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48heterophony). European professional music (which interestingly, at thebeginning was also monophonic) turned into polyphonic by the end ofthe 1 st Millennia and had a tremendous impact on polyphonic traditionsof the European communities with its polyphonic and harmoniclanguage. This influence later extended much wider, throughout themajor regions of the world;‣ As a result of the strong influence of European professional music, theoriginal character of many European local polyphonic traditions hasbeen strongly affected, and ethnomusicologists working on localpolyphonic traditions often mention the existence of two different –“old” and “new” styles of polyphony. The most salient stylistic elementsof the “new” polyphonic style are the prevalence of parallel thirds,triadic chordal structure, and TSD (tonic-subdominant-dominant)harmonic system;‣ Quite paradoxically, although ethnomusicology started in Europe, mostof European polyphonic traditions came to the knowledge of Europeanethnomusicologists much later than the polyphonic traditions of farawayregions of the world (like sub-Saharan Africa or Polynesia). The mainreason of this paradox was the initial belief of musicologists that theirmain purpose was to study the musical traditions of non-Europeanpeoples. In fact, the name of the discipline - “ethnomusicology” was notused until the second half of 20 th century and the name “Music historyof non-European Peoples” was one of the widely used names of thesubject. Therefore, European traditional music was left without attentionof European scholars for few decades. This is the reason that unlike theAfrican and Polynesian polyphonic traditions, which came to theattention of European scholars already in the 19 th century, the richtraditions of vocal polyphony of, for example, northern Greeks andsouthern Albanians became known only during the 1950s.‣ Some of the very interesting polyphonic traditions of the Europe are inEast Europe. Western scholars were mostly unaware of the richness ofthese traditions, as the infamous “Iron Curtain” made the professionalinteraction of the ethnomusicologists from the “Western” and “Eastern”countries almost impossible for the decades. As the musicologicalresearch in developing countries were often conducted by Europeanscholars, materials from some of the “Third World” countries were morereadily available to Western scholars, than the materials from the“Second World”. [“Threefold division” of the world countries appearedafter the WW2, when free-market and Communist countries wereconsidered to be the “First” and the “Second” World countries, ledrespectively by the USA and USSR. Countries, which did not belong toany of these two “Worlds”, were considered to be the “Third World”countries. Fight for the “Third World” countries was one of the maindriving forces of the fierce and often violent military clashes betweenthe “First” and the “Second” World countries in different regions of thedeveloping world (like in Afghanistan or Vietnam)] One of the main