Folk Organum: A Study of Origins

Abstract

If reader can agree, as Gustave Reese and other comparative musicologists have agreed, with statement that the so-called art-polyphony of Europe was evolved from traditional folk-polyphony and with Reese's statement that the development of polyphony seems spontaneously to have followed very similar paths all parts of world,2 it is possible to describe and document manner which polyphony developed from monophony. Polyphony (organum) had already been born when medieval theorists began to describe existing practice. Were it possible to have been present at birth, historians would not now have to rely on conjecture and hypothesis as to how and it happened. But it is not necessary to go back time; within American folk music tradition, polyphony is continually being reborn, and process has been going on since at least early eighteenth century. As Reese indicated, resulting dyadic polyphony appears to be much same as early polyphony in all parts of world. It progresses, for most part, parallel intervals of fifths, fourths, unisons, and octaves. Reese asks why should fourths and fifths be first intervals to appear? He then observes that speculation has offered several answers,3 and lists them as follows:

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