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

382Well, the origins of choral polyphony, hopefully, cannot create as much moraland ethical controversies, as the abovementioned issues, but they still are able to raise thebrows. Marius Schneider was the first to discuss the choral polyphony in the context ofthe whole world, and he was the first to face the controversies between the facts andethics in the sphere of traditional polyphony. When he looked at the global distribution ofthe traditional polyphony, he noticed that the geographic distribution of vocal polyphonywas coinciding with the data of physical anthropology.As a scholar, studying different aspects of vocal polyphony for the last 30 years, Ibelieve this coincidence is a fact no unbiased ethnomusicologist can refute (Jordania,1989). But facts themselves are never immoral, or racist. It is our interpretationsand our moral models that turn these facts immoral, unethical, or racist statements.Unfortunately, Schneider could not escape the musicological axiom that“polyphony developed from monophony as the higher stage of musical thinking”.Combination of these two factors: (1) coincidence of the distribution of vocal polyphonyand data of physical anthropology, and (2) belief that polyphony was the later and higherstage of development, brought Schneider to the racist conclusion, that only some racesmanaged to develop polyphony. This conclusion was very much in the milieu of thescholarly climate of the 1930s (Schneider’s two-volume book appeared in 1934 and 1935in Nazi Germany). At the same time, we should pay tribute to Schneider’s bravery – inhis book he argued that although Europe developed polyphony very well, Europeans (orCaucasoids) did not “invent” polyphony. According to Schneider, polyphony wasinvented somewhere in the Southeast Asia and it reached Europe via South Asian andCaucasian rout. Schneider’s conclusion, that a new cultural trait, polyphony was notinvented by Europeans, was not warmly greeted by Nazi ideologists, and according to theavailable information, Schneider’s book was publicly burned by Nazis among otherbooks that contradicted Hitler’s ideology.Schneider’s conclusion about the correlation of the regions of vocal polyphonywith the data of physical anthropology became a virtual taboo in Ethnomusicology, ashameful legacy of the awful German science and ideology of the 1930s. In countlessreferences to Schneider’s book one can rarely read about his idea of the correlationbetween vocal polyphony and physical anthropology. I did not read myself German(although I am improving…), and from few sources that were available to me in SovietUnion about Schneider’s work I did not even know until the second part of the 1980s thatSchneider was connecting data of vocal polyphony and physical anthropology. Knowingonly about Schneider’s reliance on the theory of “cultural circles”, I had to work out thiscoincidence myself.In my opinion, Schneider’s main mistake was the tacit acceptance of the idea ofthe later origin of polyphony as a more advanced stage of musical thinking.In our discussion of the origins of vocal polyphony we need to bring one morename in this discussion. As I have already mentioned briefly, Russian musicologist MironKharlap suggested that choral polyphony must have been born earlier than monophony.Kharlap was not an ethnomusicologist, and he did not publish many works about histheory. He did not publish works on vocal polyphony either. His 1972 article was all hepublished about vocal polyphony (he also delivered few papers, mostly on the origins ofthe musical scales), but the unusual suggestion he made was very well known at leastwithin the Soviet ethnomusicologists. I remember myself criticizing Kharlap’s theory