By Johnny Commansingh
It is no secret that the musical genres that emerged in the Caribbean speak to the respective way of life extant on these outcroppings of rock in the Caribbean Sea. Although they may borrow from each other, no country has the same culture. The text Diversity Amid Globalization (2012) by Les Rowntree and others pointed out:
“The rhythmic beats of the Caribbean might be the region’s best-known product. This small area is the heart of reggae, calypso, merengue, rumba, zouk, and scores of other musical forms. The roots of modern Caribbean music reflect a combination of African rhythms with European forms of melody and verse…The famed steelpan drums of Trinidad were created from oil drums discarded from a US military base there in the 1940s…The eclectic sound and the ingenious rhythms make Caribbean music very popular. It is much more than good dancing music; the music is closely tied to Afro-Caribbean religions and is a popular form of political protest.”
The lyrics and rhythms relate to the masses, the struggles of a people to establish true freedom. There are categories of music that prove beyond any doubt that there has been a constant struggle, a cultural struggle to create a culture that mitigates against oppression, yet wholly acceptable in seeking the process of freedom. The music permeates the masses to strive for a culture of resistance against colonialism and now neocolonialism. Let us first seek for a reliable definition of the term ‘culture.”
Culture must be defined to explain the processes operating in the society, suggestive of how ideas and shared values constantly alter the environment in which people live. Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. Wilbur Zelinsky, (deceased), a famous cultural geographer, shared the view that the total culture consists of a bundle of traits, a collection of particulate objects…which is at best a half-truth, but, up to a point, quite a useful one.”
Edward Burnett Tylor, another exponent, placed culture as the “…complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Culture was also established as “the intellectual property of people everywhere.”
In his seminal text, The Cultural Geography of the United States (1992), Zelinsky stated:
“Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action.”
However, Zelinsky posits that a cultural system is ordered. It is not simply to be understood as a mere collection of traits. The intrinsic aspects of cultural systems are comprised of mentifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. He explained the meanings of these three elements:
Artifacts are those elements of culture that are directly concerned with matters of livelihood…the entire technology of supplying wanted goods and services.
Sociofacts are those phases of the culture most directly concerned with interpersonal relations.
Mentifacts are basically cerebral, psychological, or attitudinal in character… the mentifactual is the innermost, least mutable “holiest,” and most precious segment of the culture—the glue holding together the entire cultural mass and setting its tone and direction.
Two other researchers on culture, Kalman Applbaum and Ingrid Jordt, in their 1996 research paper published in the journal of Cultural Anthropology: ‘Inaugurating Consumption in the Global Village: Melding the Sacred and the Secular in the Japanese Wedding Industry,’ interpreted culture as:
“…lens through which experience is interpreted and constructed, the separation of abstract ideas from a concrete set of objects, symbols, practices, or plastic representations…culture is about location and time specific systems of shared meaning and therefore resists reduction into either universal or taxonomically consistent categories.”
In every sense of the word, a true definition for culture is illusive and difficult to explain but yet people talk about culture, and about people having no culture, and the presence of cultural landscapes. In light of this apparent confusion, Peirce Lewis in 1993 explained that the myriad things that are done to the earth for whatever purpose characterise cultural landscapes, be it monetary profit, aesthetic value, spirituality, personal comfort or communal safety.
On the other hand, Don Mitchell, in his book: Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction, published in 2000, critically espoused:
“…when we use the word culture, we are really not referring to anything at all. Instead, we are drawing on what could be called an empty abstraction. People do not ‘have’ culture. Nor do ‘cultures’ simply and autonomously exist, as something real, solid, and permanent. Instead, there is only a very powerful ideology of culture, an ideology that asserts people do this or do that because of ‘culture;’ or, at the very least, asserts that ‘culture’ exists as a realm, level, or medium of social interaction. As the very words ‘medium,’ ‘realm,’ and ‘level’ indicate, such assertions very quickly take us into the realm of mysticism.”
Back to the Caribbean region and its musical genres, and in light of what Mitchell presented regarding culture, it is noteworthy to state that by 1970, over 40 articles were published in refereed journals on the subject of music geography at international, national, and regional levels as a sub-field of cultural geography. In 2006 I made two presentations: “An Exploration of the Steelpan Landscape of Trinidad and Tobago,” Festival of Steel— Steeldrum’s Diamond Jubilee, Clarion Hotel, Morgantown, West Virginia, (July 9-15), and “Stories from Trinidad: An Understanding of the Steelpan Soundscape,” International Association of Pan, Akron, Ohio, (April, 28-30).
According to Zelinsky, The Place of Music, organised by the Institute of British Geographers in 1993, offered a mere dozen essays showing that “…the place of music has a scarcity value.” To add, in 1999, Zelinsky, in his critique of Sarah Cohen’s paper on the musical aspects of Jewish life in Liverpool, pointed out that the author amply illustrated that “…music…plays a unique, and often hidden or taken-for-granted role in the production of place.” Trinidad and Tobago is now known as the ‘Land of Steelpan and Calypso.’
In 1997, Phillip Brett in Acta Musicologia identified Jocelyne Guilbault and her exploration of “why certain genres of music become representations of national culture (as in the case of the steelpan) against a background of theories that constantly question the model of any nation or cultural group embodying a single set of values or ideals.”
In essence, the creation of musical forms is part and parcel of the Caribbean region. In recent times, the once lowly steelpan that was created as part of a rebellion against colonialism is now regarded as an instrument worthy of repute across the globe. In my 2005 dissertation, the forging of a soundscape in Trinidad was highlighted. Here’s how the steelpan fell into that groove:
“Initially, the pre-Lenten street carnival in Trinidad and Tobago was the domain of the French white elite. After the declaration of emancipation in 1834, the carnival became the essence of celebrative freedom for the former enslaved Africans. In the quest to satisfy the musical requirements for the annual celebration of this ritualistic, sensual, and ribald occasion, the steelband (the beating of metal objects) facilitated the expression of the behaviours associated with an unruly class of people. Subsequently, the steelpan, otherwise known as ‘pan,’ emerged from the steelband as the quintessential instrument demanded for such expression.”
Taking the world by storm was not only the steelpan instrument. Reggae, calypso (Soca), zouk, and even the East Indian Chutney are holding acceptance on stages almost everywhere. The people of the Caribbean region are as diverse as anyone could get. Nevertheless, there is a drive among such people to rise above their circumstances. With never-ending resolve, they multiply their talents in music and give to the world a taste of their goodness.
