Five years ago, Josh Quillen, a member of Sō Percussion, a Brooklyn-based music ensemble, spoke with a maker and tuner of steel drums named Kyle Dunleavy about building a potentially unworkable design. Musical steel drums, also called pans, are fashioned from industrial barrels of the type used for storing crude oil or hazardous waste. Pans come in a variety of different voices—bass, tenor bass, cello, guitar, double second, double tenor, and tenor. “I wanted a pair of double seconds that would have at least three octaves of notes on them,” Quillen said recently. “The drums would be fully chromatic, with all the sharps and flats, and would go down to the C below middle C.” No drums like them, with such a plenitude of notes, were then in existence. “That would require about a square foot of extra room on the drums, so Kyle would have to rearrange all of the notes to get them to fit. I was asking him to climb Mt. Everest.”
Dunleavy, who works out of his garage in the Philadelphia suburbs, began the project in 2017 and spent two years seeming to get nowhere. Then, suddenly, Quillen received a call saying that the drums were ready. On a rainy night near Christmas, 2019, Quillen, a soft-spoken man with a robust beard, Moscot eyeglasses, and a laid-back gravitas, knocked on Dunleavy’s garage door. He was accompanied by Kendall K. Williams, a doctoral student in music composition at Princeton. The door rattled upward, revealing Dunleavy—tall, restless, with light-blue eyes and tendony hands.
“Let’s see those bad boys,” Quillen said. Dunleavy’s garage was outfitted with a workbench, a tool chest, an air compressor, a stand-alone hot tub, and an array of empty steel industrial barrels stacked on their ends. On a stand inside a tuning chamber—a small room lined with sound-muffling carpet—sat Quillen’s finished drums. Each was twenty-eight inches across and plated entirely in chrome. Their shining heads were concave, like pasta bowls. Inside, the drums’ notes were bubbles of different sizes and shapes swelling outward. The metal gleamed with irregularities. Steel drummers claim that no two pans sound exactly alike.
Dunleavy took up a pair of mallets and struck the largest bubble. A resonant moong filled the chamber. “That is the low C,” he said. He handed the mallets to Quillen.
Quillen tested the low C, moong, moong, then struck a smaller bubble and got a higher note—mung. “That’s middle C,” he said. Then he sharply hit a small bubble and a tiny bubble—ming, ping!—high C and C-sharp an octave higher. “My goodness, you got four C’s onto these drums. It’s kind of massive.” Quillen floated the mallets over many notes—mung ping-pong in loon and moon sang on a dumb tomb. “There’s a warmth and darkness in this sound,” he said as he malleted around.
“They sound like an organ,” Williams added.
Dunleavy said that he’d spent two years imagining different layouts of notes, trying to hear them in his mind. It was a complex problem, because every note on a steel drum interacts with its neighbors. Finally, he rolled a new eighty-five-gallon barrel into his tuning chamber and spent several hours beating the bottom with a short-handled sledgehammer. “I was sinking the pan down, just going for depth and looking for a shape,” he said. “Then I started smoothing the pan with smaller hammers. That’s when I started hearing the notes.” But, he went on, “the notes weren’t alive yet.” Using a power tool called a metal nibbler, he nibbled the barrel down to the drumhead, which he placed in a back-yard bonfire until it turned iridescent blue.
After the drum cooled, Dunleavy said, he refined the notes, hitting the steel with an assortment of small hammers while he watched waveforms pulse on the display screen of a strobe tuner. He flipped the drum over frequently, hitting the bubbles alternately from the top and from the bottom: “ ‘I’m gonna get that note,’ you say to yourself.” Once in a while, Dunleavy climbed into the hot tub and soaked his aching deltoids. (“The hot tub is my secret weapon,” he explained.) It took him two weeks of obsessive hammering and regular hot-tub dips to bring thirty-eight chromatic notes to life from the bottoms of two hazmat barrels.
In the chamber, Quillen ran the mallets over the drums in a blur, releasing linns of notes. “What comes to mind is a teardrop sound,” he said as he played. “The note is really bright at first, and then there’s a decay, a spreading out and a softening. The sound is dark, but there’s a point to it. I always liked the sound of the harp.” He played sweeping, harplike arpeggios. He improvised until a melody formed. The notes—sweet, complex, loamy in timbre, and fully alive—seemed to take on the quality of a human voice, and it was singing “What a Wonderful World.”
Weeks afterward, COVID arrived. Sō Percussion stopped doing in-person concerts. It wasn’t until last weekend, when a pan musician named Marc Brooks played them at a Sō Percussion concert at Carnegie Hall, that a live audience finally heard Dunleavy’s impossible drums. ♦
