7.20.11 - ICPP/Social and Cultural Context: Drone music
Musical movement: DRONE
Drone music finds its roots in ethnic or spiritual music which can be found in many parts of the world, including Scottish bagpipe traditions, didgeridoo music in Australia, South Indian classical and Hindustani classical, Indonesian gamelan, Gregorian chant, and the sustained tones found in the Japanese classical tradition; Repetition of tones, supposed to be in imitation of bagpipes is found in a wide variety of genres and musical forms.
In the modern era, beginning roughly post-WWII, the ideas become more defined, with reactions against traditional classical music, big band, jazz, and burgeoning pop music. Drone picks up on the idea of the “hallucinatory” aspects of art creation in the avant garde (see: Alfred Jarry, via Shattuck), and also the idea of high and low culture colliding (the intellectual appreciation of music vs. the verse-chorus-verse-bridge framework), and also of Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises Futurist manifesto that stated that the human ear requires a new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition.
Some names to remember:
John Cage, David Tudor (UCLA)
Karlheinz Stockhausen (electronic/chance pioneer)
Yves Klein 1949 Monotone Symphony (20-minute drone)
LaMonte Young, Trio for Strings, first work in the history of music that is completely composed of long sustained tones and silences (Father of drone)
Philip Glass
John Cale (VU)
Tony Conrad
Terry Riley
Angus Maclise (VU)
Kraftwerk, Can, Faust, Amon Duul
Brian Eno
Miles Davis
Sun Ra
Ornette Coleman
Glenn Branca
The Jesus and Mary Chain
Sonic Youth
Videos/artists:
LaMonte Young “B flat Dorian Blues” (1962)
Velvet Underground “Heroin” (1968)
