Drone music is a
minimalist musical style that emphasizes
the use of
sustained or
repeated sounds, notes, or
tone-clusters – called
drone. 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".
Drone music is also known as
drone-based music,
drone ambient or
ambient drone,
dronescape or the modern alias
dronology, and often simply as
drone.
Explorers of drone music since the 1960s have included
Theater of Eternal Music (aka The
Dream Syndicate:
La Monte Young,
Marian Zazeela,
Tony Conrad,
Angus
Maclise,
John Cale, et al.),
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,
Sheila Chandra, and
Sunn
O))).
Overview
Ethnic or spiritual music which contains
drone and is rhythmically still or very slow,
called "drone music", can be found in many parts of the world,
including bagpipe traditions, among them Scottish
pibroch piping;
didgeridoo music in Australia,
South Indian classical music
and
Hindustani classical
music (which is accompanied almost invariably by the
tambura, a four-string instrument which is only
capable of playing a drone); the sustained tones found in the
Japanese
gagaku classical tradition; possibly
(disputed) in pre-polyphonic
organum vocal
music of late medieval EuropeSpeculated 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); and the
Byzantine chant's
ison (or
drone-singing, attested after the fifteenth
century). Repetition of tones, supposed to be in imitation of
bagpipes, 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.
The modern genre also called drone music (called "dronology" by
some books, labels and stores, 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.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) Drone music
also fits into the genres of
found
sound,
minimalist music,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."
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."
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."
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", started
writing music incorporating sustained tones in 1957 with the middle
section of
Four Brass, 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" 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. 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. The
group released nothing during their lifetime (although Young and
Zazeela issued a collaborative LP in 1969, and Young contributed in
1970 one side of a
flexi-disc
accompanying
Aspen
magazine). The concerts themselves were influential on
their own upon the art world including
Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose
Stimmung bears their influence
most strikingly) 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. 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."
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. 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" among its
"Specifications".
George Harrison and the Beatles
Several songs by
The Beatles, the most
popular and influential group of the 1960s, include drones. 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.
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. These groups
became influential on art-rock contemporaries in their own day and
punk-rock and post-punk players subsequently. 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).
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 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) as "able to
accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing
one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting".
While his late seventies ambient tape-music recordings are not
drone music, his acknowledgment of Young ("the daddy of us all")
and his influence on later drone music made him an undeniable link
in the chain.
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 .
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), 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.
Sonic Youth uses a large number of
guitars with
alternate tunings to
emphasise the drone in almost all of their songs. 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, 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.
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.
Examples
Some notable examples include, chronologically:
- Yves Klein: as a precedent, his 1949
Monotone Symphony (formally The Monotone-Silence
Symphony, conceived 1947–1948) is an orchestral 40-minute
piece whose first movement is an unvarying 20-minute drone (the
second and last movement being a 20-minute silence).
- La Monte Young's 1958 Trio
for Strings, that he describes as "the first work in the
history of music that is completely composed of long sustained
tones and silences."
- Giacinto Scelsi's 1959 piece
Quattro pezzi su una nota sola for one pitch and numerous
subsequent pieces by himself and his followers and contemporaries
in the realm of spectral
composition.
- La Monte Young's 1960s
drone-based pieces, solo and with John
Cale, Tony Conrad, Marian Zazeela, Terry
Riley, Angus MacLise, Terry
Jennings and/or Billy Name in the
Theater of Eternal Music
(aka The Dream Syndicate), including: Day of Niagara: Inside the Dream Syndicate,
Vol. I (1965/2000).
- The "free form freakout" leading into The Red Crayola's "Pink Stainless Tale" from
their Parable of Arable
Land album (1967).
- Late 1960s–1980s work by minimal composers and gallery artists
Yoshimasa Wada (The Rise and Fall
of the Elephantine Serpentine), John
Cale (Sun Blindness
Music, 1965–1968/2001; Dream Interpretation: Inside
the Dream Syndicate, Vol. II, 1965–1968/2001;
Stainless Gamelan: Inside the
Dream Syndicate, Vol. III, 1965-1968/2002), Tony Conrad solo (Joan of Arc, 1968/2006) and with
Faust (Outside the Dream
Syndicate, 1973; Outside the Dream Syndicate
Alive, 1995/2005), Terry Fox
(Berlino), Harry Bertoia,
Jon Gibson (Two
Solo Pieces), Charlemagne
Palestine (In Mid Air, 1967–1970/2003; Four
Manifestations on Six Elements, 1974/1996;
Schlingen-Blängen, 1988/1999), David Hykes (Hearing Solar Winds),
Pauline Oliveros (Horse Sings
From Cloud), Alvin Lucier
(Music on a Long, Thin Wire), Harley Gaber (The Wind Rises in the
North), Stuart Dempster (In
the Great Abbey of Clement VI), and Remko Scha (Machine Guitars), to name
only a few. All used long, sustained and timbrally dense harmonic
material for the entirety of various of their pieces.
- Kraftwerk's experimental/drone
self-titled first album Kraftwerk (1970): the 4-minute intro
to "Stratovarius", the organ drone on most of "Megaherz", the first
half of "Vom Himmel Hoch".
- Harold Budd's 1970 experimental
drone pieces "The Oak of the Golden Dreams" and "Coeur D'Orr" on
The Oak of the Golden Dreams.
- Klaus Schulze's early "organ
drone" albums Irrlicht
(1972), and to a lesser extent the mix of drone and space on
Cyborg (1973) (the organ
drone track "Synphära", the cello drone track "Chromengel").
- Tangerine Dream's ambient drone
album Zeit (1972), and to a lesser
extent the mix of drone ambient and space music on Phaedra (1974).
- Fripp and Eno: the 21-minute drone ambient of "The Heavenly
Music Corporation" on No
Pussyfooting (1973), the 28-minute drone ambient of "An
Index of Metals" on Evening
Star (1975). Fripp revisited guitar drone in 1998 with the
3-minute intro of "Sus-tayn-Z" (a play on "sustains") from the
Live Groove album of King Crimson's ProjeKct
Two.
- On Miles Davis' Agharta (1975): the last 6 minutes of
the last track, especially the last 2 minutes.
- Jon Hassell's Vernal
Equinox (1977)
- Robert Rich's early
albums Sunyata (1982),
Trances (1983), Drones (1983).
- Steve Roach: the drone
ambient album Structures
from Silence (1984).
- Coil's drone music albums
How to Destroy Angels
EP (1984) and LP (1992), Time
Machines (1998), and to a lesser extent ANS (2003). Plus many tracks on non-drone
albums, such as "Tenderness of Wolves" on Scatology (1984), "Wrim Wram Wrom" on
Stolen and
Contaminated Songs (1992), "Cold Dream of an Earth Star"
and "Die Wolfe Kommen Zuruck" on Black Light District: A Thousand Lights in a
Darkened Room (1996), "North" on Moon's Milk (1998
singles). (Plus many semi-drone tracks such as "Her Friends the
Wolves...", "Moon's Milk or Under an Unquiet Skull Part 1", "Bee
Stings", "Refusal of Leave to Land", "Magnetic North", etc.)
- Vidna Obmana: the drone-ambient
album Soundtrack for the
Aquarium (1992/2001), and the drone ambient "night disc"
(percussionless disc two) of Well of Souls (1995, with
Steve Roach).
- On Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume
II (1994): especially "[spots]" and "[tassels]", and to a
lesser degree tracks such as "[tree]", "[parallel stripes]", "[grey
stripe]", and "[white blur 2]".
- Labradford: the drone ambient album
Prazision (1994), and to a lesser
extent some drone tracks on A
Stable Reference (1995).
- Stars of the Lid (described as
"Austin drone stars" in 1995): the overwhelming majority of their
work, from Music for Nitrous
Oxide (1995) and Gravitational
Pull vs. the Desire for an Aquatic Life (1996) to the more
classical-tinged The Tired Sounds of Stars
of the Lid (2001) and Stars of
the Lid and Their Refinement of the Decline (2007).
- Mystical Sun: the drone ambient
album Primordial
Atmospheres (1994), especially the track Journey to Samadhi which fuses 33
minute drones with binarual beats.
- Sheila Chandra's album
ABoneCroneDrone (1996) consists of minimalist vocal
phrases over complex electronic drones combined with acoustic
drones. She found melodies inherent within the harmonics of the drones, so that the music was
incomplete without the listeners finding their own melodies arising
from the drones, as she invited the listeners to be creators. She
continued this approach onto her next album, This Sentence Is
True (The Previous Sentence Is False). This work developed
from her previous explorations based in Indian music using drones such as the
tambura.
- Bowery Electric's "Postscript"
on the album Beat (1996).
- Gescom (a side-project of Autechre): the experimental album Minidisc (1998) is half drone ambient
(tracks "Cranusberg [1-3]", "Fully [1-2]", "Shoegazer", "Polarized
Beam Splitter [1-5]", "Dan Dan Dan [1-4]", "A Newer Beginning
[1-2]", "Go On", and to a lesser degree "Interchangeable World
[1-3]", "Yo! DMX Crew", "New Contact Lense", "1D Shapethrower",
"Inter", "Of Our Time", or the drone techno of "Pricks
[1-4]").
- Radiohead's "Treefingers" (on the
album Kid A, 2000) is a cross of
drone ambient and space music.
- Biosphere : half of his
ambient/drone album Shenzhou (2002), and his drone album
Autour de la Lune
(2004).
- Boards of Canada : the drone
ambient of "Corsair" on Geogaddi
(2002).
- Wilco's album A Ghost Is Born (2004) contains "Less
Than You Think", a 15-minute track containing ~12 minutes of
droning ambience after a brief piano-based melody.
- Contemporary drone composers such as Phill Niblock, Leif
Elggren, Eliane Radigue
- Dark ambient, noise music, post-industrial music and improvised music bands and projects
involved with drone music include Autopsia,
Die Krupps, KK
Null, Zoviet France, Matthew Bower's Hototogisu, C.C.C.C., Merzbow, Wapstan.
- Other contemporary bands representative of this genre include
Maeror Tri, Children of the Drone, Windy & Carl, Troum, Mirko Uhlig,
House of Low Culture, Growing, Cisfinitum. Some important hearths for bands in
the genre include Soleilmoon or Drone Records.
- "The Barometric Sea" by Deepspace is
drone-based, taking in many ambient and drone influences.
- Most of Bethany Curve's songs are
drone-based, made only with guitars.
- Erik Wøllo: the electronic drone
ambient album The Polar Drones (2003).
- Steven Wilson's solo debut
Insurgentes (2008) contains
various drone elements throughout the whole album.
See also
Notes
- "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).
- "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]
- "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]).
- "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]
- 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."
- 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.")
- A precedent directly cited by La Monte Young, see his quote
below (Zuckerman 2002).
- "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")
- 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."
- 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."
- 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."
- 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"
- 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)
- "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]).
- "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].
- Mark Richardson, "Stars of the Lid: And Their Refinement of the
Decline" review, April 3, 2007, www.pitchforkmedia.com
- Callum Zeff, "The Dream Syndicate" (Archive.org copy of 2003) — A
review that's also an overview of drone music.
- Zuckerman 2002.
- 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, [...]"
- 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]
- 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.
- 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."
- 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”."
- 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;"
- Young 2000, p. 27
- Lou Reed,
Metal Machine Music (1975), double
vinyl LP, RCA Records (CPL2-1101), "Specifications": text copy, image copy (reissue).
- Boon 2003
- 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)"
- Cook & Pople 2004, p. 547: "On the other hand, the legacy of La Monte
Young was flourishing in late 1970s punk rock."
- 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."
- 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 [...]"
- Cook & Pople 2004, p. 659 ("Personalia" mini biographies): "Riley,
Terry (b. 1935) [...] A meeting with La Monte Young deeply affected
his outlook [...]"
- 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, [...]"
- Brian Eno, 1978, sourced at Ambient Music.
- 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").
- 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."
- See also more sources and two recordings of the Monotone
Symphony at the Yves Klein article.
- "It's quite possibly some of Obmana's best work and it's
representative of the drone ambient side of his work." ( Matt Borghi review from AllMusic).
- "Vidna Obmana's penchant for getting interstellar mileage out
of even the most minimal electronic drones. [...] Roach's acoustic
and synthetic rhythms are in deliberate absence here, but as dark,
electronic buds blossom and begin to seed the lifeless
surroundings, the drones that erupt out of them vibrate with a
tangible, malevolent pulse." ( Darren Bergstein review from i/e). "This occurs through the composers' use
of nebulous drones, and gorgeous passages of pure sonics drift" (
Thom Jurek review from Detroit Metro
Times).
- Sedimental Records, "Stars of the Lid: Music for Nitrous Oxide"
(original press release that went out with promo copies),
www.sedimental.com
- Sheilachandra.com: ABoneCroneDrone
References
- Boon,
Marcus, "The Drone" (Archive.org
copy of 2006), 2003, www.hungryghost.net,
originally published as "The eternal drone: good vibrations,
ancient to future" in The
Wire book: Rob Young (ed.),
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music,
ed. Rob Young, London: Continuum Books, 2002, ISBN
9780826464507 — History and analysis of drone music from medieval
Europe to 1960s La Monte Young (who
helped with the article) to 1990s Coil.
- Cook, Nicholas & Pople, Anthony, The Cambridge History
of Twentieth-century Music, Cambridge University Press, 2004,
ISBN 9780521662567
- Cox, Christoph & Warner, Daniel (eds) & al., Audio
Culture: Readings in Modern Music, Continuum International,
2004, ISBN 9780826416155
- DRAM
(Database of
Recorded American Music), "Drone in American Minimalist Music" (Archive.org
copy should be available in February 2009), by Nate
Wooley, August 1, 2008. — Short history with six online
drone pieces (available from accredited institutions or with a
library login).
- Potter, Keith, Four Musical Minimalists: La Monte Young,
Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Cambridge University
Press, 2002 (rev. pbk from 2000 hbk), ISBN 9780521015011
- Textura, "Drones: Theatres of Eternal Music" (Archive.org
copy of 2008), Textura No. 5,
February 2005, textura.org. (Also printed as "On and On and On...:
The drone & modern music" in Grooves No. 16, 2005) — Definition, history,
further reading, records list, links.
- Young, La Monte, "Notes on The Theatre of Eternal Music and The
Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys" (original PDF
file), 2000, Mela Foundation, www.melafoundation.org —
Historical account and musical essay where Young explains why he
considers himself the originator of the style vs. Tony Conrad and
John Cale.
- Zuckerman, Gabrielle (ed.), "An Interview with La Monte Young and Marian
Zazeela" (Archive.org
copy of 2006), American Public Media, July 2002,
musicmavericks.publicradio.org — Text transcript with audio version
available.
External links