ABSTRACT
The music of carnival is no less assimilative than carnival masquerades. Whatever their origins and whatever influences they encompass, calinda, kaiso, calypso, soca, rapso, and steel pan are all musical forms (or in the case of pan, instruments), whose structures – like their names – reflect a variety of real and imagined influences that have merged into a new set of Caribbean musics. However – unlike mas – pan and calypso are recognized aspects of the larger African presence throughout the Americas. Often percussive, with a tendency to rely on drums, and yet with melodic, sometimes ballad-like lyrics influenced by the European cultures they partly assimilated, Trinidad Carnival musics are varied and eclectic, their history embedded in what Gordon Rohlehr has called the "whole process of cultural erosion, adaptation, change, and innovation, as well as the concern today with national identity" (1990: 1).
