Haphazard Assembly as a Pre-Musical Form of Polyphony

A few years ago I published a short article on a strange phenomenon, which I dared to call “polyphony.” In the meanwhile, Curt Sachs treated a very similar phenomenon in his last book and I felt encouraged to take up this problem once more. I mentioned two examples. In a village in southern Rumania, I observed some thirty or forty women going to the churchyard; there, each woman stood in front of a tomb and sang a song. Each woman sang a different melody and there was no musical relation between one song and the other. And yet the whole formed a uniform expression in a higher, let us say, extra-musical sense.