Welcome to the Musical Instrument Museum. I’m Daniel Piper, the Latin America
curator. We are standing here in front of the portal
of the Latin America gallery. Today we are going to talk about
this amazing instrument called the steel pan.
A lot of people call it the steel drum and its not a bad name because it is
such a percussive instrument. This example here, I pulled this
from storage. It is a historic 1950s steel pan.
You can see that there is no animal skin that’s vibrating, like most drums,
but instead it is all metal. Metal that is tuned so you can play melodies
and harmonies as well as wonderful rhythms. So, that is a great way to kind of
start, but we are going to move into the gallery
now and we are going to learn about the history of the steel pan and all the
different parts of a steel pan orchestra.
We are here inside the Lesser Antilles
section of the Latin America gallery. The Lesser Antilles is part of the Caribbean.
You can see Trinidad and Tobago in the back.
Those are sort of our hero country today, because they invented the
steel pan. But as you know, it has spread
over much of the Caribbean and associated with some other countries
and islands. I wanted to give you a little bit of
context. We are going to see where Trinidad is
and where some of these other islands are. Also in this region, it is important
what is the music that steel pan plays? They play really
a variety of different kinds of music. Calypso being one of the most popular.
This area shared a lot of different traditions. They had
masquerades with fife and drum. There was also
popular music like reggae and dance hall,
calypso, soca, zouk. You have this amazing interaction between the French-
and the English-speaking islands. You have large French-speaking
islands, or French–Creole–speaking islands, like
Haiti, and then smaller islands like Martinique and
Saint Lucia and Guadalupe, and then you have the English-speaking
slands, Trinidad who invented the steel pan, you have
Jamaica, and a lot of smaller islands. So you can get an idea
of where Trinidad, where the steel pan, really started
from this map here. This is a map of the Caribbean and you can see the larger
Spanish speaking islands like Cuba and the Dominican Republic over here.
You see Jamaica here in red. You have the blue here, that’s Haiti.
As we move into these smaller islands, these are called the Lesser Antilles.
At the very southern end of that you
have Trinidad and Tobago, which is right next to Venezuela.
So this is really important actually, the location, because
of the oil trade. So you have all of these oil barrels
in the early to mid-twentieth century
raveling in this region, certainly in Venezuela, but some of these
oil barrels were discarded, the empty ones, on the island of Trinidad
and Tobago. We are going to talk a little bit
of what that means later, but obviously oil barrels is one of the primary
materials of steel pans. With this map you can see though the
instrument started here, very quickly it spread and popularized
to the other English-speaking islands. All these ones in red here, like
Saint Vincent, the Grenadines, the Virgin Islands, and even
way over here in the Bahamas, there you hear a lot of steel pan there.
You even hear them also in these blue islands
which are primarily French- and French Creole–speaking.
So again, started there in Trinidad, but it’s become kind of a pan-Caribbean
instrument in many ways. With a little bit of that cultural
background and geography, now we can go and see all the varieties
of pans and learn a little bit about its history.
MIM has an entire display dedicated to steel pans.
I am going to start over on this end of it
so that you guys can get an idea of the incredible
history and the sense of the cultural resistance
of where this instrument began.
Check out these interesting instruments made from bamboo. They call
them the tamboo-bamboo. What does this have to do with steel pan?
Well, at the end of the nineteenth century, the authorities in Trinidad were
worried about uprisings and riots during
Carnival and so they prohibited the primarily Afro-descendant
Trinidadians from playing their skin drums, their animal skin drums.
So the people said, “well, you can’t stop us from making our music. You
can’t stop us from playing our rhythms and singing our songs.
So we will cut from bamboo.” Bamboo of different
sizes, shorter and longer, and each one is both
percussive by when they are hitting it on the ground as
they are parading along, then each one has a different note to it,
but it is also, between them, creating this really interesting
rhythms, similar to what they might have done on the animal skin drums.
So that for a while was how it started,
but then these bands were competing with each other. It was Carnival.
Each band wanted to be louder, wanted to attract attention,
so they started using metal. They started finding scrap metal and paint cans.
Smaller commercial oil containers.
They were using spoons and bottles and even
car-brake drums, like we have here. All kinds of metal
started to get incorporated into these Carnival bands.
So what happened next? We illustrate this somewhere around
the early 1940s. A transformation, a really unique invention,
started to happen which led to the steel pan orchestra today.
They realized that with some of these cans like a metal paint can,
and at the time some of the smaller thirty-five-gallon
oil containers, that if they started denting them, either in a convex
shape going up or in
a concave shape going down, they could start to
mold the metal and create musical notes. Those first instruments in the ’40s
like this one here, that Winston “Spree” Simon invented, were in this
convex shape and he was only able to get a few notes.
Maybe three or four notes or so, but already they were creating simple
melodies to accompany the rhythms and the songs.
Then a little bit later, the landmark here, this thirty-five gallon
called the “Barracuda” pan. This was invented by Ellie Mannette who was,
along with Winston “Spree,” was one of the recognized inventors of
steel pan. His version, which was concave as
you can see, by deepening the shell of this he was able
to start to get more notes. Pretty soon they realized, wow,
we can combine the best of this sort of western
melody and harmony with some of the most amazing aspects of African
music in terms of rhythm and timbre and call and response. We can
synthesize all of that in one instrument. So they kept working
on this and they found these larger fifty-five-gallon oil barrels. So this is a
fifty-five-gallon oil barrel. Still today, the steel pans
retain the full shape without cutting it for
the bass drums. This is an example of a
contemporary bass steel pan. It has a real low sound to it.
This one has just three notes on it.
A typical bass player today may have four to six or even twelve basses all
around them. These huge fifty-five-gallon steel pans and that’s
going to cover all of the notes of the scale and
you have all of the musical vocabulary that they need as a
a bass player. The main, higher instruments, in the mid and
the higher range, what they started to do is take the fifty-five-gallon
container and cut the bottoms and make them
not as deep. Some of the real high instruments were
more shallow, like we have here, and
some of the mid-range ones were a little bit deeper,
but the idea is that you have a whole orchestra.
You have the high registers. The mid-highs,
you have mid-lows. You have the low register and you are
able to, with a variety of instruments of different sizes,
you are able to cover both melody, countermelodies, harmonies, rhythms,
really a whole orchestra sound. So this was a major
invention. I want to get into a little bit of detail here,
because you saw an instrument similar to this when we started. This is
kind of the sister instrument. We acquired this from a very important
collector, and they are from between 1951 and 1955.
So this sister of the one you saw earlier, this is called a second pan.
The other one is called a guitar pan. So some really creative names, but it
gives you ideas of registers and musical function of the steel pan.
One of the things that we could talk about is
how are steel pans tuned. They are tuned in different ways. A little bit
later I am going to talk more technically and show you some
photos, but right now I want to talk about
the arrangement of the notes around the steel pan.
So this second pan here, if you look closely, you will see that they
left the letter names on there. For those of you who really love music
theory and harmony and these kind of things and
thinking about the intervals, you’ll see, for example, if you go from this
D to this F, it’s what they call a third.
So it’s like D, E, F. Then the F goes right up to this G sharp,
which is basically a minor third.
So these are intervals. They are kind of small
intervals. Anyway, you are going to see different
arrangements and notes here. At the time, in the late ’40s and ’50s,
t was a time of a lot of experimentation. There were all kinds of
different ways of tuning the pans and different ways of arranging
the notes. At this moment also, just a single pan,
you would have all the twelve notes on a scale. You would have,
as they say, the black and the white keys on a piano, all together on one
nstrument and one musician standing right in front of that
to play all those notes. But as we move on,
we go from that ’50s period into the ’60s
and the ’70s, you start to have a different kind of thing. For example,
these instruments here, these illustrate what are called guitar
pans, kind of like that first older one that I was sitting with at
he beginning, but they are much more contemporary.
But they are called double guitar pans. The first one I showed you was a single
guitar pan. Why are they double guitar pans? Because
the notes of the scale, all the twelve notes, the black and
he white keys, are divided between the two instruments.
One musician is standing in front of them with a mallet in one hand and a mallet in the
other hand and he’s playing both of them, and the
melody may be divided between the two instruments.
Whereas over here, and on this one, the melody
is on one instrument. So, those are some of the differences.
Some of the other differences, to sum up here, is that
as we move more towards the modern time you have
these chromed instruments. So they are not going to rust
as much over time, they have a pristine
look to them, and they refined the sound of the instruments. At the beginning, in
the ’40s and ’50s, they had this kind of
ping-pongy sort of percussive sound and now the tone is more sort
of bell-like. It’s a different, really beautiful sound.
It has a lot of flexibility depending on how you hit it. You can make
it sound very smooth
or you can make it much more percussive and aggressive.
With that in mind, I have one more thing before we wrap up.
want to show you, because it is such a fascinating instrument,
how they actually tune them because we are starting with these
fifty-five-gallon oil containers and then through this process we have arrived at
this very sophisticated instrument that really can compete with
just about any other major instrument in the world. So what is
the technical process of that? Well, as you can see, I am going to show a
couple of photos we are going to flash those on the screen for you,
but basically they start with an air hammer.
So after cutting the container to the right depth and
shape, the air hammer is what sinks it. The sinking of the drum and
sinking it in a very even contour is
a really important first step. Once you have sunk it,
the whole shell, you need to start to hammer
the individual notes in the areas in an upward direction,
opposite, and define that shape. So as you can see here,
they will define each note, which is called “grooving”. They create these
circles and they define the regions for each
note, and groove those in there, and then
hammer it in the other direction. Then finally,
before fine-tuning each note, then the pan shape is checked for its
uniform curvature as I was saying. Then they
use a strobe tuner, some kind of tuner. Just like you would with a
violin or something,
or a piano, if you were tuning a piano. You want the pitch to be
exactly right. So with a strobe tuner, then he is just
delicately hammering in different spots on each individual note
listening until he gets just the right sound.
It’s an involved process.
It’s after all an instrument that is quite complex and has evolved
over the twentieth century. So, I should say something about the
elephant in the room. We have passed by this beautiful costume.
If it wasn’t obvious already.
The steel pan, although it is played—there’s many recordings of
calypso and steel pan, steel pan orchestras and student bands
in the United States, in the UK, all over the Caribbean.
You can play classical music on it. You can play calypso,
but its bread and butter, its heart of where it grew out of was
Carnival, as we have been talking about. So very appropriately, in the midst
of our steel pan exhibit, we have this beautiful
Carnival costume. There’s many, many different characters in Trinidad in
Carnival. This one is King Sailor. And why did we
choose King Sailor? One is because a really amazing, contemporary maker
of costumes made this for MIM, but also because the
King Sailor was a really traditional, early
Carnival character and also was associated with the
rise of the steel pan in the mid-twentieth century and King Sailor was
really prominent at that time. So we thought it was great
to have the King Sailor right in there
bestowing his honor upon our orchestra here.
So thank you. I want to wrap things up just by saying, in my opinion,
as MIM’s curator, the steel pan orchestra
s perhaps the most important and innovative acoustic orchestra
instruments in the twentieth century as far as a new invention. It’s really
phenomenal and to think it came, it started by the
prohibition and by the lack of being able to
play animal skin drums started this process where the human
will and desire to make music and to celebrate
and to be dignified through our musical expression
started this incredible process and today we have steel pan orchestras
enjoyed all around the world. Thanks again for coming to join us at MIM.
