in irish music there are countless occasions when you have a pattern of notes that involves alternation between a dominant sounding note and a bunch of other notes - some tunes that come to mind that typify this are ‘peter street[f# to d, a to d, b to d, cnat to d etc]’, ‘the galway rambler’[b to g, d to g, e to g, b to g etc], ‘the harvest home’[c# to a, e to a, f# to a etc]. forgive me my crappy notation, but if you know the tunes you’ll know what I’m getting at - I just want to know what it’s called
I realize that in some ways this is a neologism, but I would suggest the use of the word trope. I don’t mean it in any way like the Medieval usage, but rather as an expansion of the Twentieth Century usage, to wit: “The primary purpose of the tropes is not analysis (although it can be used for it) but composition. A trope is neither a hexatonic scale nor a chord. Likewise, it is neither a pitch-class set nor an interval-class set. A trope is a framework of contextual interval relations. Therefore, the key information a trope contains is not the set of intervals it consists of (and by no means any set of pitch-classes), it is the relational structure of its intervals (Sedivy 2011, 83).”
I will now scurry back to my bunker and let other more musically erudite members make suggestions.
Wikipedia confirms that yes, in Western classical music parlance, “pedal point” is the correct term. Pipers should be interested to know that its original usage, of describing a sustained bass note on the organ, makes it a synonym for “drone.”
Props to Bob & Tom: I think “trope” and especially “fulcrum” are also cool terms.
there is a term used in French piping, “picotage” that accurately describes the melodic action of returning to a tone repeatedly from either above or below that tone. Sometimes this action is termed “rappell” , curiously indicated in manuscript indicated by the letter ‘r’ on the line or space to rappell TO, between melodic tones. Eastern European pipe tech also involves much of this, closed fingerings above a often moveable lower open fingering… (Yuri? this is your dept) Arguably the dense lower-hand gracenotes of Highland piping (leumluath, taorluath, crunluath, barluath et al,) are a species of this melodic action also.
“Pedal point” (as I was taught) has polyphonic implications: that there is independent melodic and/or harmonic activity above that pedal tone.
“Tropes” as Im sure many here already know, are ad libitum melodic extensions by chanting monks over a proto-harmonic backdrop, which could be either drone, moveable drone, or other basic contrapuntal texture. Troping played an important part in the development of multivoiced polyphony. I could go on…
Yes, to me the essential difference between pedal point and drone is that pedal implies some kind of building/releasing of tension through its dissonance/consonance with a harmonic progression, whereas drone does not.
In Highland Piping you see that kind of thing in a lot of modern reels and hornpipes in the top hand. Like in Itchy Fingers. But in piobaireachd a lot of the formalized doublings are exactly this, just played slower in the modern tradition. But any suibhal doubling is a series of melody notes alternated with low-a for the entire part. I suppose you could also think of the low-a that the taorluath, etc. are played TO as rappelling to a – especially in the doublings.
