(2014)
Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson
Instrumentation SSAATTBB choir, string quartet, and electronics
Category Choir
Publication year 2024
Catalogue no. TOV035m
Duration 51 minutes
Programme Note
Jóhann Jóhannsson described his composition Drone Mass as “a contemporary oratorio” and “a distillation of a lot of influences and obsessions”.
The work was commissioned and premiered by the American Contemporary Music Ensemble, aka ACME in 2014.
A composition for eight voices, string quartet and electronics, Drone Mass begins with the strings and voices and but slowly integrates electronics into the musical landscape. Despite the title, Drone Mass is not a mass and not a simply a drone. Drones are a recurring motif throughout the work and the resonant new meaning the word ‘drone’ has acquired in modern times was not lost on the composer.
Jóhannsson’s source material Drone Mass in the so-called “Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians”, part of the Nag Hammadi library discovered in 1945. Among other texts, he uses a hymn described as consisting of “a seemingly meaningless series of vowels”.
Given the origins of the Drone Mass texts, it is apt that the 2015 premiere of the work took place in the spectacular setting of the Egyptian Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Jóhannsson died in Berlin on 9 February, 2018, aged 48.
World Premiere Recording of Jóhann Jóhannsson's Drone Mass on Deutsche Grammophon