EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 23 - Lab Polyphony

Genre of the Day - Lab Iso-Polyphony

Album of the Day - Albania - Polyphonic Vocals from the Lab Region by Polyphonic Group of Girokastër (2006)

June 23, 2024

Albanians know the power of a voice well. The proportion of ethnic Albanians in the landscape of dance-pop vocalists is curiously high, and they possess some fabulously stage-ready names—Dua Lipa, Bebe Rexha, Ava Max, Rita Ora taking a piece of Albania to global dance floors with every banger. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that there’s so many go-to Albanian vocalists, but even the United Nations can confirm that Albanian singers evoke great power through the bewildering sound of traditional song, as confirmed by this genre’s status as a Masterpiece of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Nearly every culture on earth possesses a traditional form of song, if this column proves anything, but drawing a straight line from two thousand years ago to today via vocal tradition is comparatively rare. Today’s genre possesses a sound people who lived before the Roman civilization heard in the same delivery as we receive it today, a musical lifeline through millennia. 

For an ancient folk tradition, today’s genre name strikes one as some sort of synthesized chemical. We’ll have to go back to middle school English class and look at some word stems. No, this is not laboratory-created singing—Lab is simply a shortening referring to the people of the southern Albanian region of Labëria. We’ve experienced a bit of polyphony in my article on polyphonic chant hailing from Bulgaria, but the word iso is an Albanian word indicating the uniqueness of the Lab tradition. Iso here refers to the droning, one-note sound sung by one or more singers providing a base for other singers to melodically improvise.

In my first article featuring polyphonic chanting, notice that the advent of polyphonic chanting in church music settings in Bulgaria was the product of composers innovating away from the monophonic sound of Gregorian chants. However, in the region of Labëria, polyphonic singing is the living product of thousands of years of pure folk ingenuity alongside other pockets in the Balkans. Given that we don’t have music transcriptions from thousands of years ago from these Lab friends, how do we know this? Regional musical historians hypothesize its age based on musical qualities, a fascinating view into the detective work that goes into finding the origins of music for which we only have attestation for from oral tradition. 

In the book Albanian Traditional Music, scholar Shiro Shetuni points to key points of evidence that Lab polyphony has been echoing off Albania’s stony mountain faces since time immemorial—the prominence of calls and shouts, the vocals’ recitative and less melodic nature, and the pentatonic scale. Lab polyphony seems to affirm the importance of communal work and pitching in, each singer’s role filling a distinctive purpose in forming a melodically multitiered whole. The first singer called the marrës (taker) draws out the lines of the course by singing the first line and setting the melody. The second voice, the kthyes (turner), follows with a short individual part. The hedhës (launcher) might have a solo here and there to take the load off the marrës, and then the isos, which can be a soloist or a few people, drone as a base. In this video, a group of men demonstrate the tradition from the casual venue of a restaurant. 

The members of today’s group actually overlap a bit with the group of men in the video, so you get a rare double feature of a performance and an album breakdown. Lab polyphony is like a thick wall of sound unlike anything Phil Spector could’ve come up with, though this is an intimate recording that almost feels like you have a seat at the table. Whereas the tone of the composed Bulgarian female choir featured in the other polyphonic article was more commanding and unpredictable with their sharp melodic twists, the polyphonic singing here is steadied by its drones though still otherworldly. “O rrapi në Peshkëpi” (The maple tree in Peshkëpi) evokes hope and uplift. While most of the voices drone, providing a sturdy foundation for the other vocalists, the other singers intuitively take turns deviating from the main melodic line, crying to the heavens. “Ago, Ago, Ymer Ago!” (“God, God, God of Life!” if the winding path I took to translate that is correct) is but one of many testaments to an astounding ability to hold notes and coordinate as they paint a picture with vocal colors rivaling a Tiffany window. The timbral textures vary greatly—some singers’ voices are braying, other singers use narrower vibrato, the isos drone powerfully, with a stalwart firmness. It vouches for Albania’s unyielding, mystical appreciation of voices’ power, but it also speaks to singing as a familial and communal currency that transcends time, passed down in order to strengthen our bonds with our ancestors and those to come.