Claiming A Trinidadian Sound-World

Making music is about making deliberate choices about how to organize sound. Most often, you take these things, pitches, and you organize a bunch of them until you have a thing that you can hum along to or vocalize. A melody.

If you want to get fancy, you can use rhythm. Rhythm is the relationships between the relative durations and intensities of sounds. Another way, you could take a bunch of short sounds and a bunch of long sounds, and juxtapose them, and voilà, you’ve got rhythm, baby! Similarly, you take a bunch of louder sounds and a bunch of quieter sounds, and juxtapose them, and hey presto! Rhythm. When you add rhythm to your music, you’re really turning up the heat.

A thing we don’t recognize as being a part of music is the kinds of sounds we think of as being musical. Stay with me, because if you thought adding rhythm was fancy, then this is cosmic!

Consider the sound of a flute, or of a violin, or of a piano. When you hear any of these instruments being played, you automatically think, ah, music. But, the sound of a tree falling in the forest (when you’re there to hear it) doesn’t immediately make you think, ah, music, but instead, ah, shit, lemme dash to safety! I don’t wanna get squished by some random tree here in this forest where no one’s around to hear me scream.

In short, there are sounds we think of as music sounds, and other sounds we think of as, well, just sound. Noise.

Stay with me.

We think of musical sounds as sounds of music, only because we’re accustomed to these particular sounds being used in music. We’re acculturated into it. Trumpet call? Music. Car horn? Danger. Child singing on a plane? Music. Child wailing on a plane? Noise! Pass the ear plugs, please type of noise. (Or, maybe that’s relative – you might think child wailing on a plane is music to your ears. Meh. Relative.)

Anyway, here is the concept of a musical sound-world; it’s just the constellation of sounds and patterns that people will accept as musical. They accept these sounds through acculturation, in a certain place in a certain time.

At a certain time in the history of Trinidad and Tobago, there existed side by side two cultures with clashing sound-worlds. For one of these cultures, the sounds and patterns of drumming were elemental, normal; for the other culture, drumming was just noise. Dangerous noise, at that. Pass the colonialist repression type of noise.

Long story short (others have written about this history, at length), suddenly there was the steelpan (which some people call a steel drum, but please don’t, even though it’s literally a drum made out of steel), moderately repression-proof. And, for the past sixty years or more, the unique voice of this one-of-a-kind instrument has become part of the music soundscape of Trinidad and Tobago, a part of our sound-world. It’s more than just the creation of a new musical instrument; it’s also the fact that this particular voice is accepted as musical, and essentially Trini.

For me, making music that sounds like this place – Trinidad and Tobago – means incorporating the voice of the steelpan into the music I create.

In my blog post, Starting Symphony 5, I talked a little about the voice of the steelpan; at another time I’ll talk a little more about this idea, but the post will give you a primer.

For me, it’s important that I do this deliberately, consciously, obviously, only because I think I’m reacting to the perception I hold that we in Trinidad and Tobago tend to miss the forest for the trees, a little. We’re hyper-focused, some of us, on the steelpan (the tree in this little analogy), and we miss the fact that our acceptance of pan-sounds in our constellation of music sounds makes our sound-world broader than that of someone who doesn’t know pan sounds or thinks of these sounds as noise (the forest).

Think of the difference between someone trying to create a piece of art, who thinks that they can use only paint on canvas for their creation, and someone creating art using paint, yes, but also other media like charcoal; on canvas, yes, sometimes, but also on wood, or on plaster, or on stone. In the second case, the artist’s palette of what’s possible is that much broader, so the art is different.

Having a wider more inclusive sound-world gives us options and agency in music-making that other cultures with different sound-worlds don’t have, yet.

So, even though I write symphonies, I’ve adapted the typical symphonic orchestra plan to include a grouping of five voice-parts of the steelpan family. So, in my score, there are five families – winds, brass, percussion, steelpan, and strings – each family, like a choir, having its own grouping of voice-parts.

In creating music for this unusual symphonic profile, I open myself to the exploration of new doubling relationships, of new patterns of rhythm, of different musical effects. There’s a tradition of centuries of symphonic composition, and also a newer world of steelpan composition, open to me.

Not exactly the final frontier, but exactly the kind of space I’m ready to explore.