Dear Editor,
In August 1965, I had the privilege to get a six-year contract as a teacher in St. Maarten (Dutch West Indies).
In a musical sense it became a worthwhile experience in which I could use my love for music in an unexpected way. I happen to play the clarinet. Back then, St. Maarten was a small island community with a mostly indigenous and mixed Caribbean population. It had about 8,000 inhabitants whose mother tongue was a kind of Caribbean English.
I had travelled with my wife by steam ship, which was a freighter with a modest passenger accommodation. It took about six weeks to sail from Amsterdam to St. Maarten and the ship docked at almost all the Caribbean islands.
When we reached St. Maarten my luggage and crated furniture was put on the quay and the Chief Engineer asked me if I could use an empty oil barrel. Little was I to know how that drum became my passport to music in SXM.
I had some knowledge about the steel band culture that had come from Trinidad and which was all the rage on St. Maarten. On the quay a truck, or rather a lorry, was awaiting me and the driver, Mr. Chester York, came up to me and said: “Meneer, is that drum yours?” I hate to tell a lie and so I told him: “Yes. It is.” The guy’s demeanour changed completely. He became overjoyed and explained to me with a mixture of pride and excitement that he was from the steel band of the York family and that he needed the drum for the bass player. Since steel drums were hard to come by, he asked me if he could buy it. I told him to just take it and help me instead with my luggage and crated furniture. He did all that and when I told him that I had an interest in music, he became my first friend in St Maarten.
Coincidently it so happened that a Royal Visit to St. Maarten was imminent, and he invited me over to his ensemble to help the group out with the Dutch Anthem, the Wilhelmus.
Image what happened. I went to their rehearsal spot in the dark with one streetlight in Middle Region and the budding moon “to shed some light” on our efforts.
There were about six guys with different sized steelpans. There was a lead pan, two alto pans, a tenor pan and four bass pans. The tones were produced from raised tone circles on the flat upper part of the drum and each player used two self-made mallets. A small hammer was used to fine-tune the circles. The mallets were made of branches from a tree – nothing sophisticated – and their ends were wound with thick postal elastics. To hold a long tone one had to play drum rolls with the mallets on the tone circles. The two alto pans could play tremolos while holding intervals.
I noticed that they all played the melody, and I suggested: “Why not make it into a four-part-harmony piece?” But in those days, there were no keyboards! So I had to play it for them on my clarinet.
The melody was no problem and I asked the tenor pan to double the melody one octave lower. This makes the sound more beautiful in open air (al fresco) conditions. The only problem in this voicing is the intonation. Then I played the bass part from memory on my clarinet and the bass man, a giantlike Caribbean guy, wielded his mallets graciously and also produced his part the first time around.
I then played the second part on my clarinet and gave the two notes for the alto pans needed to hold, phrase by phrase, and the guys copied it faultlessly in one go. They tried it together and suddenly one of the guys cried in his enthusiasm: “I hear it; I hear it.”
What struck me was that none of the players played loudly as they only concentrated on the harmonies. In their perception I was a wizard and to my amazement we were making beautiful music together under the palm trees in the soft and gentle moonlit night of St. Maarten. People gathered around us to enjoy the tunes of our ensemble. This is making music “pur sang”. That night, I found music in Middle Region, in the middle part of Sint Maarten.
Later the players told me: “We does mostly play 3-part harmony melody, 2nd part and a bass part. The 3rd part is hard to find.” Wasn’t it Bach who quoted to have said: “When you play the 3rd part then you are in the middle of the music?” Anyways, my musical fame was set in St. Maarten!
Hein van Maarschalkerwaart
Artist name Art Marshall
