By Jane Blanksteen --- May 8, 1977
“COME on! And let it rock!” shouted James Leyden, a music teacher at the Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, trying to get the attention of the 16 blue‐jeaned and sneakered teen‐age steel drummers who were arranged in a circle around him.
These 16 high school students. called Calliope's Children, meet twice a week after school to rehearse under the direction of Mr. Leyden, who became interested in calypso and steel drums on a visit to the Caribbean. With the bassdrum players playing as many as six drums each, Calliope's Children bang on a total of 33 old steel barrels that have been converted into versatile musical instruments.
Calliope's Children toured Rumania last summer and are now earning their air fare for a trip arranged through Friendship Ambassadors, a private New York group, to the Soviet Union and Poland by performing for parties and civic groups. They are also selling copies of their record “Harvest,” a collection produced by Philo Records in Vermont.
“People like to listen to it,” said Marianne Noble, a 14‐year‐old sophomorewho is one of the group's “cello” drummers. “This really turns people on. The drums are unique and fun.”
Although the students, who have all taken Mr. Leyden's beginning music class, called Steel Drums I, and have been playing for at least a year, are enthusiastic about them now, the drums were not an immediate hit when he introduced them seven years ago.
After Mr. Leyden bought $500 worth of steel drums, he said “it took six months to get the kids interested
“I think it was just teen‐age resistance to something absolutely new,” he said. “They were afraid to try and fail.”
“But,” he added, “I got one student, a kind of nutty guy, to try the drums, and then when the kids heard the sounds, they came in the door to listen.”
After the cultural barrior was broken, the drums became an integral part of the Horace Greeley music department. The school now offers four regularly scheduled classes in the drums.
“The steel‐drum students are really learning basic theory, chords, harmony, rhythm and scales,” Mr. Leyden said. “They are learning principles they can apply to any musical instrument.”
He recalled that the original set of drums he bought “were all out of tune—I was brought up in a musical back ground of finer tuning. So 1 called the man who was the originator of steel band music, Ellie Mannette, and he came and tuned those drums.”
Mr. Mannette, a Trinidad‐born man in his 40's who lives in Queens, was among the small group of musicians in the Caribbean who, in the early 1940's, first turned tin drums, which had been used to beat out rhythms, into instruments capable of producing complex melodies.
Mr. Mannette eventually made 45 drums that Horace Greeley owns. There are four kinds of drums in the collection. The lead drums are the bottom quarters of 55‐gallon commercial steel drums, the kind used to hold wax, oil and soap. These are the soprano drums; they have the most notes (31) and the highest pitch.
Then there are those called “seconds.” Each player performs on a pair of drums, lower in pitch than the leads and with fewer tones. Next come the “cellos,” sets of three drums made from three‐quarter‐length steel barrels.
The bass drums are sets of six fulllength barrels, each with three to five deep rich notes.
“These are the tools of the trade,” Mr. Leyden said, displaying the contents of a drawer of a file cabinet in his office at the high school. “A six‐pound hammer and sound muffs to cover your ears while you hammer.”
The drumsticks are also made from simple equipment: metal or wood sticks with rubber tips made from surgical tubing or rubber bands.
“We're still primitive,” Mr. Leyden said. “But then again, the steel drum has only been in existence since 1946, and how old is that in the life of an instrument?”
The drums are so novel that there is still much experimentation with the arrangement of notes on the drum surfaces.
Mr. Leyden has contributed to these efforts. Mr. Mannette said that Mr. Leyden “took the notes and laid them on paper and redesigned them to make the drums good for teaching music theory.”
At first, Mr. Marinette resisted the changes Mr. Leyden had suggested because he was afraid that the drums would not sound so good. But, to his surprise, the changes could be made without sacrificing tone quality.
Besides teaching the arrangement of musical notes, the drums help young musicians by making them memorize the melodies.
“On the drum,” Mr. Marinette said, “the confined pattern of the notes makes you memorize the music because you can't look at the sheet and play at the same time.”
The drumsticks are also made from simple equipment: metal or wood sticks with rubber tips made from surgical tubing or rubber bands.
Calliope's Children play a wide repertoire, from the expected calypso and other Caribbean music to classical pieces by Bach, to modern show tunes such as songs from “West Side Story.”
Mr. Mannette said that the music best suited for the steel‐drum sound was not the fast calypso music that one might expect s but the classics and slower tunes. The drums, he explained, have large rich sound because “whenever you play one note, every note on the barrel vibrates.”
“The notes resonate for some period of time,” he said, “and in the classics, the movements are much slower than in calypso.”
In the slower pieces, he added, “there's time for the music to vibrate like a string:” “In calypso, you don't get clarity. The notes jumble together.”
But the students do not seem to care Mr. Mannette and Mr. Leyden prefer the slower pieces.
“I like the fast music,” one drummer said. “I don't like the slow things—they're boring.” And most of his colleagues agreed.
In general, the students expressed enthusiasm about playing the drums, mostly because these instruments were “different.”
But one of Calliope's Children, a senior, shrugged her shoulders and said: “You've got to be basically insane to endure all the practice and dragging the drums in and out of the bus.
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