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The steelpan: how Trinidad invented an instrument

The steelpan is the only significant acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century, and it was built out of discarded oil drums in Port of Spain.

An instrument made from rubbish

The steelpan is the only widely adopted acoustic instrument invented in the twentieth century, and its origins are unglamorous. Trinidad's carnival percussion traditions had been repeatedly suppressed — drumming was banned in the late nineteenth century, and the tamboo bamboo bands that replaced it, made from tuned lengths of bamboo struck on the ground, were themselves restricted after being associated with street violence.

What players turned to next was whatever made a noise: biscuit tins, dustbin lids, brake drums, paint cans. Somewhere in that experimentation, in the working-class neighbourhoods of east Port of Spain — Laventille above all — someone noticed that a dented metal surface produced different pitches at different points, and that the dents could be controlled.

By the 1940s players were sinking the ends of oil drums into a concave face and hammering out distinct tuned areas. Trinidad had oil, and therefore had drums. Within a generation the instrument had gone from improvised percussion to a fully chromatic family capable of playing anything written.

How a pan is built and tuned

Making a pan is skilled metalwork. The drum end is sunk with a sledgehammer into a bowl, the depth determining the register. Note areas are marked and grooved, then raised or shaped so each has its own resonant patch. The pan is heated and cooled to temper the steel, then tuned note by note with small hammers, the tuner working by ear against a reference.

The family runs from the tenor or lead pan, which carries the melody and has the shallowest bowl, down through double seconds, guitars and cellos, to the six-bass — six full-length drums played standing in a ring. A full orchestra covers the same range as a symphony orchestra.

Tuners are individuals with reputations, and a band's sound depends on who tunes for them. It is a craft passed on directly rather than through formal training.

Panorama

Panorama is the national steelband competition, held in the weeks before Carnival, and it is the centre of the pan year. Bands of a hundred players or more perform an eight-to-ten-minute arrangement of a calypso or soca of that season, competing through preliminaries, semi-finals and a final at the Queen's Park Savannah.

The arrangements are serious compositions — theme, variation, key changes, a jam section, a climax — written by arrangers who are followed with the attention given to football managers elsewhere. Bands rehearse nightly for weeks, and the same arranger's decisions are debated on the radio long after the results.

There are junior and single-pan categories alongside the conventional bands, and the competition is genuinely national rather than confined to Port of Spain.

The pan yards

Outside the season, and especially during it, the pan yards are where the music lives. These are open lots — often just a patch of ground with a roof over the racks — where a band rehearses in the open air, and they are among the best free music anywhere in the world.

Anyone can walk in. There is no ticket and generally no barrier between the players and whoever is standing there. In the weeks before Panorama the yards run late into the night, the same passage repeated until it is right, and the sound carries across the neighbourhood.

The yards are also community institutions, with histories, rivalries and loyalties running through families across generations. A band is not simply a musical ensemble; it is a place people belong to.

Pan beyond Trinidad

The instrument travelled with the diaspora. There are steelbands in London, New York and Toronto, most tied to the Caribbean carnivals in those cities, and Panorama competitions are held in both Brooklyn and Britain. Pan is taught in schools in several countries, and it has been taken up by composers writing concert music for it.

Trinidad and Tobago declared the steelpan its national instrument, and the annual World Steelband Music Festival attracts international entrants. Antigua, Saint Vincent, Grenada, Saint Lucia and Antigua all have their own pan traditions and competitions.

None of that has moved the centre. The instrument is still made, tuned and argued about in Trinidad.

How to listen

Panorama season is the time to hear pan on the radio — from January onward, Trinidadian stations carry the rounds, the results and the analysis, and the arrangements circulate long after the season ends. Outside the season it appears in cultural programming and around national holidays.

Recordings only partly capture it. A hundred pans in a yard is a physical experience that no stereo mix reproduces, which is why the yards are worth visiting if you are ever there during the season. The stations below carry the season live.

Trinidad and Tobago stations (30)

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