Christopher L Ballengee
During its 2012 international tour of the Americas, the Washington, DC-based National Symphony Orchestra gave a concert at Napa in Port-of-Spain in honour of T&T’s 50th Independence anniversary. During this performance, NSO music director Christoph Eschenbach announced that the orchestra would commission a new steelpan concerto. This promise came to fruition this past weekend at the Kennedy Center in Washington as the NSO presented a concert under the direction of Venezuelan guest conductor Manuel López-Gómez titled Rhythms of the Americas.
On a programme featuring a handful of important North and South American composers was the world premiere of Beneath Lighted Coffers, a new work for steelpan and orchestra created by New York-based composer Andy Akiho expressly for Trinidad-born pan player Liam Teague who was the soloist for the evening.
Akiho is not only a composer, but also an adept pan player in his own right. He first encountered the steelpan as a college student in the United States and was immediately drawn to its unique musical qualities.
Akiho soon began travelling regularly to T&T, playing in large steel orchestras and small stage sides, becoming comfortable with pan in its traditional context of calypso and soca. Yet, it was through jazz improvisation that Akiho started to explore the full range of the instrument, exploiting the pan’s distinctive identity as a melodic, harmonic and percussive musical instrument. Using the steelpan to explore these various musical elements, Akiho was eventually led to become a composer.
His growing inventory of compositions, many of which prominently feature steelpan (including one previous steelpan concerto composed while a student at Yale University), includes many prestigious commissions including those from Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble ACJW, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Harvard University, and numerous major orchestras and chamber ensembles. Most recently, he became the 2015 beneficiary of the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund, a highly selective competition to support the creation of new music.
Akiho’s works for steelpan push the boundaries of the instrument in ways that pan purists might find disturbing. He often calls for performers to play with bare wooden sticks for a thin percussive timbre, pound on the skirt of the pan to create a gong-like sound full of reverberating overtones, or use surprising materials—like a metal scraper—to elicit rather harsh sounds from an instrument that in its traditional context is synonymous with sweet sonorities.
While these kinds of performance techniques would likely draw surprise on the Panorama stage (though playing up pan’s more percussive qualities is not unfamiliar in this regard), they are at home in Akiho’s music, which is decidedly not intended for Carnival revelry. Rather, he continues in a venerable line of art music composers who have endeavoured to extend the possibilities of traditional concert instruments.
For steelpan, this is only possible thanks to composers and musicians, going all the way back to Taspo, who worked so diligently to first establish the legitimacy of pan as a concert instrument capable of performing all kinds of music, including works of Europe’s most venerated classicists. And just as innovators of the 20th century helped defy classical music conventions through a variety of new ideas scored for old instruments, so too has steelpan entered the realm of reinvention in the hands of contemporary composers like Akiho.
In 2014, Akiho won the Luciano Berio Prize, an honour that allowed him to work full-time on new compositions while resident in Rome for one year. It was in this time that Akiho completed Beneath Lighted Coffers, inspired by the composer’s many visits to the Pantheon, an ancient temple built by Marcus Agrippa around 30 BC, topped with a massive coffered concrete dome, still the largest such structure in the world.
Each of the concerto’s five movements explores a different aspect of the Pantheon. The first movement, Portico, is a musical introduction appropriately sketching the unassuming grandeur of the temple’s entryway that gives way to the breathtaking rotunda.
The inner movements pay homage to the temple’s architecture and history: movement two is structurally based on five groupings of 28 pitches which represent the 140 coffers in the great dome; the third movement, Oculus, is an introspective sketch of the changing view of the sky seen through the dome’s central opening; and the fourth movement Corelli is based upon a work by Baroque composer Archangelo Corelli who is buried in the Pantheon.
The final energetic movement, Permanence, honours the strength and stability of the ancient structure with strong musical gestures from the orchestra juxtaposed with hints of perpetual rhythmic motion in the steelpan.
What is particularly important about the concerto is its co-operative nature. Akiho’s score—featuring such unconventional orchestral instruments as glass bottles and metal pipes—accentuated the percussive qualities of Teague’s steelpan and frequently juxtaposed the thin timbre of the harp with equally thin, metallic lines in the pan’s upper register.
In this way, the traditional concerto form—one in which a soloist takes centre stage while the orchestra serves as a support mechanism—is adapted in what seems less soloist-versus-orchestra and more like a group effort. This is certainly a strength of the concerto. It’s also a quality that in many ways reflects the co-operative nature of the steel orchestra, whether or not this was Akiho’s intention.
The performance on opening night (which was repeated the next evening) was packed.
Though the event was as formal as one might expect at the Kennedy Center, the audience was decidedly less sophisticated than usual, perhaps because of the more populist works on the remainder of programme, including George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture, a classical homage to the 1930s-era rumba craze; Alberto Ginastera’s Estancia suite, an often-raucous portrait of Argentine ranch culture; Antonio Estévez’s Mediodía en el llano, an impressionistic sketch of the Venezuelan countryside; and the percussion-heavy Symphonic Dances from West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein. Of these, Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances was the most recently composed in 1957.
Removed from the other works on the programme by nearly 60 years, Akiho’s concerto therefore stood out as a bit of an oddity for audiences unaccustomed to new music. Many had never seen or heard a steelpan before, and perhaps even more had never been exposed to such a contemporary musical idiom. As such, many audience members seemed distracted and confused at times. The concerto is complex, not just for the performers on stage, but also for the audience.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate soloist for the evening than Liam Teague. Long an advocate for the elevation of pan’s status as a concert instrument, Teague is well known to the steelpan community as director of the steel orchestra programme at Northern Illinois University and current arranger for Silver Stars Steel Orchestra the last two years. He is also the 2014 Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence laureate in Arts and Letters.
The first steelpan concerto composed by Jan Bach in 1994 was also dedicated to and premiered by Teague who has since performed the work with various orchestras around the world. Where Bach’s concerto is largely lyrical and at times impressionistic, Akiho’s work is alternately fiery and introspective while its many sudden changes in mood require a great amount of technical proficiency from the soloist.
Teague’s ability was clearly displayed that evening as he adeptly navigated Akiho’s demanding score, a feat greeted by a lengthy ovation from the audience. To perhaps appease those who expected something more conventional from the steelpan, Teague provided a few brief bars of Kitchener’s Night and Day as an encore that received more enthusiastic applause than the concerto itself.
Beneath Lighted Coffers, and Akiho’s steelpan compositions more generally, challenge traditional notions of steelpan and are at the forefront of creating a space where pan can be studied, composed for, and performed on the same level as any other contemporary concert instrument.
—Christopher L Ballengee is an ethnomusicologist and assistant professor of Music at Anne Arundel Community College in Annapolis, Maryland, whose research has included work on calypso and steelpan as well as a recent PhD dissertation on tassa drumming.