Introduction and Overview

Use this lesson for:
• Music class - learn Caribbean songs and rhythms, and/or make and play percussion instruments
• Music concert - learn the song for a performance, particularly a multicultural concert
• Social studies class - do any of the activities, as part of a unit on West Indies cultures or cultures of the Americas, history of the Caribbean or of the Americas, African-American history, African-American music
• Creative writing - do the "Introduction to Calypso", and then have the students write some calypso-style lyrics

An Introduction to Calypso

Materials and Preparation
• A globe, world map, or map of the Americas would be useful.
• Have an audio player and some CDs or tapes for the children to hear. See below for a list of suggestions.
• Have the tapes ready to play at the right spot, or know the CD track numbers.
• Pictures of steel pan drums or of steelbands would be a useful visual aid. (You may use the drawing included here if you like.) Even better, contact any steelbands in your area to see if they would be willing to send a member or two for a demonstration. With younger students, you may also want to include pictures of the islands in your presentation while you are talking, to help focus their attention.

Steel Pan Drum Figure 1: Today's steel pan drum is crafted by a skilled instrument maker, but it retains the basic shape of an oil drum with its bottom specially shaped by the musician.

Procedure
1. Ask the students if they can name any kinds of (U.S.) American music that were strongly influenced by African music. There are many right answers to this question: blues, gospel, soul, any kind of jazz, as well as newer African-American styles such as rap, and, in fact, most rock and pop styles.
2. Tell the students that Africans were also brought to many Central American, South American, and Caribbean countries. I leave it to your judgement how ready your students are to be reminded of the cruelty and injustice involved; it will depend on how old they are and how much you have already covered this subject. You don't want to use this lesson to introduce the horrors of slavery, but if they already understand what was going on, you can point out some of the influences this had on the music. The large Indian population of the island is the result of plantation owners encouraging immigration from India (as replacement workers when they were forced to free their slaves) using misleading promises that led to a kind of indentured servitude. Again, this may be more information than your class needs, but if it is appropriate to their studies, by all means mention it.
3. Help the students find Trinidad on a map or globe. Tell them: Today Trinidad is part of a small country called "Trinidad and Tobago". (You can also help them find the smaller island of Tobago if you like.) But this island was once owned by Spain, and then by England, and many people cam to the islands from India and France as well as west Africa. (Have them locate western Africa, India, England, Spain, and France on a map or globe). And all of those people brought their favorite traditions and favorite songs and music with them. When they settled on Trinidad, they heard each other's music, and eventually the African-Trinidadians invented a kind of music that sounded a little bit African and a little bit European but was also uniquely Trinidadian.
4. Play some of the music you have chosen for them.
5. Tell the students: Calypso began as a type of protest music. African-Trinidadians in the eighteen-hundreds were not allowed to talk as they worked, but they were allowed to sing. Many of the song leaders became very good at improvising words to songs in order to comment on the news of the day. ("The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)" of Harry Belafonte fame is the type of call-and-response work song that this could be done with.) Calypso songs also had improvised words that commented on the latest news and sometimes on life in general, but they were more clearly protest songs that often featured sarcasm and wit. The subversive nature of the music alarmed the authorities, who in 1884 banned the playing of skin drums. That hardly stopped the Calypsonians; they just made instruments out of bamboo instead. Bamboo makes a nice sound with a definite pitch when you hit it with a stick; the bigger and longer the piece of bamboo, the lower the sound. (See Sound, Physics, and Music for more information, or Sound and Music for activities related to this.) So the calypso players cut many different lengths of bamboo and formed what they called tamboo bamboo bands. The government then banned the playing of bamboo tubes, claiming that the bands encouraged violence, but the Calypsonians still kept playing. Their bands had always included instruments other than skin drums or bamboo: stringed instruments, for example, and maracas, and bottle-and-spoon. But in the 1930's they began to make drums out of metal objects.
6. If you have any pictures or even a real pan drum for the students to look at, this is the best time to show them.
7. Tell the students: The calypso bands didn't just pick up pots and pans and beat on them. What they did was find useful objects and work on them until they became musical instruments. At first, the musicians made their own instruments, often out of the bottoms (the pans) of metal shipping containers, paint cans, and garbage cans. A good instrument maker could often shape a pan into several different areas that would get different pitches when they were hit. By the end of the 1930's there were bands made up only of pans: steelbands. During the Second World War, empty 55-gallon oil drums became widely available on the island. The now-professional instrument makers perfected their technique, making and selling pan drums that could play an entire scale and that could specialize in playing melody, harmony, bass, or rhythm.
   Note: The steel drum is the only acoustic (non-electric) instrument invented in the twentieth century.
   In the 1950's, the unique sound of calypso became widely known and popular around the world, particularly in the U.S. Today the steel pan is the national instrument of Trinidad and Tobago, and there are official calypso competitions every year. People of all races enjoy and perform the music. Strings, saxes, clarinets, trumpets, tin whistles and percussion are all popular instruments at the competitions, although not as popular as the steel pans. And the focus of genuine calypso is still on improvising clever, humorous, and topical lyrics that still often poke fun at the rich and the powerful. But the sounds and rhythms of calypso can be heard in many other places, too: in movies, jazz, dance music, and in other, newer Caribbean music styles.
8. At this point, you can ask your guest for a demonstration, or play some more calypso-style recordings for them (to focus their attention, ask them if they can guess what types of instruments they are hearing), and/or introduce the related activities you will be doing.

"Found Percussion"

Materials and Preparation
• Remember to give your students plenty of time to find and bring in "found" objects that they can use to make instruments. Suggest that they look for discardable objects that have a nice or interesting sound. Send home notes of explanation if necessary. Possible suggestions (depending on how much and what type of work you will want them doing in class): clean, empty metal cans of all sizes, with no sharp edges; clean, empty plastic tubs and lids of all sizes; pieces of bamboo or dowels, cut (at home by a parent) into various short lengths; small pieces of hardwood lumber; empty cardboard tubes from paper towel and wrapping paper rolls, or sturdy cardboard containers such as oatmeal boxes.
• You may want to have calypso music to play in the background as they are working on their instruments.
• Be prepared for a noisy activity.
• Optional: You may want to supply, or have the students supply: some dry beans for maraca-type sounds; sticky clay, plaster, water, or sand to "tune" the objects, and/or art supplies to decorate the instruments.
• You may also want string and/or strong scissors and tape.
• You will need beaters or drumsticks to play the instruments with. Rulers, heavy pencils, wooden spoons, real drumsticks, short dowels, or pieces of bamboo are all possibilities.

Procedure
1. Tell your students that since the 1950's, calypso music has mostly been played on professionally crafted instruments, including trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, guitars, and drum sets, as well as the traditional steel pan drum. But in its early days, Calypso was often played on instruments that people made from things they could find, including bamboo tubes, paint cans, shipping cans, garbage cans, and oil drums (big metal barrels that oil was stored or shipped in). Make sure they understand that the objects generally were not played as they were found, but were turned into instruments by the musicians.
2. Depending on how much material you have, you may want to pool the objects and have the students work in groups, or trade or select objects if they are working alone. Each student or group should try to gather a collection of similar objects, for example plastic tubs of various sizes.
3. Have the students experiment with "playing" each of their objects. Do some sound higher than the others? Can they get more than one sound from the same object? Can they arrange the objects from lowest to highest sound? If they all sound the same, can they change the pitches of some of them, by cutting the cardboard tubes for example. If you don't mind the mess and the instruments are not going to be permanent, they can try tuning containers by sticking clay or tape to them, or filling them with water, sand, or plaster.
4. One group may prefer to make maracas of different sizes and pitches, by filling some containers with dried beans; you can help prevent accidents by sealing their containers with strong tape once they have a sound that they like.
5. Do their objects give their best sound when they are held in the hand? Hung from a string? Put on a desk? Taped to a board? Laid across two two boards or dowels with some space beneath them? Tapped with fingers or with a spoon or on a knee or with another cardboard tube?
6. Once they have decided on their objects and decided how best to play them, have them assemble their final instrument from at least three differently-pitched objects and give a demonstration to the class. You may want to use some of their instruments to accompany a song or to play calypso rhythms.

Calypso Rhythms

Calypso Rhythms Figure 2: I hope to soon include here audio clips of these rhythms. If you cannot read these rhythms, try picking up some rhythms from your recordings.

If you can't read music, you may find these audio clips useful. A metronome in the background keeps the basic beat to help you get oriented:
• Rhythm 1 being played by shaking a plastic container (of the sort that margarine or sour cream are sold in) filled half-say with dry beans
• Rhythm 2 being played by hitting the bottom of an empty box of oats (the cylinder-shaped cardboard type of box)
• Rhythm 3 being played by beating an empty cardboard tube (this one had had wrapping paper on it) against the heel of a hand.
• Rhythm 4 being played by shaking a can of cashews.
• Rhythm 5 being played by beating with a pen on the lids of three different sizes of empty plastic containers.
• Rhythm 6 being played by tapping on the lid of a plastic container with dry beans in it, for a sort of snare effect.

A Traditional Caribbean Song

Materials and Preparation
• Choose a song or two to teach the class. You may want to do one of the songs you have found a recording of. You may use the song provided here. Some other easy-to-find songs that are associated with a calypso-style performance: "The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)", "Matilda", "Jamaica Farewell", and "Sloop John B".
• Arrange for accompaniment, by yourself, a friend, or the students themselves. Accompaniment is important to get a "calypso" sound. Piano is not ideal; but a keyboard that has a marimba or other percussion setting might do. Guitar, string bass, and/or winds (even recorders) in whatever combination is better. In either case, try to include at least some percussion; or you may consider an accompaniment of just percussion.
• Have enough copies available, as needed, of the words, music, and accompaniment parts.

Procedure
1. If they are going to make their own percussion instruments, do that activity first.
2. If students are providing the accompaniment, assign parts and rehearse the instrumentalists. The calypso rhythms above should work as accompaniment to just about any appropriate song you choose. Several short rehearsals usually work better than one long one.
3. Meanwhile, start teaching everyone the song. This may also take several sessions. You can listen here to the melody of Tingalayo if you need to.
4. Add the acompaniment to the singing for the final rehearsals. Even if the song is not a part of a concert, try to find an audience for a final "performance".

Subfigure 3.1 Subfigure 3.2 Figure 3

Improvising Songs

Materials and Preparation
• If you'd like to emphasize the creative, improvisatory nature of real calypso, and your students are up for the challenge, consider having them write a bit of calypso themselves.
• Choose a simple tune that the students are familiar with, either a song that they have learned in class (see above), or one of the tunes that you have a recording of. Tunes associated with calypso are preferable, but not necessary.
• If the students do not already know the tune very well, play the recording for them often, or work with them on singing it.

Procedure
1. Remind the students that traditional calypso singers improvise the words of their songs. That means they make them up right on the spot, as they are singing, only a few minutes after they find out what their song is supposed to be about. At the big calypso contest in Trinidad every year, they often use a standard melody and make up funny, clever songs about something that has been in the news recently or something that they have noticed about life. The songs are often complaint or protest songs about things that they think should be changed.
2. Tell the students they do not have to make up the words as they are singing. They can have some time to think about it and make up the words and write them down. Tell them which tune you are going to use and remind them of it by playing it for them or letting them sing it together.
3. Ask the students to make up new words to go with the tune. Their song should be a humorous complaint about something they would like changed (longer recesses, or being allowed to have a dog, for example), or it can be a funny commentary on something that has happened recently, at school (a game they've learned in P.E.), at home ("what happened to my missing homework assignment"), or in the news (an escape at the zoo, or a heavy snowfall, for example). If necessary, remind them that being mean or personal is not funny.
4. You may let them work in groups or alone.
5. If necessary, check the words of each song before you allow it to be performed.
6. Allow groups to perform their song together. Brave individuals can sing their song by themselves, or you may make copies so that the class can sing each other's songs together.
7. If there are any particularly clever or humorous songs, you may want to consider sharing them in a performance for parents or for the school.

Listening to Calypso

Listening Suggestions
• Many children will already be familiar with the "Under the Sea" tune from Disney's The Little Mermaid.
• Some collections of songs for children (particularly multicultural collections) include calypso-sounding versions of songs like "Tingalayo", "Matilda", "The Banana Boat Song (Day-O)", and "Brown Girl in the Ring".
• Harry Belafonte's performances, while not genuine improvised calypso, contributed greatly to the first big craze for the calypso sound in the U.S. They are still relatively easy to find.
• Steelband albums marketed to tourists (for example Steel Drum Classics "Best of the Best", produced by Barefoot Records and C and B Studio) are also not genuine calypso, but most of them do have the right sound.
• If you want some examples of the real thing, check with your favorite recording distributor. If you want to get some idea of what's out there before you look at saleslists, the following sites were helpful as of this writing: Caribbean Music 101, the Calypso and Steelband pages of a Trinidad site, and The Calypso Archives.