The Steelpan: The Only Acoustic Instrument Invented in the 20th Century

Trinidad took the discarded oil drum of the petroleum age and beat it into a national instrument. The world has been trying to catch up ever since.

In the yards of wartime Port of Spain, young men took the discarded fifty-five-gallon oil drums of the petroleum industry and, by sinking and tuning the metal, discovered they could make it sing. The steelpan is widely called the only acoustic musical instrument invented in the twentieth century, and it was invented by the poorest people on the island.

It was born in defiance. Colonial authorities had banned the drumming of the African-descended majority, and the pan emerged from the percussion bands that filled the silence. Panorama, the mass steelband competition of Trinidad Carnival, is now the instrument's Olympics, with hundred-strong orchestras playing arrangements of ferocious complexity.

The pan is Trinidad and Tobago's gift to the world's music and its clearest emblem of invention from scarcity. That it came from an oil drum, in an oil economy, is a metaphor the region has never stopped living.