Welcome to the Strand and to this celebration of Trinidadian musical culture. It is exciting to be part of this year’s event. My name is Barbara Lewis, and I am Director of the Trotter Institute at UMass Boston, one of tonight’s co-sponsors. It has been my privilege to work with Ronald Lammy, the brains and brawn behind this event. Ron is passionate about history, culture, and business, and that is an interest that we both share. In addition, I am especially pleased to see that Orville Wright, with whom I worked closely at the university closest to the Strand, is being remembered. Orville was a jaunty presence on campus, always dressed to the nines and doing everything he could to make the Department of Performing Arts, where he was Chair for several years, a better place for students, faculty, and community.

He loved music, Pan and his island home. Pan is intimately associated with the festivities of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. It used to be that in New York, where I have spent a lot of time and where the West Indian Labor Day Parade is a true institution, Pan was always being played in the streets and in the subway. And then the ping and zing of its distinctiveness began to disappear. Don’t know if there was an official ban on it, but I am delighted to see that there are those here in Boston who have not forgotten and want to celebrate its history and its future.

The Carnival Tradition

Let me say a few words about the Carnival tradition and how it brings people together and also the social function it serves, a role that Pan shares. Actually, the history of Pan as I understand it, says something significant about Carnival and about the re-creation and continuance of culture. Pan is a unifier and an amplifier. It is also an art of resistance, a reaction to repression. That is how it started. There was a crackdown, years ago in the last century, about 75 years ago, counting from today. It was back in the late 1930s when stick fighting, a cousin of the Brazilian martial art of capoeira, was banned in Trinidad.

When one door closes, it’s time to open a window. That’s what I learned in my childhood, and that is a mantra that the Trinidadian people, who refused to be denied what they knew and loved, decided was the way around repressive law. They would not forsake their traditions, so they decided to sublimate their energies through music. They took what they had at hand and transformed the everyday into something everlasting. That’s how Pan was born.

A few years later, the American military came to the island because of World War II and Pan drummed a wonderful new, percussive sound in their ears. It ignited their feelings and quickened their step, adding liveliness and zeal to the rhythms they knew. So soldiers and sailors from America helped to spread a desire for Pan around the world. Now, we are in the era of the social network. But Pan was a communicating system, bringing people together globally before the invention of the net. Pan is creative and innovative, a cultural resource of enormous power and reach.

Music has a Diplomatic Mission

We don’t often think of music as a weapon, but it has a diplomatic mission to bring people together despite differences. In Boston, we often cleave to the people and customs that remind us of home and heritage. That is fabulous and necessary but sometimes it can also stop us from coming together as a far-flung family with many branches, some reaching into the Caribbean, others into Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and into all parts of the Americas.

Carnival brings people together and unites us into a distinctive blend, making us one while it mixes chaos and order in manageable proportion. Pan, the music of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, has wide, far-reaching meaning and resonance. If we look at the roots and origins of human language, we discover that pan means all. That is a lesson to contemplate as we revisit and celebrate our togetherness and our collective force this evening. Thank You.