PAN INVADES
CYBERSPACE
By Terry Joseph
Express
July 7, 2000
Page 33
After
50 years of preening itself as the most significant musical
invention of the 20th Century, pan has suddenly made a leap into the
future, although much of that initiative is foreign in origin and utilizing
equally alien technology.
Scheduled
for October 16 to 18, the First International Conference on the Science and
Technology of the Steelpan will bring to the foreground much of the work that
has been going on in pan research and development.
The
conference, which will be held at Crowne Plaza (formerly Holiday Inn), is being
organised by the University of the West Indies and has attracted researchers
from around the world. Dr Anthony
Achong, conference chairman, has also opened a website devoted to steelpan
research.
The
web address is: http://www.steelpanresearch.com
where more information on the conference is available through a link.
Among
the more revolutionary concepts currently on the web is an Internet Midi
Panorama arrangers competition and although there are startup hiccups and
prizes are currently limited to pan CDs; the possibilities appear limitless.
A
blurb for the content barks: "Forget about the preliminaries and don't
worry about the semi-finals. Instead
walk right into the finals of the Internet Midi Panorama."
The
arrangements are available for listening and adjudication is to be done by
online voting.
The
contest is being organised by Magnus Fossum of the Swiss steelband Hot
Pans. Entrants should submit pan
arrangements using only Rules the General Midi sound no 115 (steelpan) and the
percussion sounds found on Midi channel 10.
He also recommends that contestants stick to some of the more common
drum sounds, since some plug-ins or soundcards might not support the entire set
of General Midi sounds/drum sounds. The
maximum length of an entry is 10 minutes, but entries from as small as three
minutes are welcome.
For
a basic example, Fossum has provided audio of his arrangement of Andy Narrell's
"We Kinda Music" for a traditional band. It’s written for single bass, single guitar, single 2nd
and soprano pan. He is even offering
the arrangement to small bands. It is
available through e-mail at magnus.fossum@distantshore.com. The page's URL is http://start.at/internet.midi.panorama.
The
most extensive space remains Ulf Kronman's pan page, which lists activities,
literature (including books on how to tune a pan), music and news about pan
research. Kronman, a Swedish physicist,
currently works as a web developer at the Nobel Foundation.
He
has been playing the tenor in the Stockholm steelband Hot Pans for the past ten
years and got into research as a hobby.
He has published his findings (particularly on pan acoustics) in
professional scientific journals and a book documenting tuning techniques. His page provides the busiest electronic
forum for pan. In addition, there is a
new website out of Germany (www.steeldrum.de),
the schedule for the upcoming joint tour of Caribbean Magic and the BP/Amoco
Renegades and even the results of last Carnival's National steelband panorama
Competition.
Salah
Wilson has a new book out called Steelpan Playing With Theory, which you can
peruse from a link to http://pages.infinit.net/salahpan/home.htm
and tuner/arranger for the Finnish Steelband steel pan Lovers, has put up pan
building instructions at http://www.dlc.fi/~pan-ari/pan-make.htm.
You
can also take a sample look at Cy Grant's new book Ring of Steel, Pan Sound and
Symbol, a work on the history and development of the instrument by going to
Kronman's literature list, which stretches into hundreds of publications about
pan.
Two
new web rings are also listed. The J'Ouvert
pan Ring is accessible at www.Geocities.com/BourbonStreet/Canal/9409/jou
and South Point Steel.
And
any information you wish the world to known could be displayed on Dave
Holmstrad's message board http://www.steeldrum.net/board/.
Several
local steel orchestras also have websites up, including the BP/Amoco Renegades
and the BWIA Invaders (easily accessible through www.bwee.com),
with more currently under construction, like the extensive Exodus site; which
will link to a Pan Ramajay page that goes well into 2001 with details of next
year's concerts.