History and Distribution
The systematic (not occasional) use of drones originated in instrumental music of ancient Southwest Asia, including that of Australian Indigenous peoples, and spread north and west to Europe, east to India, and south to Africa (van der Merwe 1989, p.11). It is used in Indian music and is played with the tanpura (or tambura) and other Indian drone instruments like the ottu, the ektar, the dotara (or dotar; dutar in Persian Central Asia), the surpeti, the surmandal (or swarmandal) and the shank (conch shell). In the West, they are found since the 1960s in modern drone music.
In vocal music drone is particularly widespread in traditional musical cultures, particularly in Europe, Polynesia and Melanesia. It is also present in some isolated regions of Asia (like among Pearl-divers in Persian Gulf, some national minorities of South-West China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Afghanistan); Drone (both instrumental and vocal) can be placed in different ranges of the polyphonic texture: in the lowest part, in the highest part, or in the middle.
Read more about this topic: Drone (music)
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or distribution:
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)