Despite Trinidad’s musical fame, the campus here only began offering music courses in 1992. Now about 100 students study the musical arts, the majority of them emphasizing the steel pan.

Drummers perform during Carnival in Trinidad. Thundering. Clangoring. The air around me throbs and shatters with the sound of steel pans. I'm in Queen's Park Savannah, a big patch of green in the ...

The steel drum, also called the steel pan or just pan, is surely one of the most unusual and versatile musical instruments in the world. The clangy sound of a steel band performing during carnival in ...

But in 1963, when Kernahan was just 14 years old, his mother, like most parents at the time in Trinidad, strictly forbade his playing the pan. He wasn't even allowed to listen to pan music.

Working-class youths invented the steel drum in the 1930s by banging dents in the tops of discarded oil drums to create notes. Today, steelpan is Trinidad's de facto national instrument.

American pannist (steel pan soloist) and composer Andy Narell is an iconoclast who fearlessly challenges the narrow definitions of acceptable pan music. He is global, and his usefulness as an ...

Steel pan virtuoso and Birch Creek faculty member Liam Teague talks about the many different types of music he plays on it before a Sept. 1 concert.

During last month’s funeral service for Trinidad and Tobago-born steelpan musician Reynold Juan “Caldera” Caraballo at Brooklyn’s St. Francis of Assisi-St. Blaise Parish, lo… ...

To my left, 129 more play just as furiously. In front of me, yet another steel-pan orchestra makes its own riot of sound as it competes with its rivals.

Working-class youths invented the steel drum in the 1930s by banging dents in the tops of discarded oil drums to create notes. Today, steelpan is Trinidad's de facto national instrument.