Diapason (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ricercares) wrote,@ 2007-04-15 13:27:00 |
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| Current music: | Guillame De Machaut - L'Art Musical et Poetique (Ens. GdM de Paris, 1977) |
| Entry tags: | byrd, drone, music, renaissance |
Antique Drone I – William Byrd’s The Battell (c.1591)
This is an occasional series of observations and references to the use of ‘drones’ in Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and Classical music, as well as notes on modern experimental musicians and bands that take inspiration from the past. While the drone is a familiar element in Medieval music it fell out of favour as the art of musical modulation advanced and the modern key system superceded the medieval modal system. Therefore later examples are few and far between, but here’s one from Renaissance England.
The Battell is the central, and longest (10-15 mins duration), section of a three-part group appearing in Byrd’s My Lady Nevells Booke. The other sections grouped around it being The Marche Before the Battell and The Galliard for the Victorie.
Aside from the observation that the nine descriptive titles for the sections that comprise The Battell apparently makes it the earliest piece of programmatic music, the most striking thing in the music, to me, is the use of deep, repetitive, droning chords throughout many of the sections. Here’s an excerpt from the fourth section of the piece The Trumpetts, played by Davitt Moroney, from the 7 disc collection of Byrd’s Complete Keyboard Music (Hyperion).
As can be heard, the droning chord sounds almost the same as an Indian tambura. This is due to the reliance on octaves and fifths above the low C note. A more conventionally tambura-like ‘strumming’ pattern can be heard in the bass in the opening of the section The Bagpipe and the Drone (though the tambura association is less instantly striking than the chordal example above).
The chords appear to represent the sound of battle drums being rhythmically beaten – the section The Flute and Droome solely uses the chord in the left-hand with a solo voice, representing a flute, in the right.
It seems doubtful that Byrd took any inspiration from Indian music, although it not completely out of the question since trade with the east was well established by the time of writing. Therefore some instruments may have made it to Europe as curiosities. It’s likely that such instruments and music (if ever heard) would have been thought of as ‘rude’ and primitive by the Western ear – for example, see Kepler’s reaction to Turkish chant (section 2.7). That said, the octave-dominant harmony of a well-tuned tambura would be instantly recognisable to the Western ear, and the rich overtones generated by the instrument would probably have left a deep impression on the sonic imagination of a perceptive listener.
