Some Thoughts on the Drone

The drone lives at the center of Hindustani music, and yet I think its significance has rarely been stated completely. To say that it affirms or creates the tonality is to state the obvious; rather, think of the number of musical systems in the world in which the drone is implicit or only occasionally stated. Why then is the tamboura so essential in Hindustani music? In concerts, a singer often gestures to the tamboura players, indicating “more force, more volume!” — why?

R. Murray Schafer, that marvelously creative Canadian composer and educator, offers us a complementary pair of terms, gesture and texture. Hindustani melody is gesture refined and elaborated; gesture with fractal sub-gestures endlessly revealing themselves to careful listening. The complement to a gesture is a texture, where elements are sustained with enough consistency that they form a ground, a backdrop — a context within which isolated ideas can be heard and appreciated.

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