Polyphonic music is a perfect embodiment of the concept of holobiont. Every singer sings his/her part, and there is no conductor telling singers when and how to sing. Harmony guides the whole group. The secret of biological holobionts is, indeed, harmony. Every section of the system works for its own good and, at the same time, for the whole group.
This clip comes from Georgia. I don’t know if the people in it are professional singers, but the people I know from Georgia tell me that many people still have this kind of skill. You can find plenty of clips of Georgian Polyphonic music on the Web.
At times, I had my students in chemistry sing simple polyphonic canons in class. Too bad I didn’t record their performance, but I can tell you that they seemed to enjoy that more than chemistry. Below is a post I wrote a few years ago about polyphonic music on “Chimeras” (edited).
Polyphonic Music and the Angst of the West
“Sicut Cervus” by Pierluigi da Palestrina (1604) is not just a beautiful harmony but a story about the great expansion of European civilization.
With the waning of the Middle Ages, Europe was coming out of a terrible period. The crusades had ended with a series of crushing defeats, and the tremendous war effort had backfired, generating famines. Then, the Black Death killed millions of Europeans.
Yet, Europe rebounded from the disaster. The previous collapse had left natural resources free to regrow; forests had returned, and now they could be cut and turned into arable land to produce food. In the 15th century, the European population restarted to grow, faster than before.
The 15th century was the time of the Renaissance, an age that was the start of the incredible overseas expansion that led Western Europe to dominate most of the world. But the tumultuous expansion was not without internal struggle: every European state wanted a slice of the overseas bounty. Eventually, the competition would generate the wars of the 17th century, with Europeans turning against themselves in the 30-year war. The European cultural unity was rapidly being lost, with Latin ceasing to be the universal language that had bound Medieval Europe together.
Before disappearing, Latin had a last moment of glory. It was the age of polyphonic music, a kind of delicate, sophisticated, intricate, incredibly beautiful kind of music never seen before in the world. It is not that polyphony didn’t exist before; it was possibly the most ancient kind of music in human history. However, the Western European version that lasted from ca. 1400 to 1600 CE was something different. Earlier on, Gregorian music — monophonic — had been mostly an embellishment of the sacred words of the Bible. With polyphony, music asserted itself in an age when people wanted to do more than just embellish old stories.
Polyphonic music was still sung in Latin, but Latin was not understood anymore in Europe. So, this new kind of music relied more on musical harmony than on words. The superposition of the various parts being sung together made it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the words. But that was the point: Europeans were exploring new realms, new harmonies, and new ways of communication. Polyphonic music could be religious, but it was not necessarily so. It could take the form of a madrigal, a secular kind of music.
For some two centuries, a new harmony, never heard before, resonated in Europe. Then, as the struggle among European states became harsher and wider, polyphony gave way to symphonic music. Symphonic music went one step forward with respect to polyphony. If polyphony used words as mere sounds in the overall harmony, symphonic music was often only instrumental. It conveyed emotion without using words.
Unlike polyphonic groups, symphonic orchestras always had a conductor, someone who directed players as if they were soldiers in an army. This reflected how politics was evolving in Europe, with strong, hierarchical states with a single dominating figure at the top. The Germans would later call this figure the “führer” and develop the führerprinzip, the idea that all social organizations should be centered around a strong leader.
As always, music reflected the organization of society in Europe, which was evolving into the creation of strong, centralized states. Not for nothing, at the height of the age of symphonic music, words were sung again in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. But not in Latin but in German. The Ninth was German music, not European music. The universal harmony of polyphonic music was gone.
The symphonic age lasted until English became the new universal language. With English, music could become again linked to the human voice and to words that could be understood. A modern genre such as Rap is, after all, a return to the Gregorian approach to music as an embellishment of human language.
Today, polyphonic music is still alive as a religious form of music in Eastern Europe, but it is a relic of a bygone time in Western Europe and in all the regions that recognize themselves under the wide label of “The West.” Yet, we can still appreciate the technical mastery of the composers of that time, one of them was Pierluigi da Palestrina, who composed Sicut Cervus, from Psalm 45 of the Bible.
The Sicut Cervus is not just a beautiful harmony, it is something more. Its theme is a thirsty deer looking for water. It says, “Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te Deus.” You can translate this as: “As a deer longs for a spring of water, so my soul longs for you, oh God.” And that, I think, can express the burning desire of the West, the angst for something that Westerners themselves don’t understand but have been seeking for centuries with such a reckless enthusiasm that they set half of the world on fire. And, whatever it was that they were seeking, it seems clear that they didn’t find it.
Today, the parable of the Western world's domination seems to be mostly concluded, even though it still flares high with plenty of wars and exterminations. But something distilled from so much ardor remains to us: the music of a remote age, when our ancestors managed to create something eerie and beautiful that we can still admire today: polyphonic music.
Western polyphonic music can be seen as a gift to all humankind. Will we ever see a time when human cultures exchange only gifts and not bombs? We are not there yet, but who knows?
Beautifully put
Gyuto Monks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5Dz84buYRs