Tradition and Modernity in Trinidadian Steelband Performance

Abstract

Imagine, if you have never heard it, a group of 100 steel pan beaters playing a ten-minute theme-and-variation arrangement of a popular calypso that features baroque counterpoint, African-style call-and-response structures, a driving percussion groove, orchestral dynamics, chromatic scale patterns, reharmonizations, sudden breaks during which the crowd roars with excitement, and a Beethovenesque cadence to finish it off This is the music of Trinidad and Tobago’s Panorama steelband competition, held annually just before carnival. Its complex synthesis of forms and styles, composed by one arranger and played precisely by rote from start to finish, is a far cry from what most people associate with “Caribbean music.” And yet it is generated by historical and cultural forces that are quintessentially Caribbean: cultural deracination and juxtaposition, colonialism and nation-building, the oppressive hierarchy of plantation society and the emancipatory power of festive performance. In this context of conflict and change, the people of the Caribbean had one of the first and most intense experiences of what we now call modernity—an experience that Panorama performances reflect in a particularly dramatic way.