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58Balkarians and KarachaevisThese two groups are closely connected to each other. In fact, Karachaevis areBalkarians, who migrated to a new territory (not far from their initial homeland) in the19 th century. Total population of Balkarians and Karachaevis is under 200 000 (70 000and 120 000 respectively). Balkaria traditionally consisted of several communities livingin different gorges, and the name “Balkarian” initially was used only for a specificpopulation of so-called Balkarian Gorge, same as population of the Chegem Gorge wascalled “Chegemians”, dwellers of Baksan Gorge – Baksanians, etc. The uniting nativename for all the related populations was “Taulala” (mountain dwellers) (Rakhaev,1988:21). Living between the Caucasian-language speaking Adighis from the west andSvanetians (Georgians) from the south, and Indo-European Ossetians from the east,Turkic-speaking Balkarians were believed to be culturally closely connected to Turkiclanguagespeaker populations that brought Islam to the North Caucasia. This belief wasthe result of dominating position of linguistics in ethnogenetic studies. Following thetrend, musicologists tried to “bring” the musical traditions of Balkarians and Karachaeviscloser to the musical traditions of the Turkic world by all possible means. For example,musicians were writing about the chromatic scales in their music (Taneev, 1947 [1886])although Balkarian and Karachaevian traditional music scales are diatonic. Moreparadoxically and importantly for our topic, collectors of Balkarian and Karachaeviansongs were publishing their traditional polyphonic songs as one-part, monophonic songs(in an attempt to bring their musical traditions close to monophonic cultures of MoslemTurkic peoples).Despite this tendency of negligence towards their polyphonic traditions,Balkarians and Karachaevis have one of the most developed traditions of polyphonicsinging among North Caucasian peoples. Three-part singing is widespread here. Themelody, as elsewhere in Caucasia, is performed by a soloist, and the drone (or “drones”in case of double drones) by the group of singers. Interestingly, the melodic part has aTurkic term “zhir baschi” (“head melody”, or “main melody”), but the term for the basspart is non-Turkic (possibly because polyphony is mostly absent in Turkic musicalcultures). For the base part Balkarians and Karachaevis use the indigenous Caucasian(Adighian) term – “ezhu”.There has been an insufficient study of Balkarian and Karachaevian traditionalmusic and polyphony, particularly in terms of availability to the western readers.Although Balkarian polyphonic songs were among the very first among the NorthCaucasian songs to be transcribed (in 1885, the Russian composer Taneev, teacher ofTchaikovsky, had a fieldwork here. See Taneev: 1947), Balkarian tradition of vocalpolyphony was very slow to reach the western reader. The first publication on Europeanlanguage, containing information about Balkarian polyphony was a small article in theGarland Encyclopedia of World Music (Jordania, 2000a:856-859).