Drone music

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For other uses, see Drone.
Drone music
Stylistic origins
Cultural origins
Typical instruments
Electronic musical instruments, Guitars, String instruments, Electronic postproduction equipment
Mainstream popularity Low, mainly in Ambient, Metal and Electronic music fanbases.
Subgenres
None
Fusion genres
Drone metal (alias Drone doom)

Drone music is a minimalist musical style[2] that emphasizes the use of sustained or repeated sounds, notes, or tone-clusters – called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy audio programs with relatively slight harmonic variations throughout each piece compared to other musics. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism".[4]

Drone music[5][6] is also known as drone-based music,[7] drone ambient[8] or ambient drone,[9] dronescape[10] or the modern alias dronology,[11] and often simply as drone.

Explorers of drone music since the 1960s have included Theater of Eternal Music (aka The Dream Syndicate), Charlemagne Palestine, Eliane Radigue, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Robert Fripp & Brian Eno, Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Stars of the Lid, Earth, Coil, Sonic Boom, Phill Niblock, and Sunn O))).

Contents

[edit] Overview

Ethnic or spiritual music which contains drones and is rhythmically still or very slow, called "drone music",[5] can be found in many parts of the world, including the Japanese gagaku classical tradition; Scottish pibroch piping; didgeridoo music in Australia, Hindustani classical music (which is accompanied almost invariably by the tambura, a four-string instrument which is only capable of playing a drone); possibly (disputed) in pre-polyphonic organum vocal music of late medieval Europe[12]; and the Byzantine chant's ison (or drone-singing, attested after the fifteenth century)[13]. Repetition of tones, supposed to be in imitation of bagpipes,[14][15][16][17] is found in a wide variety of genres and musical forms. However, the lineage of stillness and long tones occurring in classical compositions during adagio movements, including, for instance, the third movement of Anton Webern's Five Small Pieces for Orchestra, as well as in Northern European folk musics in the form of "slow airs" has directly descended into modern popular and electronic music in a way which is directly derived from the milieu of La Monte Young, Tony Conrad, John Cale, Charlemagne Palestine and others in 1960s New York.[citation needed]

The modern genre also called drone music[6][18] (called "dronology" by some books, labels and stores,[19] to differentiate it from ethnic drone-based music) is often applied to artists who have allied themselves closely with underground music and the post-rock or experimental music genres.[3] Drone music also fits into the genres of found sound, minimalist music,[2] dark ambient, drone doom/drone metal, and noise music. Most often utilizing electronic instruments or electronic processing of acoustic instruments, they typically create dense and unmoving harmonies and a stilled or "hovering" sense of time. While the hallmarks of drone music are easy to recognize, the backgrounds and goals of the artists vary greatly.

Pitchfork Media and Allmusic journalist Mark Richardson defined it thus: "The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phil Niblock and, especially, LaMonte Young is what happens when a fixation on held tones reaches a tipping point. Timbre is reduced to either a single clear instrument or a sine wave, silence disappears completely, and the base-level interaction between small clusters of "pure" tone becomes the music's content. This kind of work takes what typically helps us to distinguish "music" from "sound," discards nearly all of it, and then starts over again from scratch."[20]

As summarized in a review, "Drone music is about as far away from music as you can get before it stops being music [...] In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was oooooommmmmmm. God was, apparently, a drone music pioneer, and there is something religious about this music... or rather, something spiritual."[21]

[edit] La Monte Young and the Theater of Eternal Music

La Monte Young, fascinated with "the sound of the wind blowing", the "60 cycle per second drone" of "step-down transformers on telephone poles", the tanpura drone and the alap of Indian classical music, "certain static aspects of serialism, as in the Webern slow movement of the Symphony Opus 21", and Japanese gagaku "which has sustained tones in it in the instruments such as the Sho",[22] started writing music incorporating sustained tones in 1957 with the middle section of Four Brass[22], then in 1958 what he describes as "the first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences"[22] with Trio for Strings, before exploring this drone music within the Theater of Eternal Music that he founded in 1962.

The Theater of Eternal Music is a multi-media performance group who, in its 1960s–1970s heyday included at various times La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, John Cale, Billy Name, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea and others, each from various backgrounds (classical composition and performance, painting, mathematics, poetry, jazz, etc.) and brought with them concepts of the meaning of the music they were involved with as well as audiences who might not have otherwise attended.[citation needed] Operating from the world of lofts and galleries in New York in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies in particular, and tied to the aesthetics of Fluxus and the post-John Cage-continuum, the group gave performances on the East Coast of the United States as well as in Western Europe comprised long periods of sensory innundation with combinations of harmonic relationships, which moved slowly from one to the next by means of "laws" laid out by Young regarding "allowable" sequencies and simultaneities, perhaps in imitation of Hindustani classical music which he, Zazeela and the others either studied or at least admired.[23] The group released nothing during their lifetime (although Young and Zazeela issued a collaborative LP in 1969[24], and Young contributed in 1970 one side of a flexi-disc accompanying Aspen magazine[25]). The concerts themselves were influential on their own upon the art world including Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose Stimmung bears their influence most strikingly)[26][27] and the drone-based minimalist works of dozens of other composers many of whom made parallel innovations including Young classmate Pauline Oliveros, or Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Yoshi Wada, Phill Niblock and many others.[28] Then group member John Cale went on to extend and popularize this work into 1960s rock music with the Velvet Underground (along with songwriter Lou Reed).

In 2000, La Monte Young wrote: "[About] the style of music that I originated, I believe that the sustained tone branch of minimalism, also known as “drone music,” is a fertile area for exploration."[4]

[edit] John Cale and the Velvet Underground

The combination of Cale's grinding viola drone with Reed's two-chord guitar figure of the Velvet Underground's song "Heroin" on their first album, The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967) laid the foundation for drone music as a Rock music genre in close proximity to the art-world project of the Theatre of Eternal Music.[3] Cale's departure from the group in 1968 blurred matters considerably, as Reed continued to play primitive figures (sometimes in reference to R&B), while Cale went quickly on to produce the Stooges' debut (1969), including his viola drone on the track "We Will Fall" and Nico's The Marble Index (1969) which also included Cale's viola drone on "Frozen Warnings". Later, Lou Reed issued in 1975 a double LP of multi-tracked electric-guitar feedback titled Metal Machine Music which listed (misspelling included) "Drone cognizance and harmonic possibilities vis a vis Lamont Young's Dream Music"[29] among its "Specifications".

[edit] George Harrison and the Beatles

Several songs by The Beatles, the most popular and influential group of the 1960s, include drones. In 1964's "I Feel Fine" opens with a two seconds of guitar feedback as a drone (also the first recorded example of feedback[30]). Drawing on George Harrison's studies and friendship with Hindustani classical sitarist, Ravi Shankar, from 1966's "Love You To" through 1967's "The Inner Light", many of Harrison's compositions include the tambura, an instrument dedicated in Indian music to harmonic stasis. John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows", a quasi-mystical song based around text from the Tibetan Book of the Dead also includes the tambura and is sung around a pedal-point drone, as in medieval Western liturgical music.[31]

[edit] Krautrock

In the late sixties and early seventies German rock musicians including Can, Neu! and Faust drew from the heritage of experimental sixties rock like the Beatles at their most collagic and jamming as well as from composers like Stockhausen and La Monte Young.[32] These groups became influential on art-rock contemporaries in their own day and punk-rock and post-punk players subsequently.[33][34] Tony Conrad, of the Theater of Eternal Music, notably made a collaborative LP with Faust which included nothing but two sides of complex violin drones accompanied only by a single note on bass guitar and a bloody-minded percussion accompaniment. Single-note bass-lines were also featured on Can's track "Mother Sky" (album Soundtracks, 1970) and the entirety of Die Krupp's first album (1979).

[edit] New age, cosmic and ambient music

Parallel to Krautrock's rockist impulses, across North America and Europe, some musicians sought to reconcile Asian classicalism, austere minimalism and folk music's consonant aspects in the service of spiritualism. Among them was Theater of Eternal Music alumnus Terry Riley with his 1964 In C[35][36] and who had become a disciple, along with Young and Zazeela, of the Hindustani classical singer Pandit Pran Nath. In parallel, then-Krautrock band Tangerine Dream and their recently departed member Klaus Schulze both moved toward a more contemplative and consonant harmonic music, each releasing their own drone music album on Ohr Records in August 1972 (Zeit and Irrlicht, respectively). Meanwhile, as increasingly elaborate studio technology was born during the seventies, Brian Eno, an alumn of the glam/art-rock band Roxy Music postulated ambient music (drawing, in part from John Cage and his antecedent Erik Satie's 1910s concept of furniture music, in part from minimalists such as La Monte Young)[37] as "able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting".[38] While his late seventies ambient tape-music recordings are not drone music, his acknowledgment of Young ("the daddy of us all")[39] and his influence on later drone music made him an undeniable link in the chain.

[edit] Shoegaze and indie-drone

In the UK, a crop of 1980s rock bands appeared who owed greater or lesser debts to the Velvet Underground, Krautrock, and subsequent droning trends[citation needed]. Cocteau Twins, Coil, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, Loop (who covered Can's "Mother Sky") Brian Jonestown Massacre (Methodrone album) and Spacemen 3, (who used a text by Young as text for the liner notes to their record Dreamweapon: an evening of contemporary sitar music, a live 45-minute drone piece),[citation needed] for instance reasserted the influence of the Velvet Underground and its antecedents in their use of overwhelming volume and hovering sounds, even as they asserted rockish and propulsive rhythms.[citation needed] Sonic Youth uses a large number of guitars with alternate tunings to emphasise the drone in almost all of their songs.[citation needed] They also quite often prolong notes in their song structures to add more droning in their song. In New Zealand the Dead C. expanded the pure-drone passages between songs further,[citation needed] while in the US Pelt and Charalambides expanded them further still while referring to eighties and nineties noise music, Metal Machine Music-derived performers like Merzbow, C.C.C.C., and KK Null.[citation needed]

[edit] Electronics and metal

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, drone music was intermixed with rock, ambient, dark ambient, electronic and new-age music. Many drone music originators, including Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue and La Monte Young are still active and continute to work exclusively in long, sustained tones. Meanwhile, however, younger musicians tied to electronic composition like Jliat and Ian Nagoski remain dedicated almost exclusively to drone music, while improvisors like Hototogisu and Sunroof! play nothing but sustained fields which are close to drones. Sunn O))), a drone metal band, almost exclusively plays sustained tone pieces, and their peers Merzbow and Boris released a collaborative 62-minute drone piece called Sun Baked Snow Cave in 2005.[citation needed]

[edit] Examples

Main article: List of drone artists

Some notable examples include, chronologically:

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ From experimental music, not ambient music: Although drone is now seen as a subgenre of both Minimalism and Ambient, Ambient came in part from Drone, not the other way around (cf. below citations of Cook & Pople 2004, p. 502, and ambient founder Eno's quote about Young)
  2. ^ a b c Cox & Warner 2004, p. 301 (in "Thankless Attempts at a Definition of Minimalism" by Kyle Gann): "Certainly many of the most famous minimalist pieces relied on a motoric 8th-note beat, although there were also several composers like Young and Niblock interested in drones with no beat at all. [...] Perhaps “steady-beat-minimalism” is a criterion that could divide the minimalist repertoire into two mutually exclusive bodies of music, pulse-based music versus drone-based music."
  3. ^ a b c Cox & Warner 2004, p. 359 (in "Post-Rock" by Simon Reynolds): "The Velvets melded folkadelic songcraft with a wall-of-noise aesthetic that was half Phil Spector, half La Monte Young—and thereby invented dronology, a term that loosely describes 50 per cent of today's post-rock activity." (about the Velvet Underground and post-rock)
  4. ^ a b Young 2000, p. 27
  5. ^ a b Early use of "drone music" as an ethnic or spiritual, drone-based music can be found such as in 1958 (American Musicological Society, JAMS (Journal of the American Musicological Society), 1958, p. 255: "Remarks such as those on drone effects produced by double pipes with an unequal number of holes provoke thoughts about the mystery of drone music in antiquity and about primitive polyphony.") or 1972 (Barry S. Brook & al., Perspectives in Musicology, W. W. Norton, 1972, ISBN 0393021424, p. 85: "My third example of the force of tradition concerns another large problem, the persistence of drone music from the Middle Ages to the present day.")
  6. ^ a b Early use of "drone music" as a non-ethnic, new or experimental genre can be found such as in 1974 (Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Studio Vista, 1974, ISBN 0028712005, p. 20: "[...] LaMonte Young's drone music [...]") or again 1974 (cf. "drone-music" in the Hitchcock 1974 quote about Riley)
  7. ^ "Drone-based music" is used for instance in 1995 (Paul Griffiths, Modern music and after: Directions Since 1945, Oxford University Press, 1995, ISBN 0198165110, p. 209: "Young founded his own performing group, the Theatre of Eternal Music, to give performances of highly repetitive, drone-based music"), or in Cow & Warner 2004 (cf. cited quote of p. 301).
  8. ^ "Drone ambient" is used for instance on Allmusic, such as in the review of Soundtrack for the Aquarium ("representative of the drone ambient side of his work").[1]
  9. ^ "Ambient drone" is used for instance on Allmusic (and thus mirrored on VH1, Amazon, etc.), such as in the biography of Stars of the Lid ("Ambient drone duo Stars of the Lid")[2] or de:Mathias Grassow ("widely recognized as 'the King of the Ambient Drone' ")[3] or on PopMatters ("experimental no-man’s-lands like ambient drone"[4], "seminal works of ambient drone"[5]).
  10. ^ "Dronescape" is used for instance on Allmusic, such as in the review of New York Noise, Vol. 2 ("one of Sonic Youth's first known recordings, the dronescape 'I Dreamed I Dream,' ")[6]
  11. ^ The independent record store Aquarius Records, in this catalog page (Archive.org copy of 2002), claims: "Here at Aquarius, we've coined such neologisms as "dronology" and "fuckery", simply because we hope that such words offer enough connotation even without a lot of context."
  12. ^ Speculated in 1988 by French musicologist Marcel Pérès(fr) of Ensemble Organum (as summarized here) but disputed in a master thesis (Robert Howe, "The Performance of Mediæval Music in Contemporary Culture", PDF file, p. 6-8)
  13. ^ "there is no clear testimony to the use of the ison until after the fifteenth century" (in St. Anthony's Monastery, "Introduction to Byzantine Chant", p. 1). Elsewhere is specified: "The earliest notification of the custom appears to have been made in 1584 by the German traveller, Martin Crusius." (in Dimitri E. Conomos (Oxford University), "A Brief Survey of the History of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Chant", section "7. Post-Byzantine Era")
  14. ^ Rosamond E. M. Harding, Origins of Musical Time and Expression, Oxford University Press, 1938, Part 2 "Studies in the imitation of musical instruments by other instruments and by voices", p. 42-43: "IMITATION OF BAGPIPES: Bagpipes may be called a world-instrument, since they are found in most parts of the world. They are also of considerable antiquity, being known to the ancient Egyptians. [...] There are three characteristics of Bagpipe imitations all three of which may be present at the same time and any one of which is sufficient to characterize Bagpipe influence, if not a direct imitation. The first is the drone, usually placed in the bass, and consisting of one note alone or of two or three notes played together. A drone consisting of two adjacent notes sounded alternately is also typical. Dr. Naylor, in his work An Elizabethan Virginal Book, has drawn attention to the fact that many early English melodies are founded on a drone consisting of two alternating notes, and that the Northumbrian Bagpipe had alternative drones and an arrangement for changing the note of the drones."
  15. ^ George Grove, Stanley Sadie, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Macmillan Publishers, 1st ed., 1980 (ISBN 0333231112), vol. 7 (Fuchs to Gyuzelev), "André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry", p. 708: "in L'épreuve villageoise, where the various folk elements - couplet form, simplicity of style, straightforward rhythm, drone bass in imitation of bagpipes - combine to express at once ingenuous coquetry and sincerity."
  16. ^ Leroy Ostransky, Perspectives on Music, Prentice-Hall, 1963, p. 141: "GAVOTTE. A dance consisting of two lively strains in 4/4 time, usually with an upbeat of two quarter-notes. It sometimes alternates with a musette, which is a gavotte over a drone bass, an imitation of bagpipes."
  17. ^ David Wyn Jones, Music in Eighteenth-Century Austria, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 0521028590, p. 117: "Table 5.1 - Pastoral traits in eighteenth-century masses [...] II - Harmony: A) Drones in imitation of bagpipes"
  18. ^ "drone music" is also used in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-century Music (cf. Cook & Pople 2004, p. 551, about the Theatre of Eternal Music: "his drone music [...] Young went on to develop this early drone music into intricate and extended compositions") or on Pitchfork Media ("During that time I wanted my drone music to have as prickly an edge as possible"[7]).
  19. ^ "Dronology" is used for instance as a genre tag at Aquarius Records (who claim they coined it[8]), Chemical Records[9], Epitonic.com[10], and Last.fm[11].
  20. ^ Mark Richardson, "Stars of the Lid: And Their Refinement of the Decline" review, April 3, 2007, www.pitchforkmedia.com
  21. ^ Callum Zeff, "The Dream Syndicate" (Archive.org copy of 2003) — A review that's also an overview of drone music.
  22. ^ a b c d Zuckerman 2002.
  23. ^ Young, Zazeela, and Hindustani classical music: Mela Foundation, "Pandit Pran Nath Memorial Tributes", www.melafoundation.org (quoting The Eye, the SPIC MACAY (Society for the Promotion of Indian Classical Music and Culture Amongst Youth) quarterly magazine): "He [Young] is a master of Hindustani classical music. La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, founders of the MELA Foundation Dream House in New York are responsible for having single-handedly introduced vocal Hindustani classical music to America. In 1970 when they brought renowned master vocalist Pandit Pran Nath of the Kirana Gharana to the U.S. and became his first Western disciples, studying with him for twenty-six years in the traditional gurukula manner of living with the guru, [...]"
  24. ^ La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, vinyl LP (limited to 2800 copies) dubbed The Black Record (1969), Munich: Edition X, featuring two side-long compositions.[12][13]
  25. ^ Flexi-disc "Jackson MacLow / La Monte Young", Side B: credited "Drift Study 31 1 69 by La Monte Young" (full title is "Excerpt from Drift Study 31 I 69 12:17:33 - 12:49:58 PM",[14] from its recording date and time), accompanying Young's article "Notes on Continuous Periodic Composite Sound Waveform Environment Realizations", in Aspen no. 8 "The Fluxus Issue", New York: Aspen Communications Inc., NYC., Fall-Winter, 1970-1971.
  26. ^ Potter 2002, p. 89: "[Young's] influence on already established composers who were themselves his student mentors is not, however, confined to Cage. Karlheinz Stockhausen's exploration of the harmonic series, notably in Stimmung (1968), has often been linked to Young's example. [...] The German composer seems to have visited Young and Zazeela when in New York, in 1964 or 1965, and listened to a rehearsal of The Theatre of Eternal Music. He requested tapes of the group's performances which, perhaps surprisingly, Young gave him. Stockhausen's own musicians visited Young and Zazeela's Dream House installation in Antwerp in 1969."
  27. ^ Steve Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000 (ed. by Paul Hillier), Oxford University Press US, 2002, ISBN 0195111710, p. 202: "I didn't hear any of Feldman's music until 1962, when I heard a piece of Stockhausen's called Refrain. I only realized later that this was Stockhausen's “Feldman piece” just as Stimmung was his “LaMonte Young piece”."
  28. ^ Cox & Warner 2004, p. 401 ("Chronology" of key dates): "1964 [...] Young, Marian Zazeela, John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Tony Conrad form the Theatre of Eternal Music, the foundation of drone-based minimalism;"
  29. ^ Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music (1975), double vinyl LP, RCA Records (CPL2-1101), "Specifications": text copy, image copy (reissue).
  30. ^ First recorded example of feedback: sourced at the "I Feel Fine" article.
  31. ^ Boon 2003
  32. ^ Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, Routledge, 1999 (from a 1998 hardcover), ISBN 9780415923736, p. 50: "the truly “progressive” bands of the late sixties and early seventies had more in common with twentieth-century avant-classical composers (electro-acoustic, musique concrète, the New York school of drone-minimalism)"
  33. ^ Cook & Pople 2004, p. 547: "On the other hand, the legacy of La Monte Young was flourishing in late 1970s punk rock."
  34. ^ Cox & Warner 2004, p. 320 (in "Digital Discipline: Minimalism in House and Techno" by Philip Sherburne): "In the late 1970s, rock music produced its own minimalist reaction to inflated, overproduced mainstream rock. The results, No Wave and punk rock, often made explicit links to the 60s' drone-minimalism tradition, as with Glenn Branca's bands Theoretical Girls and The Static, his guitar orchestras, and the many groups that he influenced."
  35. ^ Hugh Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction, Prentice-Hall, 1974, ISBN 0136083803, p. 269: "A few others besides Young have pursued similar paths of minimal drone-music, notably Terry Riley (b. 1935) in works like In C for orchestra [...]"
  36. ^ Cook & Pople 2004, p. 659 ("Personalia" mini biographies): "Riley, Terry (b. 1935) [...] A meeting with La Monte Young deeply affected his outlook [...]"
  37. ^ Cook & Pople 2004, p. 502: "Semi-audible music had been consistently prefigured in the music of left-field composers from Erik Satie onwards. ‘Ambient music’ emerged as a category when in the 1980s, influenced by the minimalism of La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, Brian Eno started to make music for deliberately sub-audible presentation, [...]"
  38. ^ Brian Eno, 1978, sourced at Ambient Music.
  39. ^ Potter 2002, p. 91: Brian Eno saying "La Monte Young is the daddy of us all" (with endnote 113 p. 349 referencing "Quoted in Palmer, A Father Figure for the Avant-Garde, p. 49").
  40. ^ Gilbert Perlein & Bruno Corà (eds) & al., Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial! ("An anthological retrospective", catalog of an exhibition held in 2000), New York: Delano Greenidge, 2000, ISBN 9780929445083, p. 226: "This symphony, 40 minutes in length (in fact 20 minutes followed by 20 minutes of silence) is constituted of a single 'sound' stretched out, deprived of its attack and end which creates a sensation of vertigo, whirling the sensibility outside time."
  41. ^ See also more sources and two recordings of the Monotone Symphony at the Yves Klein article.
  42. ^ Sedimental Records, "Stars of the Lid: Music for Nitrous Oxide" (original press release that went out with promo copies), www.sedimental.com

[edit] References

[edit] External links


v • d • e
Ambient music
Other electronic music genres
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_music"
Personal tools
Languages