[F]raming is what happens before the spectacle is presented.
~Mieke Bal1
I am often mindful of those panmen2 who, at the inception of the steelband movement, were involved in the development of the steelpan in Trinidad and Tobago. How many of those that went before the panmen bled, were arrested and fought to express themselves through music-making.3 I think of their survival strategies and how making music, instrument building and experimentation were an integral part of their ventures to struggle against inequality.4 Their achievements are heard today with astonishing clarity. And yet the work still to be done remains equally daunting. I am mindful of both them and us – pan players, archivists, researchers, teachers, arrangers, composers, builders, adjudicators, tuners and listeners.
In the beginning there was deprivation and vehemence. Colonialism’s quartet of oppression, subjugation, restriction and discrimination were performing a perpetual tune. Still, music-making remained prodigious. Through experimentation and imagination, the steelpan emerged and took form as a reclamation of personhood.5 Restrictions and ordinances provided a space within which those marginalized had no self because it was denied by the ruling class.6 Thus, steelpan music-making aided in the reclamation of selves. There was a relish for music, for manipulating materials, often discarded objects, so that they would produce a particular sound for making music. The possibilities of these materials were explored and the inventiveness expressed in music moved those cast to the periphery and affected the way their personhood
1 Bal, 2002, 137.
2 I use the term panmen because the inception of the instrument’s development only involved men. Women were excluded from steelpan music-making practices because of the atmosphere of violence and the social stigma involved. Additionally, there is little attention granted to the role of women in the historical discussion of the early phase of the movement. Today, women are involved in every facet of the instrument as arrangers, composers, performers, educators, researchers, builders, and tuners.
3 Hill, 1972, 45.
4 Ibid., 49.
5 Personhood refers to those who were considered non-human or sub-human in order to justify their unjust treatment as their humanity continuously came into question under the slavery system, and later under colonial rule. Before the question of identity can be addressed, the reclamation of personhood and the processes involved herein beg attention. According to Davis “the most extreme form of human alienation is the reduction to the status of property” (2010, 53). The reclamation of personhood describes the process involved in a movement from considering the human as an object and treated as a thing, to being recognized as a person. Additionally, it includes a movement from a state where the humanity of those enslaved and under colonial rule was denied, to one of having that humanity recognized.
6 Hill, 1972, 50.
36
was realized. Panmen worked and played in secret, knowing fully well that whatever progress made through their ingenuity could be confiscated and destroyed by their rivals or the authorities. It was not solely the sounds that mattered, but what was being articulated in the use of sound: aspects of daily lived experiences that remained indescribable and left unarticulated – anger, vengeance, disdain. They had this shrewd knack to structure an unsound reality – play it, abridge it until it complied – which yielded a profound knowledge. An eloquent discourse resides in their music-making. Their musical endeavour was discredited and scorned, yet in spite of this their obstinacy is audible today. In their performance, they remain the gauge by which humanity is calculated and marked. Those who, intentionally or unintentionally, ignore your history, or seek to exoticize in order to commodify, are liable and must therefore answer.
Panmen have always performed exquisitely. Steelpan music-making defended people who couldn’t defend the practice or themselves. There is movement now away from the periphery and onto world stages. That which moved and disturbed behind the bridge7 is remembered.
Coming from the edge, from the periphery, a disturbance so distressing now completely gathers those involved in music-making – as it did then and will continue to do.
Posing questions: Steelpan and the concept of framing within the world music festival
The above was an attempt to start at the beginning. It sought to provide the house into which we are welcomed. This mode of framing serves the purpose of letting the reader learn what went before and how that informs what is currently taking place, as well as to anticipate the actions that will follow. Widely dispersed genres of music are increasingly caught in a web of framing processes as they make their pilgrimage through the world music festival circuit. This chapter crafts its remarks in relation to the notions of roots, diversity, multiculturalism and difference. I engage with these four terms because they emerged from the festival space, from conversations with participants and musicians, stage presentations and introductions of artists, festival website descriptions, and the literature that was distributed throughout the festival space in the form of programme notes, fliers and magazines. The major part of this chapter is a schematic framing of ways, often taken for granted, of thinking about music and identity that are echoed in everyday language.
In analysing certain framing processes at world music festivals and expos such as WOMAD and WOMEX, this chapter challenges the apparently self-evident significances of the above
7 Dudley 2007.
37
four terms. Both as they are casually used in conversation and deployed in relation to music-making, they inhibit us from questioning what it means to celebrate and inhabit a multicultural8 society. The questions I will explore in this chapter, then, are these: How can we complicate the notion of roots as it emerges in world music? What is the musical implication of ‘roots’, and how does it inform musical performance at the Amsterdam Roots Festival? How do particular processes involved in framing music, within the festival space and world music discourse at large, prevent us from acknowledging the intricate ways it clandestinely structures practices and ideologies? Framing will be the spindle around which I will attempt to develop other concepts. I will explore such notions as Otherness, difference and acts of Othering, movement, and transformation. As we proceed through the emergence of framing processes in world music stagings, we should recover an entire throng of kindred topics and questions. The festival flier at the 2010 Amsterdam Roots Festival is the first example of framing that I will present. The flier described Pamberi Steel Orchestra as having the main goal of “warming up the public with bomp tunes.”9 It describes the ensemble and music-making further: “the sunny and rustling pansounds makes the Pamberi-team the perfect opening act for a wonderful day filled with amazing and surprising music from all cardinal points of the world.”10 This description prompted me, as a steelpan player, to reflect on the history of the steelband movement and the goal within it to move away from such tenets and conceptions as held by the festival flier.
If music is considered a cultural practice which enables an expression, how do processes of framing music affect or inform it? If this expression is elicited through interaction, what role does framing play in informing the latter? As acts of interaction and expression give rise to experience, how does framing contribute to it? This chapter is interested in the process by which the performance unfolds, by which music emerges as an experience. To tentatively explore this, I turn to the building process by which the steelpan emerges as an instrument for music-making.
Here I concentrate on the interaction between the builder and the used material as well as the way sound was worked with. I attempt to implicitly exemplify the value that was placed on instrument development and the knowledge acquired during that process. This knowledge emerged from the processes of interaction and expression. Framing is implicated herein for it involves how these processes are thought of and described in the festival’s discourse on the instrument and the music-making in which it is involved.
8 This term is used pervasively within world music discourse and casually throughout the festival space by participants and research informants. There are numerous scholars that critically engage with the term such as Spivak 1986, 1993; Hall 2001; Bhabha 1994; Bennett 1998; Back 1996 and Modood 2013.
9 “Het publiek opwarmen met bomp tunes.” (Italics and translation by the author).
10 “De zonnige en ruisende panklanken maken het Pamberi-elftal tot de perfecte openingsact voor een heerlijke dag vol met verrassende muziek uit alle windstreken.”(Italics and translation by the author).
38
I will raise the question of framing practices, exploring what a comprehension of framing both as a mode of presentation and as a concept might enable. How can knowledge of the mechanisms involved in framing practices be used to better comprehend world music performance practice? I will explore the idea of being able to think through the advantages of framing as it emerges within contemporary world music performance practice. I aim to stretch the boundaries of both world music and the concept of framing so that the way we, as music scholars, relate to Otherness can be accommodated on grounds of greater critical equity.
At the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010, Trinidad and Tobago-based Pamberi Steel Orchestra performed on a stage that also accommodated performances of Les Espoires de Coronthie from Guinea, Haggai from Mongolia, Staff Benda Bilili from Congo, Kassav from Guadeloupe, Lura from Portugal, and Izaline Calister from Curaçao. The above performances were implicitly collected under the category of roots. Pamberi performed on Sunday the 20th of June 2010 on the Alliantie stage at Amsterdam’s Oosterpark from 1:00pm to 2:40pm. The way that the festival flier described Pamberi Steel Orchestra was in exoticizing terms. This language, as well as the naming of the festival and musics that are comprised under it, will be discussed at length in this and the following chapter. The introduction to this chapter relates to framing since it locates me as part of the steelpan movement as a player and as a researcher within the festival space. It also presents my engagement in acts of framing steelpan music-making. In addition to the previous questions posed about framing, I ask: In what way does framing inform musical performance within world music festivals and how is this to be conceptualized in terms of how difference is negotiated? Following this, another question presents itself: how has world music in general, and one performance practice in particular, been constructed, maintained, and presented as a musical Other through acts of framing. Before directing my attention towards framing, I will now briefly discuss the importance of musical performance as a notion.
The concept of musical performance remains foundational for approaching the above questions. In addition to Nicholas Cook’s11 understanding of musical performance, discussed in the introduction, I argue that music situates participants in a particular relation to each other.
According to this argument, musical performance allows participants to rethink their personal socio-cultural experiences, in this case, within the world music festival space. Moreover, it enables them to make sense of their relationship to their surroundings and community. It furthermore affords a consideration of how they relate to others, themselves, and the spaces and places within which they dwell because it brings them into these relations. Finally, through music-making, participants are able to contribute and thus co-produce the world that is
11 Cook 2003.
39
presented to them and to reflect on this presentation. These points will be elaborated in the case study discussed in this chapter.
Steelpan building: Interaction and expression
To preliminarily underscore the acts of interaction and expression, I turn to John Dewey,12 who explains that expression and art demand material employed as media. He suggests that an innate relation endures between medium and the act of expression. He states that “only where material is employed as media is there expression and art […] Everything depends upon the way in which material is used when it operates as medium.”13 Etymologically, he says, “an act of expression is a squeezing out, a pressing forth,”14 but Dewey explicitly recognizes that “the mere issuing forth or discharge of raw material is not expression.”15 Therefore, expression involves interaction, for it is only
through interaction with something external to it, the wine press, or the treading foot of man, juice results […] Even in the most mechanical modes of expression there is interaction and a consequent transformation of the primitive material which stands as raw material for a product of art, in relation to what is actually pressed out. It takes the wine press as well as grapes to ex-press juice, and it takes environing and resisting objects as well as internal emotion and impulsion to constitute an expression of emotion.16
One may ask what this expression brings to the notion of framing. It simply raises another question: how do particular modes of framing (such as the festival’s description of the instrument) interact with, and relate to, musical expression (instrument building, music-making and the expression of self herein).
For Dewey, the work of art involves the construction of experience through the interaction of diverse circumstances and forces, within which the thing expressed is wrung from the producer.17 He considers the act of expression to be a “construction in time, not an instantaneous emission”18 and explains that the “expression of the self in and through a medium […] is itself a prolonged interaction of something issuing from the self with objective conditions, a process in which both of them acquire a form and order they did not at first possess.”19 Drawing on Dewey’s argument, I turn to my case study to show how both the oil barrel and those involved in transforming it into a musical instrument acquired “a form and order [it] [they] did not at
12 Dewey 2005.
13 Ibid., 66.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 67.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 68.
40
first possess.”20 This step also serves to historically situate the steelpan and outline a preliminary contrast to the festival flier.
In the 1940s and 1950s, discarded oil barrels21 were used to manufacture and produce the steelpan.22 Baraka succinctly sums up the impetus for this music-making when he writes: “the use of the African drum was strictly forbidden, other percussive devices had to be found, like the empty oil barrel that led to the development of the West Indian steel bands.”23 The instrument created when an empty 55-gallon oil barrel, with a thickness of 17-18 gauges, is stretched to accommodate space for the placement of pitches. The top surface of the barrel is sunken into a concave shape through manually hammering with a six-pound sledgehammer;24 the depth depends on the particular voice of the instrument. When the required depth is achieved, the pitches are strategically drawn out with a piece of chalk or permanent marker and then shaped to be slightly convex.25 The outline of the pitches is then indented using a flathead nail and a hammer – a process known as grooving which prevents interference between the pitches. Depending on the voice of the instrument, the skirt of the barrel, which has numerous acoustic functions, is measured and cut off with a cutlass; the lower voices have longer skirts than the higher voices. The steel is then subjected to heat. In this process, called tempering, the metal is heated and rapidly cooled, enabling the instruments to retain their tuning. When the metal turns blue because of the heat, water is poured over it so that it cools rapidly. Hereafter, tuning hammers are used to achieve the correct pitch. Overtones and fundamentals are strategically placed in such a way that a particular timbral quality is attained. Strobe tuners are commonly used to ensure the precision of this process. After tuning, a protective coat of some sort is added for practical and aesthetic reasons – usually a layer of chrome, paint, or a powder finish is used to prevent rusting and, for some, to make the instrument look more attractive. The instrument is now fine-tuned and blended with the other instruments in the steelorchestra. This means that the tonal quality and the pitches of the pan are matched with those of the other instruments of the orchestra. Kim Johnson notes that “a tuner does not tune a steel pan the way one does a piano tuner [sic] or a guitar – by turning a key that tightens a string. Rather, tuning a
20 Ibid.
21 In addition to oil barrels, other barrels are specifically produced for the purpose of making instruments.
22 The steelpan is the only acoustic musical instrument to be invented in the 20th century. This chapter does not seek to give a comprehensive delineation of the historical development of the instrument; instead it will outline particular socio-cultural aspects that surround the instrument and the ways in which these were negotiated in framing processes at the Amsterdam Roots Festival 2010. For a comprehensive historical outline of the instrument’s development, see Nurse 2007; Stuempfle 1995; Johnson 2011, 2006, 2002, 1998; Dudley 2007; Smith 2013 and Hill 1972.
23 Baraka, 1963, 27.
24 See example 1.1 and 1.2. Pneumatic tools are also used to get to the required depth.
25 This process is referred to as ‘marking the notes’.
41
steelpan means actually manufacturing the instrument, which begins with selecting a drum and ends with making the notes vibrate at precisely determined rates.”26
I have outlined this process to practically explore how expression took shape in these music-making practices and to delineate how Dewey’s conception of experience construction, as it relates to interaction and expression, might be related to steelpan music-making. Moreover, outlining this process allows a foundation to explore the construction of experience through an interaction with steelpan music-making within the festival space. The notion of interaction in world music should not be glossed over, especially when aspects of hybridity, diversity, difference, multiculturalism and collaborations come into consideration.
The above discussion of instrument building as it relates to interaction and expression can be now brought into conversation with the description of the steel-orchestra in the Amsterdam Roots Festival flier. I conceive of this description, including that on the festival website, as a paratextual entity that forms a constitutive part of the framing process of world music – it surrounds the musical performance and contributes to music discourse. According to Genette and Maclean, the paratext is a “reinforcement and accompaniment of a certain number of productions”27 like the preface of a book […] they surround the text and prolong it, precisely in order to present it, […] to make it present, to assure its presence in the world, its “reception”
and its consumption.”28
Pamberi’s music-making was described in the festival flier as “traditional oil-barrel sounds.”29 However, the instrument building processes outlined above suggests that the steelpan can no longer be simply considered as an oil barrel. This leads us to the enigma of conceptualizing framing practices in relation to musical performance.
Bal and the Concept of Framing
Bal’s principal concern is inherent in her title, Travelling Concepts. She is opposed to providing precise definitions, historical delineations,30 in depth discussions, or concrete overviews of
Bal’s principal concern is inherent in her title, Travelling Concepts. She is opposed to providing precise definitions, historical delineations,30 in depth discussions, or concrete overviews of