Discover how a range of acoustic musical instruments are made in this year’s Folk Craft area of the Lowell Folk Festival. Meet craftspeople whose expertise include fine woodworking, metalsmithing and an understanding of how sound resonates and travels. Learn about the making of world class pipe organs that fill concert halls, uilleann pipes that enliven Irish music seisuns, Middle Eastern ouds, Hardanger fiddles and violin bows that spur on dancers, revived tiples and cuatros and Trinidad’s steel pans that evoke the Caribbean. Here in New England, it started with Mi’kmaq wooden flutes and Wampanoag and Nipmuc drums that “awaken” when filled with water.
Did you know that “tone wood” is the term used for making musical instruments, a moniker that captures its natural resonance? Musical instruments come to life by being blown into, banged on, bowed, plucked or strummed. Musicians will be on hand throughout the weekend to demonstrate the sounds of some of these instruments. Join us Saturday at 1:45 pm for a moderated conversation between makers and players on the festival’s St. Anne’s stage, next to the folklife area.
One highlight includes “Making, Playing & Tuning Steel Pans” with Carl Smith and Justin Petty of Boston.
The steel pan was forged out of African and European traditions. Invented in the 20th century, the pan’s origins are from the intermingling of enslaved Africans brought to the Caribbean in the 1700s and European colonizers. When laws forbade the playing of drums by Trinidad’s Black descendants, they protested by creating musical instruments using bamboo shoots and later recycled scrap metal. Around 1940, someone discovered that dented sections of an empty oil barrel produced different pitches. Tuners began producing pans with concave surfaces, upon which melodies could be played. Neighborhood pan men formed parade bands. The modern 55-gallon steel pan is now played in musical competitions at annual Carnival celebrations around the world.
Smith grew up Trinidad, the steel band Mecca of the world. In 1978, he brought the pan to Boston where he makes instruments, plays and teaches local youth as manager of Branches Steel Band. Petty joined the Rising Stars Youth Steel Orchestra in St. Thomas before moving to Massachusetts, where he has performed and arranged for the steel pan for over 30 years; under his musical directorship, Branches has won multiple competitions.
Using a sledgehammer and pneumatic hammer to shape the pan is a noisy, labor-intensive skill. Note the different sounds made by a single, second, tenor pan, and dudup, one the earliest forms of steel pan.
— Lowell Folk Festival
