IT IS the Monday, the day after the Panorama semi-finals, the names of the steelbands for the finals have been announced in the conventional small, medium, and large categories.
For the following two weeks, these bands will embark on a programme of rehearsals, geared to fine-tuning their Panorama arrangements.
No doubt they will pay more attention to achieving better clarity, especially in the execution of those 16- note allegro passages. Also, the instrument lends itself to a wide gamut of dynamic effects which Panorama arrangers creatively exploit. These will be looked at again. They range from: very soft (pp) to moderately loud (mf) to very loud (ff); together with the directions to change the dynamics such as growing louder (crescendo), softer (decrescendo), and sudden stress (sforzando).
Additionally, even at this stage, arrangers will try to improve reharmonisation and melodic and motivic development with the knowledge that even a half point can make a difference between a first and second placing. Other strategies and musical devices are considered and reviewed including: balance, interpretation, tonal quality, and more effective use of the rhythm section. But all the time at the back of arrangers’ minds is the unavoidable compulsion that the arrangement must inevitably express the “Carnival spirit”.
There have been many discussions among pannists as to the meaning of the Carnival spirit. I too have engaged others to get their interpretation of this aesthetic quality and the consensus is that “the Panorama arrangement must unfold in a manner that is emblematic of the way Trinbagonians behave during Carnival celebrations.” Panorama pieces are saturated with arrangers’ intentions which are designed to evoke certain emotions in the listening audience and in turn elicit particular responses. This is clearly evident when a selected musical device or phrase is executed by a Panorama finalist. This could be crescendos and diminuendos (growing louder then softer), surges and releases, tensions and plateau, melodic/rhythmic stops and starts, chromatic runs; when these are executed and then terminated with a flourish and the audience spontaneously jumps to its feet with joyous shouts of approval, the pannists inwardly smile and silently agree, “We ketch them.” In 1923, the Swiss composer, Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), wrote Pacific 231 (a locomotive). In it, he too used crescendo in conjunction with accelerando (louder and faster), which vividly portrayed in the listeners’ minds a train gradually building up momentum and tearing through the night. Music has always been used as a manipulative medium.
In Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, Nelson Goodman suggested, “For the listener, the music is an excuse for his own emotion. The evocation fuses with the musical experience, and association then becomes expression.” Music is such a medium that can effect the passage from evocation to expression.
The 20th century Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce, believed that music and other works of art can express “intuitions”, that is, a preconceptual mental particular that can be communicated and understood through this particular experience (the intuition). He expounded the “resemblance theory” which states that “expression in music is founded in analogy or resemblance between a piece of music and a state of mind.” What the steelbands are doing in Panorama is nothing new and has been done for centuries.
As a non-conceptual art, music is able to present to us, in objective form, a direct picture of the mind itself.
The expression of the Carnival spirit does not arise simply through evocation, or resemblance with a state of mind; thoughts of Carnival penetrate the Panorama musical structure, and is worked out through it.
Replies
Very well said, and thank you.
"Music is heard, but seldom seen-except by musicians." (The Invisible Man.)
HOW true Ms. Sten...
I think the judges SAW Phase ll music but did not HEAR it.