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231• Florian Messner (1980) pointed to the similarities between different singingstyles throughout the world that use the secondal dissonances, and sutartines.• Alica Elschekova suggested that the sutartines style has no parallels, at least inthe Carpathi an and Balkan regions (Elschekova, 1981:240).• Karl Brambats expressed the same idea of the unique character of the sutartinesstyle. According to him, sutartines is “difficult to fit into some genetic and historicalcontext” (Brambats, 1983:26).• Martin Boiko did a fundamental study of the sutartines phenomenon and after astudy of the other Baltic singing styles he (1) found structural similarities of sutartineswith the refrain songs from Latvia and Estonia, as well as (2) found the elements ofsutartines in Latvian traditional music (Boiko, 1992, 1992a)Discussing the age and the archaic origins of sutartines, Rachiunaite uses theinformation based on the set of three different elements: (1) archaic elements in the textsof suta rtines, (2) very old choreography, and (3) musical features. Based on an analysisof these elements in detail, Rachiunaite agrees with most of the researchers of sutartinesand concludes that the roots of sutartines “lie as deep as the prehistoric era” (Rachiunaite,2002:58).I agree that an analysis of the song texts, choreography and musical features cangive us lots of information, but I would still suggest that if we want to find out the age ofsutartines (or of any other phenomenon of culture) we need to consider first and foremostthe context of its geographical distribution, then the ethnic history of the region, andfinally the existing parallels with other polyphonic traditions.1. Geographic distribution. Typical elements of the archaic geographicdistribution are:• The phenomenon exists in several geographically isolated islands, surroundedby the later styles.• The extremely ancient phenomenon of traditional culture is most likely tosurvive in extremely isolated and hard to reach geographical regions, as in highmountains, or on islands, or in deep forests, where active migrations and new economicand cultural developments can not reach easily;2. Ethnic history of the region. You would certainly expect that the regionwhere the extremely archaic elements of culture can survive, will:• Display the great continuity of the population and languages; and will• Display the whole set of other archaic features as well.3. The set of defining musical features. Musical language of the extremelyarchaic phenomenon would:• Display a great integrity of the archaic musical features;• Display deep parallels with other existing archaic traditions from differentisolated parts of the world.If we study the geography, ethnic history of the region, and musical features ofsutartines polyphony against these criteria, we will have the following picture:• Sutartines does not exist in several isolated regions. It is basically one regiononly, unique for the rest of the Europe and in fact the whole world;• The region where sutartines is distributed does not have any kind of isolatinggeographical environmental factors (high mountains, forests, island);