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polyphony in the earliest layers of ritual and calendaric songs of Polissia, and pointed atPolissia as the most important region of the distribution of Ukrainian traditionalpolyphony. He also was the first to write about the tradition of using dissonant chords andintervals, containing seconds (the idea of using of dissonances in Ukrainian polyphonywas totally rejected in the 1962 volume on Ukrainian polyphony).Despite the 1967 article of V. Matvienko, the same neglect towards traditionalpolyphony continued in Ukrainian ethnomusicology. In the early 1990s I received a PhDof a Ukrainian scholar, Irina Belosvetova, and as I looked through the musical examplesfirst, I remember how delighted I was to see plenty of examples of very interesting dronepolyphony with secondal dissonances. The dissertation was about one of the regions ofPolissia. I started reading the manuscript with much anticipation of the discussion of thisinteresting phenomenon. Despite the fact that the work was very professionally written,there was hardly even a mentioning of the existence of polyphony in the analyzedtradition (let alone drone polyphony). To be precise, the words “polyphony” wasmentioned only twice, and the term “drone” was not mentioned at all. In the laterpublished standard work, “The History of Ukrainian Music”, published in 1989, andwritten by a group of the leading Ukrainian musicologists, the special section about theUkrainian traditional polyphony mostly follows the 1962 book on Ukrainian polyphony.So, for example, the archaic polyphonic tradition of Polissia with the drone and dissonantintervals is totally missing in 1989 book. Generally speaking, the same trend stillcontinues, and even in the feature article about the Ukrainian music in the GarlandEncyclopedia of World Music there is nothing about the drone polyphony with dissonantintervals in Polissia (Noll, 2000).Fortunately, from other smaller publications (together with the article ofMatvienko, mentioned earlier) and some unpublished materials (mostly papers, deliveredat the polyphonic conferences in Georgia) we do have more complete idea about thedistribution of different types of vocal polyphony on the territory of the Ukraine. Forexample, in a special paper about the polyphony in Polissia written for the 2004 Tbilisiconference, dedicated to the traditional polyphony, E. Efremov distinguishes two mainstyles of polyphony in Ukrainian Polissia: (1) Drone polyphony, and (2) heterophony.Drone polyphony with a small range melody is characteristic to northern regions ofUkrainian Polissia. Heterophony is characteristic for both northern and southern regions.In northern regions heterophony is based on dissonant harmonies and develops within thethird, and in southern regions heterophony is more parallel third oriented and has widerrange melodies (Efremov, 2005).Generally speaking, the tradition of polyphonic singing in the Ukraine decreasesas we go from East to West, and from North to South. Therefore, the most polyphonicregion is the northeast part of the Ukraine (eastern Polissia), and the only region wherethere are no data about vocal polyphony, is the southwest part of the Ukraine.Not going into the detailed classification of polyphonic traditions into types andsup-types, we can say that there are three main polyphonic styles on the territory of theUkraine:(1) Drone polyphony, present in the most archaic genres of the Polissiaregion, both in West (for example, in Brest district) and particularly –East Polissia. Although Shevchuk mentions drone polyphony inPolissia as a sub-type of heterophonic polyphony (Shevchuk, 2001:69