Chasing away the gray: Steel drums find a place in MN music culture

Walk the halls at the University of Minnesota School of Music and you're likely to catch a bit of oboe, a brass quintet or even a symphony orchestra.

Then you may hear something you didn't expect — sounds that seem better suited to a sun-drenched island than Ferguson Hall: calypso music on steel drums.

Marilyn Clark Silva says it's impossible for her not to dance or move when playing the pan, or steel drum. Every semester for three years, the teaching assistant and percussionist leads a steel drum class open to anyone, music major or not.

In a land where folk music is defined by Lutheran hymns played on parlor pianos and polkas on the accordion, the steel drum classes have helped build a bit of a beachhead on Minnesota musical culture.

The steel drum rhythms lead people to think of, and sometimes commit, dancing. And playing the instrument involves a certain amount of built-in movement as the percussionist reaches across and around the steel drum heads.

The U of M band has five bass steel drums that surround the percussionist, so he stands in a kind of well. Abby Johnson plays three cello "pans" or steel drums that require movement. Instead of a metallic "ping" the steel drum sound is made with wooden mallets wrapped with natural gum rubber and comes out as a gentle thrum.

Clark Silva traces the drum's roots to slaves on Trinidad and Tobago plantations who wanted to make music. They had to fashion crude instruments from what was available, bamboo at first. Plantation owners worried the workers used the drumming to communicate and organize a revolt and then, after slavery, worker strikes.

Competition among the bamboo bands spawned violence. When the instruments were banned, workers turned to other objects including discarded biscuit tins that created different pitches as they dented during playing.

In the late 1930s and then taking off in the 1940s, Trinidad and Tobago musicians salvaged oil drums from scrap yards and other sources. Players trimmed the drums to different sizes — big, deep ones for the bass pan, shorter ones for the lead pan. They used a rock or some other heavy object to pound the top of the oil drum into a bowl.

Modern steel drums produce all the notes of the musical scale, though banging down the oil drum top is mostly unchanged 80 years later. Areas of the bowl are tuned to create pitches.

"You have to be all day throwing a bowling ball into these oil drums creating this bowl shape," Clark Silva says.

Tuning the bowl to make different notes evolved into an art. Johnson, a university sophomore, says drum head space is limited so note arrangement is unusual.

"They're organized in diminished sevenths, per drum, so, it doesn't really make sense, but once you learn the road map of where all the notes are it gets a lot easier," she says.

Most steel drums are made to order and cost from $1,000 to $5,000. The U of M steel band this semester had seven players, five of whom were playing the instrument for the first time. Steel bands in the Caribbean can have dozens, even hundreds of players.

Clark Silva, 26, a California native, has percussion degrees from Sacramento State and Arizona State universities. She says steel bands have a very strong following at colleges and universities, with excellent programs in Texas and Arizona.

Johnson was smitten with the sound early. She joined her suburban Chicago steel drum school band in seventh grade. At the U, she has her sights set on a music therapy degree.

She says steel drum music chases the gray away.

"When you go into rehearsals and you create music especially with the pans, and it's happy and it's upbeat," she says, "you sort of forget all your gray troubles."