The Ubyssey
by: Mariam Baldeh
British Columbia, Canada - College dropout and proud father Gage Averill — when he’s not busy as dean of the Arts faculty at UBC — is a world-renowned ethnomusicologist. To find out exactly what that means, and how music comes into play in race relations, The Ubyssey sat down for a conversation with Averill last week.
Dean of the Arts Faculty Gage Averill. Photo Geoff Lister/The Ubyssey
U: And in addition to studying music, you play a lot of cool instruments, like the Trinidadian steel pan. What exactly is that?
GA: [Laughing] You take a 55-gallon oil drum — imagine that — and cut off a little bit of the rim, and you pound down the surface so it’s concave. Then you pound up and down so that it forms notes, and you tune it, and then make whole orchestras of up to 150 people. It’s the world’s most sophisticated 20th century orchestra. It’s the first major orchestral instrument developed in the 20th century in Trinidad during and after World War II.
U: So what role has music played in race relations?
GA: Oh, it’s huge. I mean, you could go in so many directions. You were just asking about steel pan, so imagine that this music — what came out of Carnival, which was a gathering of very poor, very black neighbourhoods in Trinidad under British colonialism as they moved into post-colonial era — this was the kind of music that middle-class parents didn’t want their kids to play. It was racially associated as well as class associated. And so it was music of assertion. You’d play it loud to piss off all the people in the area. Gradually, it became a national thing, but really it was a poor, black musical symbol for quite a long time.
U: Interesting.
GA: Everywhere where you have a group that is racially marked and made marginal, music and other cultural expressions take on a really symbolic role. The music tends to mark the group: this is our thing, this is what we play. And then they tend to create moral panic elsewhere, especially among the racially dominant groups.
I grew up in the states during the civil rights era, and the really important songs from that era were songs that gave people courage. They created a sense of possibility that barriers could be overcome. It was like a soundtrack to a movement. Very often, you find that when there are those kinds of claims being made and groups are in social and political motion, music becomes a soundtrack to that, and reinforces those claims of political power and social and economic equality being made. This usually comes into play in situations where there is an obvious racial divide.
Replies
I wish I could read the whole interview, the Ubyssey only posted an edited version. My only comment is that "It was racially associated as well as class associated" should actually be "It IS racially associated as well as class associated." Pan has not escaped the race issue yet. As a white panist, I am consistently told that I have no place in the pan world. These comments come from other panists, potential clients looking to hire a "real panist," and even from one of my prior teachers at a university well known for it's pan education.
I know that the beauty of pan will prevail though. Trinidad has blessed the world with a beautiful instrument and it's just a matter of time before that beauty is seen by all.