Originally written in the Maine Sunday Telegram / Portland Press Herald (direct link to original article)
By CHRISTOPHER HYDE
The Portland String Quartet opened its Maine Festival of American Music on Wednesday night at the Shaker Meeting House in New Gloucester with steel drum music by the Island Beats.
The steel drum has become very popular in Maine, and is certainly a unique product of the Americas, where the instrument was invented (probably in Trinidad as a result of the British injunction against traditional tribal drums).
Another connection with the festival, now in its fifth year, is that Julia Adams, violist of the Portland String Quartet, plays tenor drum with the Island Beats. She offered a surprising cadenza, or should I call it a riff, in “Jouvay Man.” Adams also wrote an arrangement for steel drum of the famous Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts.”
The band includes three sets of steel drums — tenor, guitar and cello — percussion and bass guitar, and sounds as authentic as it gets. Nothing is depressing on a steel drum, even when it attempts to be dark and sultry, as in the bossa nova “Seabreeze” (2010) by Bert Ligon, or a piece written by band member Duncan Hardy after the BP oil spill, titled “The Quest for Oil.”
The steel drums of Island Beats have a timbre that is difficult to describe. According to Hardy, they can’t be amplified very well because of the flood of overtones generated by hitting just one note, delineated by an area on the caved-in surface of a 55-gallon drum. It’s the only instrument with a circular keyboard, Hardy said.
The nearest equivalent I can think of is a Russian balalaika band in which a tremolo on one note serves to sustain it for a lyrical passage, which was done beautifully in “Black Orpheus.”
Nearly all the selections, most of them arranged by band member Chris Beaven, had the cheerful beat and animation of calypso, plus some fairly complex interaction between the voices, sounding surprisingly like a string quartet.
Although notes can’t be shaded sharp or flat, as they can on a stringed instrument, the differences in tuning what are called the “pans” provide the microtone dissonance that give string quartets their edge.
A set of three pieces popularized by Harry Belafonte, including “Jamaica Farewell,” was the high point of the evening for those of a certain age.
Today, the festival will include a workshop and master class (3:30-5:30 p.m.) on five string quartets. On Saturday the program, beginning at 7 p.m., will be “Sabbathday Riffs: The Fusion of Classical, Jazz and World Musics,” by the Portland String Quartet with electroacoustic violinist Matthew Szemela, including his own “Improvisation of Shaker Hymns.” For ticket information, call 926-4597.
Christopher Hyde’s Classical Beat column appears in the Maine Sunday Telegram.
He can be reached at:
classbeat@netscape.net