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205Even in cases of century- and millennia-long residence next to the bearers of thepolyphonic traditions, accompanied with the millennia-long developments of musicalculture, peoples with the monophonic singing stay loyal to their own traditions (as in thecase of Armenians, the millennia-long neighbors of Georgians in Caucasia). The culturalpolicy of the former Soviet Union also provided us with a huge 70-year long massexperiment with over 200 million people in this direction. Aiming at creating a modernsocialist musical culture for everyone, Soviet authorities were trying hard to bring choralsinging, harmony and polyphony to all people of the former Soviet Union. And still noneof the traditionally monophonic peoples started singing their traditional songspolyphonically, and as soon as “perestroika” ensured increased local authority, one of thefirst things that happened in monophonic Soviet Central Asian republics was that thechoirs were disbanded.The belief that monophony turns into polyphony, and that all the polyphoniccultures were “once upon a time” monophonic is so strong among musicologists that noone actually even tried to raise arguments to support this view. Where does this beliefcome from? Why should we expect that monophonic traditions would turn intopolyphonic ones? Well, there are at least two reasons to believe this must be the case:(1) To sing in parts for a group of people is generally more difficult than tosing in unison. Therefore, if we look at this commonly accepted factfrom the evolutionary point of view, we may conclude that humanitymust have come to the idea (and ability) of polyphonic singing later,after the long period of initial monophonic singing. So, according tothis model, polyphony is a kind of evolutionarily natural way ofdevelopment of human musicality, and therefore, all polyphoniccultures were at some time monophonic, and similarly, at some pointall monophonic musical traditions might turn into polyphonic ones.(2)Most importantly, after all that was said above, we do have awonderfully detailed documented case of monophonic singing turninginto polyphonic singing! This case is so well documented that scholarssometimes claimed to know not only the time but also the name of aperson who “invented” polyphony. This “case study” mostly discussesthis “newly born” polyphonic tradition.We can add here that this new emerged polyphonic style that we are talking aboutis unquestionably the best-known, best documented, best studied and the most influentialmusical style our planet has ever seen. The only downside of this well documentedhistorical case for our discussion is that this is not a case of emergence of polyphony intraditional music. We are talking about the emergence of polyphony in Europeanprofessional (“art”) music.Well, I agree that as this book is dedicated to issues of traditional polyphony, weshould not be discussing here the origins of European professional polyphony (unlikeMarius Schneider, who deliberately studied the origins of both – traditional andprofessional polyphony in his “History of Polyphony”), but we have a few very importantreasons to discuss the origins of European polyphony: