By MIRANDA LA ROSE Friday, August 7 2015 Trinidad Newsday
Canada-based musician Hameed Shaqq wants Trinidad and Tobago to recommend that one of steelpan’s pioneers, Anthony Williams, be nominated for a Nobel Laureate in Physics for being the first to use the Pythagorean Circle of Fifths to make tonal music on a musical instrument, and more so doing it on a discarded steel oil drum.
“This invention was never done before. It was an age old theory going back to Pythagoras.
We saw in the eleventh, sixteenth and seventeenth century, people coming up with theoretical diagrams, but no one actually formed an instrument,” Shaqq said.
Shaqq spoke yesterday during the session on “Social Dimensions” on the steelpan at the International Conference and Panorama under way at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain.
Shaqq, formerly of Arima, has over 30 years in steelband education and performance.
“Anthony Williams can rightly claim the invention and construction of the only musical instrument in the configuration of the fourth and fifth cycle in the world,” he said Williams and other inventors, he said, used the discarded 55-gallon steel oil drums to create a musical instrument with a different modern tonal quality using the four voices - soprano, tenor alto and bass - not only to play music, but to understand and teach music as well.
The fifth cycle, he said, “is a practical for any music student in any part of the world at any point in time. That was never done in the history of music.” Looking at the development of musical instruments, including wind instrument and string instrument, he said, “we cannot say distinctively who were the creators of those instruments, because they were created thousands of years ago and spread across different cultures.” China, India, Africa, among other countries, he said, all have drums.
“There is no drum made on which the rudiments of music could be played on, until the development of the steel drum, which was then transformed into a musical instrument,” he said.
Williams’ vision manifested itself, Shaqq said, in the layout of the drum.
The structured notes radiated from the centre like a spider’s web, leaving practically no empty space on the face of the steel drum.
Williams’ genius, he said, led him to place the note arrangements in the best possible tuning positions, in the logical musical sequence spaced at intervals of fifths and arranged in such a way that each note ascends the chromatic scale and is one eighth of an inch narrower than the preceding note.
Outside of the steelband community, Shaqq said little is known of the science, technology, art, history and collaborative principles required to develop the steelpan.
Replies
The Nobel prize categories are: Physics, Chemistry, Medicine , Economics, Literature (Swedish Nobel Committee)
The Nobel Peace Prize (Norwegian Nobel Committee).
It seems to me that a case could be made in Physics. In AW's own words the pans were created "according to the mathematical principles of the movement of the planets".
The Peace Prize might also work.
A nomination in either field would be a strong positive statement and a recognition of the social,cultural and spiritual value of pan, its innovators and its people.
Check out <nobelprize.org/nomination and selection of nobel prizes>.
Let's do this.
Agreed 100%.
I second that.
We need to take it step by step, if we can get Anthony Williams a Noble Prize, get it and deal with the next
I agree completely.
That is great! All and good, but when will the originators of Pan from the 1940s get international recognition? What have their descendants to show for their initiatives?