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

273Case Study #14Polynesian PolyphonySettlement of Polynesian Islands is one of the biggest puzzles of large-scalehuman pre-historic migrations. The fact itself that humans populated such vastlydistanced isolated islands, as, for example, the Rapa Nui (Eastern Island), is quiteamazing. Unlike scholars, studying most of other human pre-historic migration routs,scholars of the history of Polynesia sometimes had to prove that people could reachPacific Islands without the late European sophisticated marine technique. Dr ThorHeyerdahl sailed a balsa raft from South America to the Polynesian islands. Dr DavidLewis sailed traditional Haitian catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand without thesophisticated contemporary instruments. Ben Finney made several trips on a Hawaiiandouble canoe. Of course, no scholar would doubt the idea that, say, East Asians (or evenEuropeans) could actually walk the long distances to the America via Siberia and BeringStrait, but Polynesia is different. Polynesian islands are dispersed in the biggest ocean ofour planet, surrounded by thousands of kilometers of open ocean waters.Polynesian case does test our trust into the traveling abilities and spirit of ourancestors. It seems to me natural, that as time goes by, and as the studies of “historicalgenetics” of human DNA (particularly mitochondrial DNA) matures, more and morefacts of human large-scale migrations will come to our knowledge, and our trust andrespect for our traveling ancestors will increase. But at the moment we need to rely on theexisting facts.In the juxtaposition of linguistic, historic, ethnographic, physical anthropological,archaeological, genetic and other data, each providing sometimes contradictinginformation, quite outstanding polyphonic traditions of Polynesians had been mostlyneglected. The main reason for this neglect is (again!) the deep belief of music scholars inthe late origins of polyphony. “What valid historical information could Polynesianpolyphonic traditions provide, if, most likely, Polynesians developed their ownpolyphony quite late, say, in 15 th or 16 th centuries, before the first contacts with Europeansailors, long after settling on Polynesian Islands?” – that is the questions that believers ofthe late origins of polyphony would be asking. We may remember, that some Europeanmusicologists could not even face the facts and accept reality that Polynesians “already”had polyphony when Europeans arrived there (Kaeppler et al., 1998:15).I am very sorry, if the readers are already tired me repeating the same idea againand again, but I can’t help myself, so I need to repeat once again, that the idea of the lateorigins of the vocal polyphony from monophony is a myth, unsupported by the existingfacts. Multiple examples of the disappearance of vocal polyphonic traditions fromdifferent parts of the world on one hand, and the conspicuous absence of the facts of the“natural evolution” of vocal polyphony from monophony on the other hand suggests thatpolyphony is gradually disappearing in human cultures. Therefore, I believe that the factof the presence of vocal polyphonic traditions in any of the regions of the world, inany of the cultures must be treated as the possible very valuable source of theancient history of this region/culture. This is particularly important in the cases when