Panorama competition and the Carnival spirit

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.

We might attribute to the music a certain atmosphere without implying that it is really articulating anything, even when we find ourselves at a loss to identify the content; we have the sense that an emotion, a character, a conception is being articulated through the musical argument. And if we find no words to describe it, this does not destroy our sense that there is a meaning to this music, which relates it to things other than itself. So we accept that we can encounter music whose meaning remains allusive and elusive. The content of the music is real but ineffable.

Suzanne Langer, who has written on music aesthetics, asserted, “The emotions have two parts – the direction outwards towards the object, which could be captured only if the object could also be portrayed, and the inner movement of feeling, which has a form and structure that can be comprehended without reference to its intentionality.” I think it is this form or structure that is mirrored, symbolised, or “presented” as the Carnival spirit in Panorama music, which gives the dynamic movement of our feelings.

The 18th century German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, resolved the paradox of musical meaning with his concept of “transcendental idealism” which states: music means or refers to something other than itself, but there is no access to this “other” thing through concepts, and therefore no answer to the question what the music means. This is a sublime metaphysical explanation of the fact “expression” applied to music, which tends towards both a transitive and an intransitive grammar.

To perceive the “Carnival spirit” in the music you need not only sensory capacities, but also intellect, imagination, perhaps even self-consciousness.

This is what I mean when describing the aesthetics of the “Carnival spirit” in Panorama music.

Will say more at a later date.

* Lambert Philip is a Panorama adjudicator