Who Asked the First Question? The origins of human choral singing, intelligence, language and speech

460 Pages·2006·2.918 MB·English

by  Jordania, Joseph

Tbilisi Ivane Javakhishvili State University
Institute of Classical, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies

International Research Centre of Traditional Polyphony

Joseph Jordania

WHO ASKED
THE FIRST QUESTION?

The Origins of Human Choral Singing,
Intelligence, Language and Speech

Logos
2006
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To the memory of Valeri Pavlovich Alexeev and
Malkhaz Abdushelishvili

© Programm “Logos”, 2006
© Joseph Jordania, 2006

ISSBN 99940-31-81-3

Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University
13 Chavchavadze ave.
0179 Tbilisi, Geogria

Tel.: [phone] 58
Fax: [phone]
E-mail: [email protected]
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Contents
Foreword and acknowledgements 8
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PART I World Styles of Traditional Polyphony 22
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Foreword 22
Question of terminology and classification 23
Vocal Polyphony in Africa 30
Sub-Saharan Africa (Rhythm; Unity of singing and dancing; Tone languages and
polyphony; Characteristics of sub-Saharan polyphony 31
East Africa 36
Central Africa 37
South Africa 39
West Africa 41
Madagascar 43
North Africa 44
Sahara 45
Conclusions 46
Vocal Polyphony in Europe 47
Vocal Polyphony in Eastern Europe 49
Russia 49
Polyphonic traditions of minorities of Russian Federation 54
North Caucasian minorities
(Abkhazians; Adighis, Balkarians and Karachaevis; Ossetians;
Chechens and Ingushes, Dagestan) 55
The Volga-Ural region minorities of Russian Federation (Mordva; Komi;
Mari; Udmurtia; Tatarstan; Bashkiria; Chuvashia) 62
North European minorities of Russian Federation 67
Jews and Rom 67
Ukraine 68
Belarus 72
Georgia (vocal polyphony in Georgia; General and regional characteristics;
East Georgia; West Georgia; Improvisation in western Georgian
polyphonic songs; Traditional polyphony in Svaneti; Religious music;
Urban music; Scale system; Melody in polyphony; Singing men and
singing women; Conclusions) 74
Balkans 105
Romania 105
Bulgaria 106
Serbia 108
Montenegro 109
Bosnia and Herzegovina 110
Croatia 111
Slovenia 112
Macedonia 113
Albania 114
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Greece 116
Vocal Polyphony in North Europe 118
Baltic region 118
Lithuania 119
Latvia 123
Estonia 124
Finland 125
Iceland 126
England 128
Wales 129
Scotland and Ireland 130
Sweden 130
Denmark and Norway 130
Vocal Polyphony in Central Europe 131
Poland 131
Slovakia 131
Czech 132
Germany 132
Austria 133
Switzerland 134
Belgium and Holland 135
Vocal Polyphony in Western Europe 135
France (Breton, Corsica) 135
Portugal 137
Spain (and Basques) 137
Italy (Sicily, Sardinia) 139
Conclusions 142
Vocal Polyphony is Asia 143
Vocal polyphony in the Middle East 144
Pearl divers of the Persian Gulf 145
Polyphony in Jewish music 146
Armenia 148
The Bedouins, Egypt, Turkey 149
Central Asia: Overtone singing 149
Tajikistan (and Kazakhstan) 151
Afghanistan: Nuristan 152
North Asia 154
East Asia 155
Japan: Ainus 155
China 158
Chinese minorities 158
Tibet 160
Taiwan 161
South-East Asia 163
Vietnam 163
Nepal, Burma 164
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South Asia: India (Assam; Southern India) 164
Conclusions 166
North America: Vocal Polyphony among Native Americans 167
Northwest Coast 167
Eastern Coast 168
Southwestern 168
Plain Indians 168
South America 169
Q’ero 169
Amazonian region 170
Conclusions 172
Polyphonic singing on Pacific Islands 172
Polynesia 172
Tonga 173
Tahiti 174
Smaller islands 174
Melanesia 175
New Guinea 175
Micronesia 176
Australia 176
Conclusions of the first part 176
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PART II Comparative Perspectives 178
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Introduction: Dialog between regional and comparative studies 178
Brief review of comparative studies and ideas 181
Section 1. Methodological Issues 185
“They sound so similar”, or how could we compare polyphonic traditions 185
What is more stable: Language or music? 187
What are the stable and mobile elements of musical culture? 189
Set of stylistic parameters of polyphonic cultures 193
Section 2. Practical Issues. Regions, Styles, Peoples, Migrations: Historical dynamics and
comparative perspectives 197
Case Study #1. What happened to the vocal polyphony in Khevsureti? 198
Case Study #2. Historical dynamics: Appearance or disappearance? 200
Case Study #3. Who can drink milk? Or the origins of European professional
polyphony 203
Conclusions for the previous two cases 209
Case Study #4. Drone and horses: Ancient European family of vocal polyphony
and the Indo-Europeans 210
Legacy of singing Indo-Europeans 217
East Georgia: Listen what the “long” table songs can tell us 217
European mix: Indo-European contribution to ancient European
polyphony 220
More about mixed styles: Age matters 221
More mixture: The influence of European professional polyphony 223
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Conclusions 224
Case Study #5. Heterophony 225
Case Study #6. Lithuanian sutartines 229
Case Study #7. Overtone singing of Central Asia 235
Case Study #8. The Nuristan polyphony 240
Case Study #9. Ainu polyphony 247
Case Study #10. Southeast Asian polyphony 251
Case Study #11. From Atlas Mountains to Bahrain 252
Case Study #12. “I’ll follow the sun” Round-the-world travel ticket and the vocal
polyphony of Native Americans 255
Case Study #13. Vocal polyphony in ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia and
Mesoamerica 261
Case Study #14. Polynesian polyphony 273
Case Study #15. The Beatles: Ancient sounds in hit parades 277
Unity of the music creator and the performer 278
Writing music together 278
Performance style 281
The performance as a social experience 281
Harmony of The Beatles songs 282
Dissonances 286
Drone 287
Vocal harmonizing 288
Conclusions 288
Conclusions of the second part 289
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Part III Singing, Questioning, Thinking, Talking, Stuttering 293
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Brief summary instead of introduction 293
Sounds of the ancient choir: Primordial vocal polyphony 294
Few preliminary questions and answers 297
Singing ape 299
Singing rabbit and the Lion Dance: Origin of the rhythm 302
Singing in peaceful times: Towards the origins of human language 311
Gestural theory of language origins 315
Pitch based language: singing, whistling, drumming 317
Whistle languages 318
“Language” of African drums 320
Tone languages 320
Pitch language: The first dead language in human history? 321
Is music an enigma? 324
Small question to Noam Chomsky 326
Has anybody asked a question? Language and intelligence 327
Questions in music: Musical dialogue 329
Few basic questions about questions 330
Why do we ask questions? 331
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What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questions have given to
human individuals? 331
What evolutionary advantage could the ability of asking questions have given to
human groups? 332
So, who asked the first question: Or “Interrogo ergo cogito” 333
Is asking questions a uniquely human ability or do we share this ability with few
other species? 334
Where did the phenomenon of question came from – are there any evolutionary
prerequisites for the questioning behavior? 338
Who could answer the first question when it was formulated? 339
Is question one of the higher functions of syntactic structures? 340
Is there a genetic component for questioning behavior? 341
Questions and mental retardation 342
Questions and Genie: Do we learn to ask question? 342
Questions, apes and children 343
Questions and protolanguage 344
How do we learn to ask questions? 345
Question of chronology: When was the ability to ask questions born? 346
Let’s Talk: Origin of Speech 347
What can vocal polyphony tell us about the origins of speech? 348
Language and Homo sapiens 351
Correlation with the paleoanthropological data 352
Choral polyphony and the theories of human origins 355
Tone languages and the asynchronous model of speech origin 356
Music, Speech and Stuttering 358
Speech, choral singing and stuttering 359
Stuttering in different cultures: A shadow of “milk-drinking syndrome” again?361
What about stuttering among Chinese? 364
Official attitude towards prevalence studies 367
Reasons? Plenty of them! 370
Conclusions 371
PS: What about polyphony? 372
Developmental Dyslexia 373
“My child said today ‘biscu-it’”: Cross-Cultural Aspect of the Acquisition of
Phonological System 374
From polyphony to monophony: Belated Appendix to the “Case Study #3” 376
Conclusions: Any more questions? 378

PostScript: Moral and Ethics Issues of the Study of Vocal Polyphony 381
Appendix: Conferences, Seminars and Symposia on Traditional Polyphony 386
References 397
Index 438
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Foreword and Acknowledgments

April 26, 1977, Tuesday, was a sunny day in Tbilisi, capital of the former USSR
Republic of Georgia. I was coming down from the mountain ‘Mtatsminda’ (lit. “Saint
Mountain”), an impressive 500 metres high mountain range that dominates the very
centre of Tbilisi. I was accompanying my guest, a musicologist student from the Lvov
Conservatory (Western Ukraine) Natalia Shvets, who happened to be at the graduate
students’ conference, which was taking place at that time at Tbilisi State Conservatory.
Walking down the narrow and steep streets of old Tbilisi, I was teaching Natalia the
beautiful Georgian healing song “Batonebo” [“Lords”]. Everything was going well,
Natalia had a good musical ear and soon we were able to sing the tantalising dissonant
harmonies of the healing song together. The only problem was that, as with most of the
Georgian traditional songs, Batonebo needs at least three singers to convey all three
necessary parts of the song. Well, there we were - only two of us, walking down the
empty street of Old Tbilisi and singing two parts of the three-part song. And then
suddenly, “out of the blue” sky of that Tbilisi spring afternoon came the bass voice
complementing the full three-part harmony of the healing song. We looked around and
there he was, a Georgian male in his thirties, leaning over the balcony on the second floor
on the left side of the street and helping two lone singers with the bass part. We waved to
each other and continued on our way down the street, still accompanied by his bass.
This is by no means a “life-changing experience” (particularly in Georgia where
almost everyone sings in harmony), but I still remember it as one of the nice moments of
life, when a song suddenly brings together people who never met before. Actually, the
real reason I can pinpoint the exact day when this happened after so many years is
because I have been writing a diary every (well, almost) single day for the last 30 years.
My good friend and colleague, arguably the most influential ethnomusicologist of
the Soviet Union, Izaly Zemtsovsky from Sankt Petersburg (currently at Stanford
University) had a somewhat similar experience in Abkhazia, the north-western part of
Georgia. Let us listen to how he described his experience in his own words: “… I would
like to share with you what I saw in the hamlet of Gudauta in the summer of 1978: an
Abkhazian, dozing as he waited for the bus, in his sleep immediately began intoning a
drone as soon as he heard the distant sound, barely audible in the cavernous empty
waiting room, of a solo voice singing in the manner of his native land, a song that
required a drone.” (Zemtsovsky, 2006a). [For non-professional readers – the “drone” is a
long sustained sound, often (but not always) sung as the lowest part of a polyphonic song.
Drone can be played on instruments as well]
The following tongue-in-cheek story comes from the decorated Georgian
traditional singer and the leader of the world-renowned Rustavi Choir, Anzor
Erkomaishvili. Let us listen to his own words: “A big group of artists of Georgian
Philharmony arrived from Tbilisi to our village [Anzor Erkomaishvili’s native village is
Makvaneti, in Guria, the mountainous Black Sea-side region of western Georgia]. After
their performance a traditional ‘supra’ [banquet-like Georgian traditional feast at a long
table with toasts and singing] was organised in the spacious room of ‘Kolkhoz’ [Soviet
Collective Farm] officials. We (village singers) were also invited. The guests from the
State Philharmony toasted our singing and said they enjoyed Gurian traditional songs
very much, although I somehow had an impression that at that moment the guests were
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more enjoying the traditional ‘Honey-Vodka’, home-made by Kasiane Bersenadze. As
the feasting reached its highest point, one of the guests, a professional opera singer,
started singing, announcing beforehand that he was going to sing for us the aria of ‘Abdul
the Arab’ [from the opera ‘Tale of Shota Rustaveli’, by the Georgian composer Dimitri
Araqishvili]. Ilarion Sikharulidze [a well-respected Gurian traditional singer who was at
the table] waited for a while, and when he lost faith that the lone singer would be
supported by any of his own friends or colleagues, he himself gave a supporting high
harmony to his singing. Tele Iobishvili [another traditional Gurian singer who was at the
feast as well] supported the aria by the bass part. I should confess that the result was not
bad at all, particularly considering that two out of the three performers had no idea of the
song they were singing. ‘This is an “aria” from the classical opera and should be
performed alone’, announced a professional singer with mild annoyance in his voice as
the song came to an end. ‘Well’, came the reply from Ilarion Sikharulidze, ‘as we
Georgians say, it is a pity for a man to be alone while eating, as for singing, I have never
heard of a song that has to be sung alone’” (Erkomaishvili, 1988:56).
Georgia was widely known for its rich polyphonic traditions in the former Soviet
Union. “Two Georgians and a bottle of red wine is already three-part singing” was a
popular Russian saying. But of course, such stories of compulsory group participation to
complement the harmony of a polyphonic song do not come from Georgia alone. It
would be natural to expect that in most of the cultures with traditional polyphonic
singing, you would come across similar stories of people joining in singing to
complement the harmony, sometimes in the most unusual circumstances. Our good
friend, Bulgarian ethnomusicologist Boryana Alexandrova, told me a family story that
took place in the 1970, during the “Silver Wedding” of her own uncle, Mladen Angelov,
an ardent singer of Bulgarian traditional songs. In the midst of the most sacred part of the
ceremony, while standing with his head leaning forward and covered with the sacral cloth
by the local priest, to the common laughter of everyone present at this memorable
moment, the “silver groom” suddenly started singing a drone to support the priest’s
recitation (personal communication from December 27th, 1987).
I also vividly remember Dunia Rihtman, ethnomusicologist from Bosnia (now in
Israel), singing along quietly during the concert of Georgian polyphonic songs on
November 14th 1986 in Borjomi, Georgia, during the International Conference “Problems
of folk polyphony”. Conforming to the etiquette of a conventional performance, Dunia
was trying not to be loud, but I was sitting next to her and I could clearly hear her droning
along to the unknown (for her) Georgian songs. By the way, I was droning as well.
Exactly the same way as I was quietly harmonizing to the (unknown to me) Hungarian
monophonic melodies at the Kechkemet music festival in Hungary on August 27, 1977.
Co-participation in a musical performance can happen without singing. As a
matter of fact, singing along is not the most widely spread form of co-participation
(particularly in western cultures). The most universal (and the most natural and
economical) way to “join in” the musical flow must be joining the beat of a musical piece
by simply tapping, finger snapping or even just making a swinging movement using any
part of the body. This phenomenon is so widely spread in human societies that it often
escapes our attention. Representatives of some cultures are particularly prone to the urge
of “joining the beat”. I remember how amazed was my friend, musicologist and singer
Irina Bavkun from the Novosibirsk Conservatory, when she went to a concert of Russian
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classical music together with a big group of African exchange students. According to
Irina’s words, “every time, as soon as there was a more-or-less rhythmic section in the
music (compositions of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and other Russian “classic”
composers were performed at that evening), there was a vigorous rhythmic tapping
coming from our guests” (personal communication of 28 March, 1979).
Why it is so pleasurable to move our body following the rhythm of a musical
piece (often without even noticing this) or to sing along with our favourite song? This is
one of the questions that I will try to answer on the pages of this book.
The problem of a listener’s behaviour during the performance, or, in more
“scholarly” words, the relationship between the “performers” and the “listeners” is a
fascinating topic by itself. In some musical styles the gap between the performers and the
listeners is immense, and in other styles and cultures there is hardly any difference at all.
Let me give a brief description of the performer/listener relationships of some of the best-
known musical styles.
If you have ever been at a live performance of any of Beethoven’s magnificent
symphonies, or heard pieces by any other “classical” composer, you might notice the
strict rules of behaviour for listeners at the performance of classical European music. The
listeners at a classical music concert must remain absolutely silent for the duration of the
playing. They are not supposed to clap even during the break between the parts of the
symphony (you must wait until all the parts are finished!), let alone any more emotional
expression of excitement during the performance. In this style of music (European
classical music) the gap between the performers and the listeners is the greatest.
If you have ever been at a performance of jazz music you will remember the quite
different set of rules for an audience of this style of music. Listeners are expected to
support performers and appreciate their improvisational skills not only at the end of the
pieces, but during the performance as well. Not to clap when any of the jazz musicians
finishes her/his share of the improvisation is almost as rude as to clap after the first part
of the symphony at a classical music concert. The jazz model of listeners’ appreciation
during the performance is widely known in different traditional cultures, particularly in
non-polyphonic cultures, where the boundaries between professional musicians and
listeners are clearly set but the listeners are not required to be passive.
Now let us turn to the cultures, where polyphonic singing (part-singing) tradition
is well alive. Here the performer/listener relationship has a totally different meaning. I
remember, during my fieldworks in Georgia (mostly during recording sessions at a
traditional “supra” feast) I would often realise that all present were contributing to the
choral singing (sometimes including myself). So, although this may sound bizarre to
some readers, in the societies with a tradition of polyphonic singing there often are no
listeners at all, as all the members of the event are actively involved in the music making
(singing, dancing, or making different rhythmic sounds at the traditional celebrations).
Listening through your own performance, you may agree, can be emotionally a much
more loaded experience than passive listening to somebody else’s performance. The
closest to this kind of model of the total participation of all present, characteristic of
traditional polyphonic societies, is the model of the performer/audience relationship
characteristic of rock concerts. Rock musicians naturally encourage this kind of
emotionally loaded mass participation during their live concerts as an important part of
their show. If the readers of this book have ever seen a rock-performance on a TV screen