Drone (music)

In music, a drone is a harmonic or monophonic effect or accompaniment where a note or chord is continuously sounded throughout much or all of a piece, sustained or repeated, and most often establishing a tonality upon which the rest of the piece is built. The systematic (not occasional) use of drones originated in Ancient Southwest Asia and was spread north and west to Europe, east to India, and south to Africa (van der Merwe 1989, p.11).

Similarly, a drone is the name of a part of a musical instrument intended to produce such a sustained pitch, generally without the ongoing attention of the player. A sitar features three or four resonating drone strings and Indian sargam is practiced to a drone. Bagpipes (like Great Highland Bagpipe and the Uilleann pipes) feature a number of drone pipes, giving the instruments their characteristic sounds. The fifth string on a five-string bluegrass banjo is a drone string with a separate tuning peg that places the end of the string five frets down the neck of the instrument; this string is usually tuned to the same note as that which the first string produces when played at the fifth fret, and the drone string is seldom fretted when playing bluegrass. The bass strings of Slovenian instrument drone zither also freely resonate as a drone.

Composers of classical music occasionally used a drone (especially one on open fifths) to evoke a rustic or archaic atmosphere, perhaps Scottish or other early or folk music. Examples include:
* Haydn, Symphony No. 104, "London", opening of finale, accompanying a folk melody
* Beethoven, Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral", opening and trio section of scherzo
* Berlioz, Harold in Italy, accompanying oboes as they imitate the piffari of Italian peasants
* Bartók, in his adaptations for piano of Hungarian and other folk music

However, drones are less often used in common practice classical music because the longer and more central a drone the less functional it is and because equal temperament causes slight mistunings which become more apparent over a drone, especially when also sustained. On the other hand, drones may be purposely dissonant, as often in the music of Phill Niblock. The best known drone piece in the concert repertory is the Prelude to Wagner's Rheingold (1854) wherein the bass instruments sustain an Eb throughout the entire movement (Erickson 1975, p.94). Later drone pieces include Loren Rush's Hard Music (1970), Folke Rabe's Was?? (1968), and Robert Erickson's Down at Piraeus.

Contemporary classical musicians who make prominent use of drones, often with just or other non-equal tempered tunings, include La Monte Young and many of his students, David First, the band Coil, Pauline Oliveros and Stuart Dempster, Alvin Lucier (Music On A Long Thin Wire), Ellen Fullman, and Arnold Dreyblatt. The music of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi is essentially drone-based. Shorter drones or the general concept of a continuous element are often used by many other composers.

A drone differs from a pedal tone or point in degree or quality. A pedal point may be a form of nonchord tone and thus required to resolve unlike a drone, or a pedal point may simply be considered a shorter drone, a drone being a longer pedal point.

See also

* Dronology or "drone music" or "drone": a post-classical popular music genre with heavy emphasis on the drone harmonic effect
* Drone doom is a form of heavy metal music with simplistic song structures focusing almost entirely on droning, heavily downtuned electric guitar and bass guitar, often lacking vocals or drums. Songs often reach or greatly exceed ten minutes in length.

Source

*Erickson, Robert (1975). Sound Structure in Music. University of California Press. ISBN 0520023765.
* van der Merwe, Peter (1989). Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 0193161214.