Droning On

A coworker of mine is excited about the drone he got for Christmas and has already been using it over his neighborhood and, as of this weekend, around Lake Tahoe. In Northern Nevada, there is an abundance of great places to capture footage with drones. Most of the local news stations use them, as do police departments, farmers, and even Amazon (above). The military has been using much larger drones for decades.

But as you may have guessed, this post is not about those drones.

New Liturgical Movement features an article by David Clayton called "Using Drone Warfare In The Battlefield Of Sacred Music." A drone in this instance is a single note sung along with a chant, which Clayton says is especially useful in churches that do not have the best acoustics because of carpeting or other architectural issues. I had never heard of this concept before.

Clayton argues:

I have seen the drone used in both Gregorian and Byzantine chant to powerful effect. I suggest that this is something that could be used more, especially in modern churches which are not designed with an acoustic that naturally produces a harmonic resonance. In my opinion, chant requires that faint suggestion of harmony that such a resonance lends to it, as one might hear in a Gothic abbey, for example, in order to have full effect as sacred music. 

After discussing how the concept of a drone relates to mathematics and proportion, Clayton offers the following video as an example of how it sounds in a chant.



Clayton concludes with a great idea on how droning can help when the music was selected and played by adherents of the "Spirit of Vatican II":

[I]f I ever find myself trapped in the pews in a Mass that has missalette music I create a little chant-like micro-environment around me by trying to improvise an ison to the hymns and ditties. I aim to make it as deep and reverberating as I possibly can - we are talking Russian-basso-profundo levels of reverberation here. It seems to pull it in the right direction at least. 

Read and see the whole thing.