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“Drone studies”, or the baroque and repetition.
The word “drone” has an interesting polysemy.
It means both fixed and constant noise, or buzzing, as well as drone (male bee). In a figurative sense, it also means pedal point, that is, a prolonged chord throughout the composition, which —as in the baroque continuo— shapes the tone of the composition itself. In fact, in drone music, it coincides with the first meaning: that of buzzing, eventually recalling the second meaning: that of bee.
In the two tracks, in the two studies on drone (“The Organ That Made You Bleed” and “One Bee”) that cellist Clarice Jensen released on cassette last September, the semantic core of buzzing-bee-pedal point explicitly comes to the surface. What seems to be discernible here is that, starting from a certain number of basic components:
- clusters of various nature
- repetitions of cello chords
- minimal variations
a living organism emerges, through continuity and juxtaposition, whose life is, however, like that of real bees, quite brief: 27 minutes and 14 seconds.
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