Droning on

One of the first groups to really grab my attention and engage my enthusiasm for medieval music was Sinfonye, with their core sound established by Stevie Wishart's fantastic fiddle and sinfonye playing. In particular, her fiddle style is strongly drone based, an approach that seems well justified by the existing evidence for relatively flat bridges and consonant open string tuning in early fiddles, as well as its general effectiveness for modal tunes. Every so often I have encountered people who really do not enjoy music with drones (they also dislike bagpipes, for example) but more often I find the average listener who knows little about early music finds the sound particularly exciting and enjoyable, often without really knowing why.

So I was very interested when I came across this passage from (yet another) article by Chris Page about the organistrum and symphonia:

How did the lettered musicians of the 13th  and 14th centuries regard drone accompaniments? Had they constructed a hierarchy of string-techniques that distinguished (a) constant drones from (b) proto-polyphonic forms blurring into (c) genuine plurilinear polyphony? If so, were they prejudiced-as most modern Western listeners are-in favour of plurilinear music?2 Can the supposed social fall of hurdy-gurdies be explained by a dependence upon drones?

As I find so often with Page, his impeccable research and beautifully phrased writing seems to have subtext about what is 'ideal'  medieval music (pure vocal polyphony), with everything else some kind of preparation or departure that should be taken less seriously. Why should we expect medieval musicians to put these different approaches in a hierarchy? And isn't the 'prejudice' one of the modern Western classical music listener (or choral scholar), rather than one common to all Western ears?

Frustratingly, however, I haven't been able to find that Page ever answered the questions posed in this introduction. The referenced article (Part 1) makes a good case that the origins of the instrument are most likely to be German, not Arabic as some have claimed; and a following article (Part 2) that 'organistrum' and 'symphonia' (and variant terms) were used fairly interchangeably, rather than the first being always the 2-person instrument as is often suggested. But I can't find trace of a Part 3.