You won’t offend Marcia Sloane if you point out that she drones. Droning is this cellist’s specialty. She has even issued a CD of six-minute drones on all 12 chromatic pitches—definitely not Pulitzer Prize material, and not even Top 40 fodder, but it’s something Sloane thinks would be useful to any string player.

“A drone is a chamber-music partner,” she points out. “It forces us to pay attention to something besides ourselves and to adjust in relationship to something or someone else. Playing with a drone develops an awareness of frequency relationships, an awareness that can carry over into listening and tuning in all playing situations.

“Playing with drones adds a harmonic element that makes scales and passagework feel more like music-making. Drones can be used in rhythmic ways that deepen our awareness of pulse and of how rhythmic patterns are rooted in pulse. Drones can also provide a background soundscape and a structure for improvisation.”

Sloane learned about drones when she was studying and singing Indian classical music. “A large part of that is the use of the drone,” she says. “Having that ongoing sound against which the melody was accompanied and harmonized and measured, that had a big impact on me. I thought it was beautiful because you could really hear the tension and resolution of the scale.”

East Meets West
Drones lend themselves naturally to Western stringed instruments; it’s easy to hold a tone on an open string while playing a melody on a neighboring string. “It’s a beautiful way to create harmony by yourself,” she says, and a good way to keep her students on track and in tune when practicing alone at home.

She explains, “As musicians we rely on an inner sense of pitch and rhythm, like a grid or matrix within, upon which is superimposed all that we play. We feel rhythmic patterns in relationship to beat and meter; we hear pitches in relationship to tonic and scale. This relationship between outer and inner music worlds is so automatic and ongoing that we’re not always even aware of it. As students, we need to develop this inner sense of rhythm and pitch, as it is the inner music ‘grid’ that connects us when we play with others.”

Although Sloane believes the cello, with its low pitch, is an ideal drone instrument (“It’s nice to have a lower pitch with which to tune”), any instrument can provide a drone. It’s just a simplification of what happens when two or more stringed instruments play together.

“When we’re playing a duet, or with anybody else with a moving part, we’re tuning to that other part all the time,” she notes. “But constantly adjusting to changing notes is a skill that comes with time. It’s easier to start with one note that’s anchored in our pitch sense, something that’s not changing. So with a drone we’re reproducing what it’s like to play with somebody else, but in a simpler way.”

A drone can be a single, sustained pitch, or something more. Sloane’s Cello Drones CD, for example, employs five sustained tones at once: three octaves of the tonic (the fundamental scale tone) and two octaves of the fifth. This provides a rich, resonant sound full of natural overtones.