The Intelligencer
Illinois, USA - For a student to learn the music of another culture is always intriguing, but to perform it in the very country where that music was born is something really special. And that is precisely what happened when a group of Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) students traveled to Trinidad to perform in a steel band.
I had the opportunity to speak with some of the students, along with their instructor, Dan Smithiger, of the department of music at SIUE. They were: Sophie Browning and Alyssa Cowan, both majors in music education, and with Merrick Haji-Sheikh and Ryan Helenthal, both majors in music performance. During the last Christmas break they visited Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, a small country off the coast of eastern Venezuela.
....Given the simplicity of the instruments in a steel band, one wonders if they could be good tools to introduce to children. “Definitely,” said Cowan. “We did that over the summer at the percussion camp that I helped with here. It is difficult to teach them because the drums are so malleable, you hit it and it changes pitch. So it is hard to teach them not to create their own instrument by playing it.
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