Oltre il Mediterraneo: le polifonie semplici della terra australis incognita nei diari di James Burney

Simple polyphony, considered by scholars to be only a European musical phenomenon, is here investigated in an anthropological perspective and identified in the southern hemisphere during James Cook's voyages of exploration, particularly among Polynesians and New Zealanders. James Burney, the son of the English music historian, composer and musician Charles, sailed on Captain Cook's second and third voyages of exploration between 1772 and 1779, two of the most significant voyages in the history of the South Pacific. Burney wrote two journals, not for officialdom but for the information of his family and friends. In these private journals, Burney recorded his experiences and the remarkable places and peoples he encountered. These sources are very candid diaries in which we can read many accounts of the natives he met, as well as reports about their dances, music, chants and musical instruments. However, some debate emerged among coeval European intellectuals about several of Burney’s unexpected musical accounts, such as simple polyphony. The polyphony was not contemplated out of Europe and thus natives' polyphony was neither understood nor believed possible. This eighteenth-century debate can help us to understand some misunderstandings and prejudices of musicology towards simple polyphony. This repertoire, now attested since the Medieval age in western and eastern Europe, was not included in the western Science (or Art) of music, was ignored for centuries and was still called "primitive" yet in the 1960s. Today, with this new evidence, it must be considered a musical expression of human cultural history.