Programme note for The Lydian Steel 25th Anniversary Recital "Seasons of Steel"
published July 16, 2022
The Lydian Steel presents our 25th Anniversary recital “Seasons of Steel,” to the world this weekend. It is a labour of laughter and love. It is also an exercise of syncretism and innovation. We will take you through Seasons that have dominated and cycled in their ways throughout our existence. The show’s music is thematically set into four seasons, which for us here are synonymous with states of being, which we parallel as themes from Vivaldi’s 4 seasons suite of works:
- Season of Passion, Excitement, and Freedom (Summer 1st Mvmt)
- Season of Reflection, Reverence, and Respect (Winter 2nd Mvmt)
- Season of Harvest, Celebration, and Change (Autumn 3rd Mvmt)
- Season of Possibility, Hope, and Renewal (Spring 1st Mvmt)
Our show boasts music from the late 1600’s down into the present day (in one instance the very present-day). Interestingly, there will likely be very few moments where you will feel fully in one world or the other. As said before, the show is laid out in themes of transition and emotion. Here, you will find an aria from Handel about intense love and yearning chipping right beside Bizet, who gallops beside Verdi – being lashed by the winds, driving rain and hurricane imagery of Brown’s Tempest. And the beautiful thing is, to us as Caribbean people who will play, sing, and listen… there is this feeling of rightness – that this is how we do it! But why?
“Hold on please. While that tempo is great and is certainly possible for a violin, is roll we rolling – on a pan.”
While our repertoire for this show – and generally – begins in the early Western canon and moves into and around all genres and cultures we can creditably cajole from our chromatically tuned chrome, there is a uniqueness in the act of our offering. Yes, we are transmuting pieces from their original instruments
onto another. But that is not rare. Orchestrators take piano scores and put them into full ensemble pieces for classical chamber orchestras and larger ones. Often, even the reverse is true. It is not an unheard-of innovation to transpose music for one’s context. But then what is new here? is it the ranges? A question of colour? Sound-making limitations? The answer is yes, all of these and no – but mostly no.
As a percussion instrument, pans are played by striking, and as with most pitched percussion instruments, a note is sustained by rolling – hitting the surface in rapid succession for as long as the sound is desired. It is why sometimes playing a piece that moves at allegro dominated by quavers on a pan may be easier on the wrist than playing Vivaldi’s “Largo” from his Winter violin Concerto from the Four Seasons suite (don’t worry, you will hear both of these examples in the show). In one case, the music is moving at probably at most 16 notes/hits every four beats – in another, rolling for four slow beats could have you striking a note up to 60 times, all fast enough for them to be indistinguishable as separate notes.
In that way, pan players learn the same fact that wind players and violinists also accept early on – “Them Long notes is murder!”
But have we come upon why yet?
Is it that we are feeling pride at making it sound Caribbean/ Trinbagonian by virtue of it being on our instrument? I mean, in many ways this is the answer – but bear in mind that this is not new for us. In Bizet’s opera Carmen, the Iconic Habanera Aria is an actual Habanera – A Cuban contradance! The music of the region has been influencing the European metropole far longer than the peal of our pans. The answer, as I said is this – transposing onto a pan – but it also isn’t just this. It is on a pan – and what “playing it on a pan” means when those pan sticks are in the hands of a Trinbagonian.
Who but Trinis going to listen to Verdi’s anvil chorus, hear the clang and say “Ah, is iron, leh we calypso di chorus” and in seconds the Gypsies are in conversation with some good rum, chipping in de band? What other spirit but a Caribbean one would compose a piece named Tempest, and have horses running with the feel of cold raindrops hitting the back of your neck? A piece where thunder rumbling like an old-time tv station signing off, and all the while dizzying chromatic runs at breakneck speed, playing rhythms that feel random until you realise, they’re also the pattern of heavy wind and fat raindrops landing on 'galvanize' roofs! Nobody does do it like we.
And as we chip out the hall to Merchant, let us – as this programme aims to – meld all parts of us that may at a glance seem discordant and ill-fitting, into one beautiful whole. Come, Let Us Build a Nation together!
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