DRONE

French Bourdon, in music, a sustained tone, usually rather low in pitch, providing a sonorous foundation for a melody or melodies performed at a higher pitch level; also an instrumental string or pipe producing such a sustained sonoritye.g., the drone strings of a hurdy-gurdy or the three drone pipes of a bagpipe. A drone may be continuous or intermittent, and an interval, as a rule the fifth, frequently replaces the single-pitch drone. Use of drone instruments was popular in antiquity. Drones occur widely both in vocal and in instrumental folk music, particularly European. Balkan singers frequently sustain a drone against a sung melody. Various instruments have drones built into them, contributing to the characteristic sound of the instrumente.g., the launeddas, a Sardinian triple clarinet; the Appalachian dulcimer; the five-string banjo; and the vielle, the medieval troubadours' fiddle. Twentieth-century folk fiddlers often bow open strings to drone beneath the melody played on a neighbouring string. In the art music of India, the drone played on the tamboura sounds the two predominant notes of the raga (the melodic pattern developed by the soloist), producing a framework in which the raga is heard. A pedal point (q.v.) is a drone that was used in European harmony of the 17th to the 19th century. French music favoured the bourdon as early as the Notre-Dame organa of the 12th and early 13th centuries. In the France of Louis XIV and his immediate successors, a nobility alienated from manual labour and the soil fancied itself closer to nature as it practiced the quasi-rural musette, a bagpipe made of velvet and ivory; the composers Franois Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau, among others, wrote a number of drone pieces for the harpsichord. As for the organ, bourdon stops sounding an octave below the notated pitch soon became standard for the pedal board. Thus, the term bourdon is sometimes used to denote the kind of pedal point that, in the context of 18th- and 19th-century functional harmony, seemed particulary suited to harnessing polyphonic energies, especially as generated in the fugues of J.S. Bach.