THE Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture has announced grant-funding increases for unsponsored steelbands and players for Carnival 2025.
The increases amount to 25 per cent across the board for unsponsored bands and players. While better payouts to the musicians who operate on the edge of viability are welcome, there is still no clear and focused strategy for improving the prospects of steelband players and their support teams to turn their labour of love into a rewarding career.
Minister Randall Mitchell has demonstrably supported Pan Trinbago president Beverly Ramsey-Moore, and they have presented a unified and collaborative front at events throughout 2024. So, what's needed is an effort to break the status quo of the steelband movement beyond promises and pittances to professionalism and sustainability.
It's the best time to push for that change because 2024 was a banner year for the movement.
Mrs Ramsey-Moore was re-elected as Pan Trinbago's president for another four-year term in October.
In July, the National Musical Instrument Bill was passed unanimously in Parliament.
The steelpan was granted geographic indication rights in August, establishing TT as the birthplace and inventive source of its creation.
In September, Ramsey-Moore was awarded the Hummingbird Gold Medal for culture.
She has proved aggressive about planning and executing pan events after covid restrictions were lifted.
The Single Pan finals staged on Saturday featured 25 bands and was the second such event for the category for the year – the first held as part of the National Steelband Music Festival.
The country is in the midst of the longest-declared Panorama competition, which began on November 17 and will run until March 2, 2025.
The Pan Trinbago president's mandate for her second term is to go global with the association and improve ties with local stakeholders.
Rebuilding communities from the panyard up will be as challenging as catching up with international innovators in steelband production and instruction.
International universities and manufacturers are steadily working to improve the instrument.
In 2002, the TT government challenged a patent claim by US academics Harvey Price and George Whitmyre for hydroforming metal to shape the instrument.
Hydroforming was used to produce tenor pans in the 1970s at Cariri, but applying for a patent then was considered too expensive.
Another patent on the Cycle of Fifths was overturned in 2011 after evidence of its development by Anthony Williams in the 1940s was produced.
TT can no longer rest on past laurels of steel. It must resolve to leapfrog these impudent usurpers and reclaim its steelband leadership with the innovation and creativity that birthed the instrument a century ago.
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