Drone music

Drone music (also known as drone-based music, or simply drone) is a minimalist genre of music that emphasizes the use of sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters called drones. It is typically characterized by lengthy compositions featuring relatively slight harmonic variations. La Monte Young, one of its 1960s originators, defined it in 2000 as "the sustained tone branch of minimalism." Music containing drones can be found in many regional traditions across Asia, Australia, and Europe, but the genre label is generally reserved for music originating with the Western classical tradition. Elements of drone music have been incorporated in diverse genres such as rock, ambient, and electronic music.

Overview

Music that contains drones 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 Carnatic music, and Hindustani classical music (both of which are accompanied almost invariably by the Tanpura, a plucked, four-string instrument that 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 Europe; 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.

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. Drone music forms a part of the movement referred to as minimal music.

Pitchfork Media and Allmusic journalist Mark Richardson defined it thus:

The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phill Niblock and, especially, La Monte 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.