who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

247with two other parts, sung by soloists, clashing with the drone. The soloist singing lowerthan the drone is almost constantly a major second lower under the drone.• In some Bulgarian traditional songs from the “Shopluka” region (the regionaround the capital city Sofia) two-part singing is ”enriched” by the appearance of threepartchords. The peculiar three-part singing tradition, independently discovered byFlorian Messner and Tim Rice in the end of the 1970s, has elements of this singing style.Here the bass actually consists of two different parts, both singing the drone, and only atthe cadences do they divide in a second. One of them is singing “straight” (continuing thedrone), and another one is “curving” down, creating a clashing second under the drone. Insome other songs from the same Shop region three-part songs are constructed as almostconstantly sounding seconds in the two lowest voices (peculiar double drone inseconds!).• The tradition of embellishing the bass part with the repeating grace note fromthe second below (for example, known in Northern Greece, in Epirus) also might beconsidered in the context of the ancient polyphony consisted of the drone, surrounded bytwo other parts.• Slight elements of this kind of three-part singing style can be also seen in somePolessye drone songs. In two-part songs, just before going into the cadencial unison, bass(drone) singers divide into two parts, creating a three-part clashing chord.Another interesting topic is the historical development of this ancient three-partstyle. This tradition disappeared before our eyes in Latvia; in Lithuanian sutartines thedrone most likely disappear ed, giving freedom to the two melodic parts; in the Shopregion of Bulgaria and in Epir the remnants of three-part dissonant singing survived onlyin the cadences; among the Albanian Laberi these songs were mostly turned into fourpartsongs; the same also happened in West Georgian working songs, where a moresimple three-part section is now followed by a monumental four-part section. In thisdynamic historical picture of changes, gains and losses, the tradition of Nuristan threepartdrone singing might be the best preserved polyphonic tradition of ancient Europe,still surviving far from Europe, in the unique isolation of the Hindukush mountains.Case Study #9Ainu PolyphonyI became interested in Ainus in 1986, when in physical anthropological literature Iread about the unique physical features of the Ainus, oldest inhabitants of the NorthJapan. I had no idea about Ainu music, but at the time I was fascinated by thecoincidence of the geographic distribution of physical anthropological types andtraditions of vocal polyphony, so I decided that if the coincidence of distribution ofdifferent populations and polyphonic types was a reality, then Ainus must have had vocalpolyphony. According to my knowledge of that time, no people had a vocal polyphony inthat region, eastern from the overtone singing regions of Central Asia, and this was