usually spoke different Africanlanguages, but they “shared general musical traits that transcended particular Africancommunities – among them collective participation in making music, call-and-responsesinging, and dense, often interlocking, rhythms played on drums” (Seeger, 1998a:47).Another very interesting feature of the musical cultures of South America is thatarchaeological records are full of references to polyphonic blown instruments.Panpipes, played in interlocking style, as well as double, triple and even quadruple flutessuggest that the peoples of the central and northern parts of South America were familiarwith certain forms of instrumental polyphony before their contact with Europeancivilization. In one of the most important written sources from 1609, Inca Garcilaso de laVega speaks about the Qollas, an Aymara-speaking people from the Titicaca region, thatthey “played double-unit panpipes in interlocking fashion. His reference to differentvocal parts (tiple, tenor, contralto, contrabajo) in Qolla panpipe performance may suggestthat different-sized panpipes created polyphony (as they do today)” (Turino, 1998:207).We will discuss the problem of polyphony in a pre-contact Mesoamerica in a special“case study”, dedecated to the the possibility of the presence of polyphony in ancientcivilizations.