March 2006

concert info

The History of the Steelpan

Steelpan (also known as pan or steel drum ) is a musical instrument and a form of music originating in Trinidad in the West Indies. The pan is a pitched percussion instrument, tuned chromatically, made from a 55-gallon drum of the type that stores oil (such as those made by our generous sponsor, Trilla Steel Drum Corporation), and is one of the most recently invented musical instruments. Drum refers to the steel drum containers from which the pans are made; the instrument is correctly called a pan .

When the British conquered Trinidad in 1797, they feared the passing of secret messages by means of drumming and outlawed the use of drums in the late 1800's. Drumming was a large part of the culture for the people of Trinidad, so they developed instruments to replace the banned ones, including tin cans and woodbarrels.

The first true steelpan used by musicians was an empty biscuit container, followed later by a paint pan. Drummers discovered that bulges of different sizes in the bottom of a tin could produce sounds of various pitches. These early steelpans had only a handful of notes.

In 1939, a drummer named Winston "Spree" Simon began playing melodies on the first tuned tins. He is considered to be the inventor of the tuned tins. Spree later produced the first convex (dome-shaped) steelpan. In 1946, Ellie Manette created the first steel drum in its concave form, made from a steel 55-gallon oil drum. During the 1960s, the tuner Anthony Williams developed a pan - the fourths and fifths - that has since become the standard design used today.

Pans are constructed by pounding the top of the oil drum into a bowl-like shape, known as "sinking" the drum. The drum is tempered over a fire and allowed to cool. Then the notes are laid out, shaped, grooved, and tuned with a variety of hammers and other tools. The note's size corresponds to the pitch - the larger the oval, the lower the tone. The size of the instrument varies from one pan to another. The length of the skirt (the cylindrical part of the oil drum) generally corresponds to the tessitura (high or low range) of the drum.

In a steel band, the melodies are played on a tenor pan, which can play a complete low pitch scale. The bands also have double tenor pans, a pair of lower pitch drums in which a lower pitch scale is divided between the two drums. Treble and harmonic drums are also featured. The steel pan continues to be further developed by panmakers through sophisticated experimentation. Modern steel bands have ten different drums, from tenor to the Nine Bass drums, which produce a vast tonal range. This tonal range of modern steel bands includes several octaves that emulate those available in a grand piano.