In 1989 I went to Trinidad, the mecca of the steel pan, to play with Pandemonium steelband in the annual Panorama competition. One of my strongest impressions on this first visit was of the way Panorama seemed to have moulded steelband musical practice. Every member of my band came to rehearsal for about five hours each night during the six weeks between New Year and carnival, and yet they only learned ONE tune. Clive Bradley’s steelband arrangement of the calypso, “Somebody,” was a 10-minute multi-part extravaganza that taxed the technique of even the best players in the band--and which everyone learned entirely by rote. No-one improvised, and no-one but Bradley composed any of the music. Everyone was focused on perfecting this monumental opus for those 10 minutes of glory when it would be played on stage in front of thousands.

As I met more people, read the paper, and listened to radio and TV, I heard more and more complaints about Panorama: the judges were incompetent, the competition was stacked in favor of a few bands, the music all followed the same “winning formula,” commercial sponsors controlled neighborhood bands, star arrangers and tuners had no loyalty, steelbands no longer played on the road for masquerade, they played too fast, musicians only learned one tune... and all anyone cared about anymore was money; it was just too “commercialized.” I started to get the feeling that steelband and carnival just weren’t what they used to be, and wondered if I had come to Trinidad about 20 years too late.

I was amused, therefore, to read of a complaint made by the calypsonian Duke of Albany (aka Charles Jones) 40 years before my visit to Trinidad. Waxing nostalgic for the past, he noted that “calypso not being commercialised as it is today, there was a greater feeling of enjoyment on the whole” (Rohlehr 1990:420). It would seem that competition and commercialization-- and complaining--have been part of Trinidad carnival for a long time, and this has not prevented people from enjoying it. In this paper I will argue that competitions in Trinidad are used to control artistic expression, but that they also create opportunities. I will discuss the work of scholars who have identified this creative aspect of competition as a basic principle of carnival and of human culture generally, and argue that, in formally adjudicated performances, this creative impulse is encouraged or repressed according to the degree of participation by everyone present. I hope these observations may be interesting and useful to cultural activists throughout the Caribbean who promote the arts through competitions.

Control and Resistance

Calypso scholar Gordon Rohlehr describes how, in 1919, the Argos newspaper in Port of Spain sponsored a competition for masquerade bands, offering cash prizes as an incentive to improve costumes and music. They were concerned that their event not be marred by stickfighting and other practices of the lower class “jamette” carnival that were seen as threats to order and decency. The competition rules encouraged musical sophistication, explicitly prohibiting bamboo stamping tubes, called “bamboo tamboo.” Their announcement read in part:
We look forward to good behaviour ... and will entirely discountenance the assembly of any stick playing band and things of the kind.... Those employing the use of bamboo and bottles will not be admitted into the competition. Bands taking part in the musical competition must have at least eight pieces or ten performers and [their] members must be uniformly attired. (Rohlehr 1990:96-97)

The Argos competition was sponsored by a number of professionals and merchants who sought, in Rohlehr’s words, to “abolish the Ole Mas [that is, masquerade] of the unwashed and put in its place the pretty Mas of the respectable”. (Rohlehr 1990:97)

The 1919 Argos competition can also be viewed, in a more positive perspective, however, if we consider that its sponsors their event as an alternative to the more elite Guardian carnival competition held in the Queen’s Park Savannah. In this perspective, the Argos competition was meant to defend and promote the people’s arts. This strategy dates at least to the 1890s, when French creoles sponsored formal carnival competitions for traditions of masquerade and music that the British colonial authorities wanted to ban altogether. In the aftermath of carnival riots in 1891, particularly, upper class French creoles and lower class jamettes were united by their opposition to police repression of carnival and anti-carnival legislation. Competitions that encouraged masquerade and music, while at the same time discouraging some of their more vulgar and unruly elements, became an effective strategy for defending carnival (Cowley). These competitions were sponsored by merchants and French creoles who sought to improve the quality of costumes and performances as a way of protecting carnival against English efforts to abolish it. In addition to controlling musical expression, therefore, early carnival competitions functioned to legitimize certain expressions, to defend and valorize them, and to create opportunity for groups who’s music was not otherwise welcome.

By 1919 carnival was well-established, no longer threatened with abolishment. The business leaders associated with the Argos newspaper were concerned, however, that the Guardian newspaper competition was an overly elitist representations of the carnival arts. The Argos competition represented a colored middle class cultural position—symbolized by its downtown venue and its openness to lower class performers—that was different from that of French Creoles and English colonial authorities. In subsequent years this middle class sector pushed an increasingly urgent agenda of cultural nationalism, expressed largely through competitions and other efforts to “improve” and thereby help legitimate carnival as the “national festival.” In 1939, for example, a “Carnival Improvement Committee” was formed, one of whose primary purposes was to “lift the calypso.” This was the model for the 1956 Carnival Development Committee, later renamed the National Carnival Commission. These organizations were behind the establishment of the Calypso King competition in 1953 and the Panorama steelband competition in 1963, both of which are centerpieces of carnival to this day.

Staging Street Music

One of the most important transformations in Trinidad carnival during the latter half of the 20th century entails what Tom Turino (2000) describes as a shift from participatory to presentational modes of performance. Music once performed by community carnival bands, that is, with virtually everyone present singing and dancing, regardless of musical expertise, was transformed into something that “musicians” performed on stage before a seated “audience.” Turino associates the presentational mode of performance with cosmopolitan values and with an agenda of control, arguing that it tends to favor uniformity and planning over individuality and spontaneity (2000:138). Similar concerns have been expressed by Trinidadian intellectuals like John Stewart, who writes that “under the patronage and control of the middle-class Creole leadership, carnival has evolved into a grand spectator event” (1986:309). On the other hand, one must be careful not to over-estimate the transformative power of such cosmopolitan or middle class framing, since competition per se is not an exclusively cosmopolitan mode of performance. Indeed many conventions of competition that were common to the participatory performances of the jamette carnival persist in today’s staged competitions. Incursions of participatory folk practice make the formally adjudicated competitions of carnival a terrain in which diverse priorities and values contest with one another.

What is today called calypso, for example, has its roots in the older tradition of the chantwel, who, in addition to invigorating the music for carnival street processions, took the lead in confrontations with other neighborhood bands. Opposing chantwels traded boasts and insults in song, contests which sometimes escalated into physical battles with fighting sticks. This kind of verbal rivalry, referred to in Trinidad as picong, continued even when chantwels began to sing on stage before seated audiences in the 1910s. Calypso tents in the 1910s through the 1930s commonly featured “picong wars” between individual singers or opposing groups. Even today calypsonians often compose songs that attack another calypsonian, for example, initiating a battle that is waged over different venues and several carnival seasons, each year’s songs responding to the previous year’s. Calypsonians are also expected to make incisive social and political commentaries (Rohlehr 1990, Regis 1999), and these usually are delivered in a combative tone.

Importantly, the audience in the calypso tents responds to the calypsonian’s insults, criticisms, and jokes, even though the object of his scorn may not be present. They greet a particularly good lyric with gesticulations, bursts of laughter, or shouts of “kaiso!” to express their approval. Sometimes picong even develops between the calypsonian on stage and a member of the audience who is bold enough to disagree with or taunt the performer. These kinds of behaviors are not compatible with the cosmopolitan presentational mode of performance, yet they strongly condition the style of calypso performance in the tents, a style that is largely reproduced in formal competitions. Such participatory behaviors are thus valued both in the tradition of the chantwel and in the modern tradition of adjudicated competitions, where active feedback from the audience forces performers to respond to popular taste. The nature of contemporary calypso performance is thus conditioned as much by playful and creative interaction between performers and audience as by the official judging criteria.

Competition as Opportunity

The “control value” of formally adjudicated competitions is limited not only by the incursion of participatory performance modes, but also by the possibility of alternative competitions. A competition’s power to legitimize cultural values depends on its ability to draw a crowd, and so the hegemonic influence of an established competition may be mitigated by the creation of an alternative that draws the participation of artists and their public. For example, despite the Argos competition’s exclusion of tamboo bamboo in 1919, the practice continued to be popular in carnival, and there was actually a competition in 1939 for “best bamboo band” (Stuempfle 1995:34). Indeed, one could trace various lineages of carnival competitions (e.g. the 1939 best bamboo band competition, back to the Argos competition, back to the Guardian competition) that show a pattern of new breakaway competitions challenging old orthodoxies. The organization of alternative competitions has thus been a consistent response in Trinidad carnival to what are perceived as inequities or distortions of institutional competitions.

One of the most famous examples of this was the calyponians’ boycott of the Guardian Newspaper’s carnival competition in 1957, spearheaded by the Mighty Sparrow. Sparrow won an alternative competition, which forced sponsors in the following year to redress discrepancies in prize money that favored the Carnival Queen over the calypsonians. More recently, the problems of Panorama have also been addressed through alternative competitions, including Pan Ramajay, which features improvisation in small ensembles of ten players or less. Pan Ramajay’s continuing popularity is attributed by its organizer, Ainsworth Mohammed, to the fact that it “levels the playing field” (1993 p.c.), taking away the advantage from the big-name steelbands. This view is consistent with the theoretical observations of Roberto daMatta, who argues that competition in carnival reinforces an egalitarian ideal:
The very idea of competition, of a contest between equals, is incompatible with hierarchized social systems and therefore seen as something that should be banned from them. There no one should rise by means of tests, which place performance above other criteria of greater importance (such as birth, residence, skin color, etc.). But in Carnival everything happens through competition, so much so that the idiom of the society is transormed. From a hierarchical language and style, we pass to a competitive and egalitarian code, since now open contests provide opportunity for all (1991:112).

The creation of opportunity through competition takes on a particular significance for many Trinidadians in relation to the global music media, in which soca and calypso are increasingly enmeshed. When I presented a colloquium on carnival and competition at the University of the West Indies in March of 2000, for example, students were mainly interested in talking about the power of the media. Many felt that radio station management, in particular, whether through passive ignorance and disinterest in carnival music, or through active corruption and payola, pushed simplistic and formulaic soca songs for profit, stacking the deck against less commercially controlled musical forms. Given the historical and contemporary involvement of private businesses in sponsoring carnival competitions, one might have expected these students to apply a similarly cynical interpretation to events like the Soca Monarch or Ragga Soca Monarch competitions, linked as they are to the interests of record and concert promoters. They tended, however, to take the contrary view that formally adjudicated competitions represent an alternative to “commercialization,” and provide opportunities for creative artists.

A particular example the UWI students held up was the Pan Kaiso competition, founded in 1999 by Pan Trinbago to respond to the trend toward party-oriented soca music, “two-chord” jams that do not provide the kind of harmonic and melodic material needed for an effective steelband arrangement. To counter the commercial pressures that radio stations and DJs exert on calypsonians, the Pan Kaiso competition has created a monetary and prestige incentive for calypsonians to compose for the steelband. In a sense, this reeastablishes a relationship that thrived in the 1950s and 1960s, when steelbands played a more important role than DJs in popularizing carnival music, and calypsonians had to write at least one “pan tune” each year if they wanted their music to be heard on the road. Rather than favoring the musical style of that earlier era, however, the Pan Kaiso competition rewards innovation and new possibilities for steelband music. In contrast to some competitions whose emphasis is mainly preservationist (such as the extempo calypso competition, featuring improvised verse, or the “ole mas’” competitions for traditional carnival characters) Pan Kaiso is thus conceived as a vehicle for certain kinds of innovation and creativity that the commercial media do not support.

Despite their complaints about the excess of competition in modern carnival, therefore, many Trinidadians view competition as a positive tool in relation to specific problems. Organized competitions are thought to level the playing field, to promote marginalized art forms and communities, to challenge official definitions of the national culture, and to resist the formulaic pressures of the marketplace.

Rules and Hierarchies: Competition as Play

So far I have argued that elite control over musical expression may be limited in adjudicated competitions where there is significant audience participation; I have also argued that adjudicated competitions can be a tool of resistance as well as domination. Despite these counter-hegemonic aspects of competition, however, it is always a very highly organized activity which places constraints on musical expression. One of the paradoxes of carnival in general is the meticulousness of preparation and organization for an event that is commonly said to defy the structures and limitations of everyday society. For example, Victor Turner calls attention to the elaborate rules and hierarchy of the Mangueira escola de samba in Rio de Janeiro, noting that “it takes an awful lot of order to produce ‘a sweet disorder’” (1987:84). If carnival at its best is characterized by a community bonding or “flow” which we might experience as spontaneous, “people need framing and structuring rules to do their kind of flowing. But here the rules crystallize out of the flow rather than being imposed on it from without…. [Mangueira’s structure belongs] to the domain of ludus and not to the politico-economic order” (ibid.).

Play (ludus) is a distinct mode of human experience that is fundamentally linked to contest and festival in all cultures, as argued by Johann Huizinga, an influential theorist on the topic:
Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social grouping which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
The function of play… can largely be derived from the two basic aspects under which we meet it: as a contest for something or a representation of something.” (1950:13)

Huizinga proposes that “the two ever-recurrent forms in which civilization grows in and as play are the sacred performance and the festal contest” (ibid:48). He cites the tendency of human societies to organize themselves in rival moieties, and the dualism that infuses many cosmologies, as evidence of a fundamental human penchant for representing the world in terms of rivalry and contest (ibid:53-54).

The tendency to structure social groupings around play and rivalry is a common phenomenon in carnival. Steelbands in Trinidad, for example, represent larger neighborhood communities. The violent steelband clashes of the late 1940s through the early 1960s (Stuempfle 1995: 60-64, 110-112; Goddard 1991:53-58 ) were particularly intense manifestations of a kind of inter-group rivalry that has a long history in Trinidad carnival. When the British first came to Trinidad around 1800, carnival historian John Cowley reports that they were alarmed to discover that the slaves of the French planters were organized into groups called regiments or convois. Each convois had an elaborate hierarchy of officials with titles like King, Queen, Dauphin, Ambassador, and Prime Minister (Cowley 1996:13). With emancipation in 1838 these convois took to the streets at carnival time, and Cowley presents an account of a confrontation between the Damas and the Wartloos (who he surmises identified themselves with the French and the English, respectively—Wartloo deriving from Waterloo), which escalated from song and masquerade into pitched battle (ibid:30-32). And although stickfighting bands united against Captain Baker in the 1881 Canboulay riots, the more common cause of the violence at this time was inter-band rivalry. Like the convois, these stickfighting bands also had kings and queens, as well as hierarchies of musical specialists, such as chantwels and drummers. From the earliest years of Trinidad’s carnival, therefore, street performances were guided by elaborate rules of engagement and expression. Thus the importance of rules and regulations, in and of itself, is not unique to the modern carnival. Carnival competitions clearly place constraints on performance, but such constraints are generated by popular festivity as well as elite control.

Panorama

The dynamics of the Panorama competition, as an example, are driven by the interests of several distinct groups: the priorities of some cultural nationalists and calypsonians are expressed in the stipulation that steelbands play calypso only; British colonial values are also represented in the attitudes of some formally trained judges; businesses confer vital sponsorship on steelbands; musicians knock themselves out to project their power and brilliance; and a crowd of thousands voices its preferences. Whose interests are most influential, you might ask, in the choice of a winner?
The criteria by which judges ostensibly calculate the winner have included, in various years, things like “arrangement,” “interpretation,” “tone,” “rhythm,” “phrasing,” and “balance.” In the following video clips from Panorama you will be able to see that these criteria do not begin to describe the richness of performance at Panorama. There is also exuberance, aggression, drama, dance, costume, and much more.

The first clip shows fans reacting to Desperados’ performance at the 1994 Panorama finals. Note the military garb of one fan, reflecting the long popularity of military masquerade, and everyone’s vicarious identification with the power of the music. The second clip is Trinidad All Stars from the same competition. This is a song called “Earthquake” and their musical representation of an earthquake here made them the popular favorites. The last segment shows Pamberi’s flagman firing up the energy at the end of their performance.

Trinidadian musicologist Pat Bishop asserts that the judges are influenced much more by the reaction of the crowd than by the scoring categories. If she is right, steelband musicians are guided as much by the opinions of their peers as they are by the criteria of Panorama judges. Indeed, before Panorama, competition between steelbands was decided by what arranger Ray Holman likes to call “the pundits of pan”—big men with loud voices who waited to hear the steelbands play on Charlotte Street on carnival Monday morning, then argued about who was best. Steelband pioneer Neville Jules of the Trinidad All Stars also explained to me that in the days before Panorama some formally judged competitions were held; however, the judges’ decisions might not be as important to the bands as the popular consensus (10/28/99 phone interview). Given this concern with public opinion, it seems clear that the content of Panorama performances cannot be explained by a list of the judges’ criteria alone. We must ask, therefore, to what extent the design of a competition can control performance.

I would argue that few people could have predicted, at the outset of the Panorama competition in 1963, what the music would be like today. For example, those who intended that steelbands should play only “local” music in Panorama, rather than subscribe to colonial values of musical excellence, might have been surprised to find steelband arrangers employing theme and variation form, contrapuntal part writing, and Beethovenesque cadences in their calypso arrangements. Calypsonians who had hoped that Panorama would be a promotion for their music were outraged when Ray Holman began composing his own tunes for Panorama in 1972. Those who thought that the “tone” of the instruments would be improved by including this as a judging criterion might not have anticipated how Panorama’s intensely aggressive style would come to favor volume over sweetness, nor could they have imagined the extraordinary sound effects of Boogsie Sharpe’s dissonances and chromatic glissandos. All of these things are evidence of a creative energy that adapts communal patterns of festivity to new circumstances, and which generates entirely new patterns as well.

Conclusion

In this paper I have problematized the association of Trinidad carnival competitions with elite control, by pointing out that there have always been multiple hegemonies in Trinidad--as a result of which every opposition may be balanced by a new alliance, and every restriction by a new opportunity. I have also suggested that performances in organized competitions are determined by more than the official format and criteria--musicians respond just as much to the evaluations of their peers at Panorama, and to patterns of rivalry and competition that predate Panorama. This is not to say that lower class art forms in Trinidad are unaffected by colonial or nationalist hegemonies. While competition is in many respects a natural impulse associated with communal festivity, Frank Gunderson notes that, “Because of their impressive communicative potential in communities, music competitions are often targets for appropriation by larger social forces to include the needs of government and organized religion” (2000:17). To understand how such elite appropriation may affect communal performance traditions, it may help to view organized competitions as contests that are waged not just between the performers, but between many other constituents as well. Who sponsors the competition? Who decides the winner? Who is present at the performances and what input do they have?

Ultimately the impact of adjudicated competitions hinges on participation. The people who participate are the ones who will decide the character of a performance. If an organized competition is conducted before an audience of the performers’ friends and nieghbors it will have one character; but if it is conducted before an audience of tourists, or conservatory educated musicians, it may have a very different character. The framing of performance on stage, where it is objectified as an aesthetic object for contemplation by a passive audience, is a powerful tool for control and transformation. Therefore, if carnival and other Caribbean performance traditions are to maintain vital connections to the communities in which they were born, those communities must continue to play an active role in performances.

(Society of Ethnomusicology, Austin Texas, November 1999)