In preparation for a trip to the Caribbean islands of Trinidad and Tobago this past summer, my family picked up a copy of The Lonely Planet. One of the things the guide emphasized as a claim to fame for the island nation of T&T, as it is often called, is that the only acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century was invented on Trinidad. The instrument is called the steel pan drum, often simply pan, and it was originally made out of any old, round, metal containers.Islanders would take whatever containers they could find and cut off one end so that they had the flat end and the sides intact. They then would take a hammer and make the end into a shallow bowl. To get multiple pitches they would even take sections marked by hammer grooves and hammer from the bottom until they got the desired pitch. The length of the sides decides the overall pitch of each particular pan. Making pans was a simple and cheap. Now there are professional companies that manufacture the drums but they still make them in much the same fashion.
The pan has a very distinctive sound and when I first heard it on a street in Port of Spain, Trinidad, I was surprised that it was such a simple instrument. The man playing it was doing a gorgeous rendition of Amazing Grace. Pan has a sound all its own that is associated strongly with the Caribbean. It seems to me that pan is more than just a piece of metal that can make some nice sounds. It is a way for people who do not have a lot of material things to participate in a cultural movement. Hopefully, I will be exploring this in depth in later posts.
If you would like to listen to an example of steel pan music I have a link to a video from Youtube here:
Citation:
Schmidt-Jones, Catherine, and Russell Jones. "Steel Pan Drums." Connexions- Sharing
Knowledge and Building Communities, 2009. http://cnx.org/content/m12397/1.4/.
(accessed March 28, 2010).
Images:
http://www.ttcgnewyork.com/images/steelpan.jpg
https://www.musiciselementary.com/images/CSDS%20Steel%20Drum%20-%20RED.jpg
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