Pygmy and Perontin's polyphony compared
  • Chris_McAvoyChris_McAvoy
    Posts: 389
    I stumbled upon this fascinating comparison between early european and present day subsaharan african polyphony.

    http://docs.exdat.com/docs/index-147842.html

    Admittedly, any attempt to speculate regarding a possible connection between the musical practices of African hunter/gatherers and the Medieval churches and monasteries of western Europe may seem far fetched in the extreme. Indeed, until recently, there was no reason to associate African and European traditions of any kind. Almost all historians and archaeologists were in agreement that African and European prehistories were completely unrelated, with Europeans in all likelihood descended from earlier, archaic humans from the same continent. Thanks, however, to remarkable developments centered in the field of population genetics, our picture of world prehistory has changed, so abruptly and so radically that many in the social sciences remain either unaware or in a state of confused disbelief regarding the most recent findings and the profound implications they bring with them. In the words of anthropologist Doug Jones,


    Perhaps someone with more time and understanding of early music can decide if the paper makes sense.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,481
    Prehistoric genetics and medieval musicology aren't in the same temporal arena, so that seems meaningless.

    North Africa, though, was a major cultural center in the Early Church, and there was plenty of trade into the continent, so it's reasonable to think that there MAY have been some musical practices bubbling up from the tribal regions into Roman society.
    Thanked by 1M. Jackson Osborn
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,481
    Now that I Read this - it's not talking about European polyphony in the art music sense, but in the folk/traditional genres.

    Seems like a stretch, unless you could identify other shared cultural elements- language in particular, or dance styles.
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