On the topic of pain and drone sounds, during my early years at secondary school some of the pupils would play a cruel trick on one of our teachers, a Mr Griffin, who, to be fair, didn't really deserve this, and was good at his job, and a likeable character. Arguably the same goes, in very different ways, with punk, metal, ambient and classical. So while there is beauty and meditation to drone music, it also requires a recalibration of patience and there is also an element of pain, as is necessary to break through with many forms of music genre in order to understand and appreciate them. The music was invariable long and experimental, but one overriding theme is that did away with any notion of the 3-minute song and looked for a more expansive perception of time, again a whole philosophy taken from Indian traditions. Immersing himself in Indian classical music, which is the true origin of drone music, and something that readers may also wish to explore, in 1962 Young founded an experimental group, The Theatre of Eternal Music, involving a variety of talents from different backgrounds, from other classical composers to poets and jazz musicians, painters and mathematicians, including Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, John Cale, Billy Name, Jon Hassell, and Alex Dea. In the 20th century one of the key figures in drone music is La Monte Young, the American composer born in 1935, who said he was fascinated from a young age by droning noises, such as "the sound of the wind blowing", and the "60-cycle-per-second drone step-down transformers on telephone poles". In Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (1989), Peter van der Merwe writes that “of all harmonic devices a drone is not only the simplest, but probably also the most fertile." Its effect is often, but not always minimalism. They can be as single notes or chords or other clusters, and their effect is often strange and mesmeric, the drone sound something around which other notes can play, moving in and out of harmony with it, creating dissonance, but somehow that central stem of sound is the foundation, the mothership, the place where it must always return. And in music itself, the chant of monks or Mongolian to Bulgarian voices to shrill blow of bagpipe pibroch, or the growl of didgeridoo, the turn of the hurdy-gurdy, the low rumbling sustained pedal of church organ to the non-stop thrum of bass or guitar or twang of the banjo's fifth string, of Slovenian drone zither or Welsh crwth, the puffing of a shruti box, the ping of Indian tanpura, Japanese gagaku, the ottu, the ektar, dotara, the surpeti, the swarmandal and shankh, all the way to sine waves and strange sounds of analogue or digital electronica.ĭrone music is as old as the hills, but as modern as this very moment, transcending time, passing from ancient Indian classic to western bedroom composer, from Byzantine chants to 20th-century avant garde, from classical to krautrock, new age and ambient, shoegaze and indie, metal, experimental and film music, from the meditative and calm, to the clashing and nightmarish.īut given that it spans throughout music's history, where are its parameters and definitions for the benefit of this topic? Drone is any music, or songs dominated by sustained sounds, very long notes, either in instrument or voice, often occurring continuously throughout a song or piece, or at least recurring regularly. The soft hum of fridge to the loud, distant rumble of train or traffic, the constant trickle of ice melting, of water rushing, of rocks cracking, of wind blowing, it's the rush of thought, of blood coursing, of brains whirring. my idea was to make music that was more like painting." – Brian Eno "Music should be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular it must be as ignorable as it is interesting. “It’s a liminal thing, humming, And I'm always interested in liminal things.” – Max Richter
"Music is the best means we have of digesting time." – W. "Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.” – Ludwig van Beethoven "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." – William Congreve "There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres." – Pythagoras
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