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used term, although not universally accepted. “Multi-part music” is maybe the next mostpopular English term used widely in ethnomusicological publications. “Polyvocality”,“plurivocality” and “multiphony” also made appearances. They denote generally thesame phenomenon and could be used as the uniting word for this phenomenon.Let us pay attention to the most popular term – polyphony. Traditionally it hasbeen used in two – general and narrow meanings. “Those ethnomusicologists who acceptthe very general etymological meaning of the term often tend to call all multi-part music,whether vocal or instrumental, ‘polyphonic’ even if there is no obvious organization. Initself, the concept of polyphony thus embraces procedures as diverse as heterophony,organum, homophony, drone-based music, parallelism or overlapping. The sharedcharacteristics of all these procedures is that they all relate to multipart phenomena”Arom, 1985:34). Arom himself prefers the more neutral term “multi-part music”.To find the most convenient term, we should know what for we need this termfor. I suggest that we need a uniting term, the one to use conveniently as the “familyname” for the extended “polyphonic family”. This term in its broadest meaning shouldunite whole set of types and subtypes of this “family”.The very wide general meaning of the term “polyphony” (as Arom described it)seems to be very convenient to use in this context. I suggest using the category of“polyphonic family”, with subsequent division on types (heterophonic polyphony, dronepolyphony, parallel polyphony, contrapuntal polyphony etc.) and sub-types of polyphony(unison-heterophony, pedal and rhythmic drone, tonally unconnected and tonally linkedparallelism etc.). In search of the better alternative for the uniting wide term for the whole“family”, we could use the term “multi-part music”. This word is not so much“contaminated” by the extensive use in musicology and ethnomusicology for fewcenturies, and could make a good alternative for the term “polyphony”. At the same time,as three-word-composition (“multi-part music”) this term might not be the mostconvenient and practical to use as a “family name”. When I imagine myself (or mycolleagues) using the terms to denote the further sub-types of polyphony (for example,“heterophonic multi-part music”, “drone multi-part music”, or “canonic multi-partmusic”), I feel there will be a certain resistance in implementing this kind of terminology.Therefore, I believe that the use of the term “polyphony” as a “family name” leads tomore practical and convenient terminology to denote different types and sub-types ofpolyphony.So, although both terms (“polyphony” and “multi-part music”) actually mean thesame (the first one in a long ago dead ancient Greek language, and another in very muchalive and the most widespread contemporary English) we have in one case the one wordterm(“polyphony”) and in another case complex three-word-combination to denote thesame phenomenon (“multi-part music”). This simple fact works in favor of the practicaluse of one-word-term “polyphony”. [As a matter of fact, the term “polyphony” alsocontains two words “poly” and “phony”.] So, without insisting that this is the only correctway of naming this family, type and sub-types of music, for the sake of practicality I willbe using in this book the term “polyphony” as a “family name” for all types and subtypesof music, where more than one pitch is heard simultaneously.So, according to this model, we have one big family of polyphonic music, and this“family” consists of several different types of polyphony:(1) Parallel polyphony,24