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From the issue dated September 16, 2005

The Steel Drum Works Its Magic

On the island of Trinidad, a once-humble instrument has inspired an
academic specialty


By MIKE CEASER

St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

Satanand Sharma's voice never rises as he gently reprimands a pair of
students, guiding and cajoling them through a two-hour practice session
of steel-pan music, moving from Bach to Schubert to the professor's own
compositions.

"My impression is that your melody isn't clear," Mr. Sharma, a lecturer
in music at the University of the West Indies campus here, tells
Kenneth Joseph, a second-year musical-arts major. "In the more
difficult parts you're losing the melody."

Mr. Joseph grips his pansticks, and once again the melodic, ringing
notes come springing off the concave surfaces of his shiny steel pans.

In Trinidad and Tobago, 55-gallon oil drums are fundamental to both the
energy-exporting economy and -- once they are heat treated, tuned, and
shined -- the music scene. Played on beaches, cruise ships, and in
nightclubs in the company of rum and calypso's cheerful melodies, steel
pans may be Trinidad and Tobago's best-known cultural emissaries, and
in 1992 the steel pan became the country's official musical instrument.

But at the university's Center for Creative and Festival Arts here,
steel pan is more than a tourist attraction: It is included in the
curriculum and research.

Two of the top students, Mr. Joseph and Sophia Subero, a third-year
musical-arts major whose main instrument is the steel pan, are
preparing for their end-of-term recitals. They lean over their pans in
concentration.

60 Years Old

The steel pan evolved during the 1930s from used chemical barrels,
which Carnival celebrants employed as handy, loud instruments during
street celebrations. Even today, upon first walking into Mr. Sharma's
pan studio, one might be excused for mistaking it for a futuristic
warehouse. The room is crowded with steel drums -- tenors with shallow
curves and basses with deep bowls -- some whole, and others shined,
sectioned, and suspended from instrument stands.

Since the Carnival of 1946, when an inventor showed off a barrel with
its top crafted to produce 14 different notes, the drums have evolved
into unique musical instruments. The surfaces from which the notes are
derived, rather than being separate, like the strings on a guitar, are
all part of one pan and separated only by notches -- demanding great
subtlety and precision from musicians.

Despite Trinidad's musical fame, the campus here only began offering
music courses in 1992. Now about 100 students study the musical arts,
the majority of them emphasizing the steel pan.

"The idea was to start with our strength," says Mr. Sharma, who has
taught steel pan since the center's founding. "We are in the Mecca of
steel-pan country."

Nevertheless, the quiet St. Augustine campus, with its grassy fields,
fern-draped trees, and low concrete buildings, still places more
emphasis on the steel barrel's original use by educating students to
work in the nation's booming natural-gas industry. The same spirit of
industry reigns in Trinidad's gritty capital, Port-of-Spain, a half
hour away, where ships and cargo containers usually block the view of
the sea. (Most of the nation's famed beaches are an airplane flight
away on the smaller, slower island of Tobago.)

'In Your Blood'

On the Trinidad campus, steel-band study carries an air of urgency as
well as artistry. While Trinidad and Tobago's beaches and natural-gas
reserves are national property, steel-pan playing, teaching, and
research have spread to North America and Europe. Clement Imbert, a
professor of mechanical engineering and deputy dean in the Faculty of
Engineering, has spent decades studying the acoustics of steel pans and
researching ways to improve their design. He can see the day when the
land that gave birth to steel pan could fall behind others in research
and, eventually, even in performance.

"In playing, nobody will come close to us in 25 years -- but it could
happen," he says. "Even if you don't like it ... it is in your blood,
because it's a part of your culture. It's more than just a cultural
thing, it's part of us."

Mr. Imbert says many innovations marketed and even patented by foreign
researchers were really first created by Trinidadians and Tobagans. But
Trinidad has little money for research and less for commercializing
inventions, he says.

Despite a recently injured foot, Mr. Imbert answers a reporter's
questions while limping up and down the engineering school's stairs,
pausing at seemingly every landing for rushed conferences with other
faculty members and students. Despite the limitations on research, Mr.
Imbert and others have a workshop complete with a robotically-played
pan -- although it is not even close to eliminating the human musician.
Researchers have experimented with changing the pans' sizes, hardening
their surfaces, and even abandoning the barrel altogether by using
sheet metal -- all in an effort to produce clearer, more consistent
notes.

But the big question in this sort of development, Mr. Imbert says, is
this: How far can pan makers stray from tradition, and still rightfully
call their drums steel pans?

Today almost all steel pans are still formed by hand out of used
chemical barrels, giving each unique characteristics.

"You play a thousand tenor pans and each one will be different, you can
guarantee that," says Mr. Joseph, the student. "You know which notes
ring out more, which you need to attack more."

North American Connection

While students come to Trinidad from North America and Europe to study
steel-pan music, students from here also travel to the United States,
Canada, and Britain to complete their studies. Despite the university's
continuing expansion of its creative-arts center, its facilities still
fall far short of those available at many overseas campuses, such as
Northern Illinois University, where both Mr. Joseph and Ms. Subero plan
to continue their studies. (More than 50 North American campuses now
have steel bands, according to officials at Northern Illinois, who say
the university started the first steel band in the United States in
1973.)

At the University of the West Indies, Ms. Subero points out, computer
equipment is rudimentary. Since there are no dedicated rehearsal rooms,
students often use the corridors. Her dream of playing steel pan in a
symphony orchestra would be impossible to realize in Trinidad: There
isn't one. To play commercially, she would do better heading somewhere
where the market is not already saturated.

"Here it's like the norm, so people don't pay to hear pan," she says.
"If I am dependent on performing here in Trinidad to survive, it's not
going to happen. I have to go abroad." (Asked how she will survive the
Illinois winters, she says: "Properly dressed.")

Although steel pan belongs to Trinidad, some see it belonging more to
some Trinidadians than to others. The nation's population is divided
almost equally between descendants of enslaved Africans and descendants
of indentured laborers brought from India after 1838, when slavery had
ended and landowners needed low-wage laborers. The groups have rival,
ethnically based political parties that trade bitter accusations over
crime and economic problems. Steel-pan music was pioneered by black
Trinidadians and has its roots in African rhythms, and Mr. Sharma, who
is of Indian descent, acknowledges that some of the most radical
Indo-Trinidadians resent his participation in it. Therefore, while
studying on a Fulbright scholarship at Northern Illinois from 2000 to
2002, he found Americans' attitude toward steel pan refreshing.

"They didn't have the social baggage," he says. "They just saw the
beauty of the instrument."

One challenging moment in Mr. Sharma's early career came when he won a
science scholarship in his last year of high school. Against his
teachers' advice, he decided to forgo engineering for the
less-lucrative field of music teaching. He hopes his own students won't
have to make that difficult choice.

"We're trying to educate our pan men and our pan women that there is a
career to be had in pan music," he says.

The steel pan's sweet notes ensure that it will always have a market.
And if Mr. Sharma succeeds, Trinidadians will still be setting the beat.
http://chronicle.com
Section: International
Volume 52, Issue 4, Page A44



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