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289phenomenon in the history of the humankind. At the same time, as I tried to demonstrateon the example of the Beatles, few very important elements of the ancient traditionalpolyphony came back in the rock-musician’s songwriting practices, performance style,and even their harmonic and melodic style. According to these elements the legacy of theBeatles is closer to the traditional polyphonic cultures than to early classic R’n’Roll.Some of these elements are:• Group creative process and the unity of composers and performers;• Music is composed and recorded orally, mostly by individuals withoutclassical music education;• No formal rules of harmony or counterpoint – ear is the only legitimate pointof reference;• Unparalleled (in classical music or even jazz) close connections between theperformers and the listeners;• Unrestricted richness of chordal changes and new colorful modulations;• Partial diminishing of the role of the pure vocal melody, and particularimportance of the harmonic element (sometimes puzzling professional musicologists,unable to decide which of the harmonizing melodies is the “main melody”);• Ambiguity of tonal centre; beginning and finishing musical composition withother than tonic harmonies;• Wide use of the secondal connection between the chords;• Changes to the all-important (for classical musical system) dominant chord;• The wide and innovative use of the dissonances;• Wide use of vocal and instrumental drones, particularly on the top and in themiddle of the musical texture.Many of the elements that were successfully used by the Beatles, were later usedby othe r rock and pop-bands. In some cases certain elements were particularly widelyused by bands. For example, both “U2” and “Cold Play” started using drones in a highrange in a big part of their songs.Conclusions of the second partSecond part of the book is coming to an end. This part was fully dedicated to thecomparative perspectives of the research of traditional polyphony. Without going intodetail, let us have few most important conclusions to sum up the second part of the book:• Documented cases of the disappearance of polyphonic traditions in differentregions of the world, and the absence of the cases of the evolution of polyphony frommonophony in traditional music suggests that the general historical dynamics is thegradual disappearance of vocal polyphonic traditions. Therefore, the idea of the lateevolution of polyphony from monophony, dominating the musicological andethnomusicological literature for more than a century, is totally unsupported byexisting facts and must be discarded.