A Central Bank concert honours the woman who shaped our national sound, led by Edward Cumberbatch and Theron Shaw.
One of Pat Bishop’s most enduring convictions was this: “Until all have crossed, none have crossed.” It was a belief rooted in justice, inclusion, and her lifelong commitment to lifting up her people through the arts.
Pat Bishop trained tenor Edward Cumberbatch—known to many as Eddie—for the title role in Schubert’s Winterreise, instilling in him the precision and emotional clarity she demanded of all her performers. He was among the few local tenors capable of carrying the demands of a Lieder song cycle with both control and feeling.
Bishop saw in him the ability to make classical music speak in a Trinidadian voice. Bishop passed away before seeing that role fully realised. Fourteen years later, on June 29 at the Central Bank Auditorium, he returns to the stage in her honour, guided still by her vision, in a concert to be held by the PALM Foundation (Pat Bishop Foundation for Art, Literature and Music).
Pat Bishop (1941-2011) was one of Trinidad and Tobago’s most original and necessary cultural minds. A recipient of the Hummingbird Medal (Gold) and the Trinity Cross, she was a painter, historian, ethnomusicologist, and conductor.
Educated at Bishop Anstey High School and King’s College, Durham University, she came home in the 1960s to be a force in the visual and musical arts—particularly in her work with The Lydians and steel orchestras in the context of nation-building.
Bishop was passionate about musical literacy and theory—as a way of grounding T&T’s musical life in something that could last. The pan, for Bishop, was not to be exoticised or solely improvised ... It had to be read, scored, and rehearsed.
She insisted that it belonged fully to T&T while carrying the gravitas of any great musical instrument in the world, which is why she believed music literacy was essential to the development of the national instrument.
Pat Bishop thought in structures. Whether scoring a Mozart concerto for steelpan or tracing the fractures of T&T’s social fabric, she returned always to form—how things are made, how they endure, and how they fall apart.
From canvases to choirs and panyards to lecture halls, she insisted that our beauty must be built on structure, literacy, and discipline, demonstrating how the steelpan could carry the weight of Mozart and our own multicultural compositions.
For a young nation still finding our centre, Pat Bishop used art—to help us see ourselves.
In 2005, Pat Bishop, using the parable of the Gordian Knot, speaking on societies in crisis, warned that as a people we often solve by force what should be unravelled with care. Two decades later, as divisions sharpen and social media gives us a grotesque and oversimplified worldview, her words read with extraordinary prescience.
This is an excerpt of that speech:
“I suppose that I have lived with the idea of art–the arts–and their possible purposes all my life. I practise music and painting, and I have usually been teaching somebody something, whether it is down in the More Diablo Community Centre, up Desperadoes Hill, at the Lydians, in the university’s history department or, more recently, in the university’s creative arts centre. So I’m cool with arts practice and arts education. Some might assert that I haven’t been able to deliver quality in either respect, but I’m cool with that too. Let me also say that what I’m trying to say today draws upon my West Indian– specifically Trinidadian–experience. I just don’t know enough about the wider world.
‘Societies in Crisis’ is another matter altogether, and I must understand the term since its meaning informs my attempt today to revisit the Gordion Knot.
First of all, a little history.
And perhaps this history is coloured by myth and legend, but real history must always include these human-centred considerations. It is believed that the ancient city of Gorida, located in what is now northwest Turkey, was founded by a peasant named Gordius. It is also believed that he devised a knot, and according to the story, anyone who could untie or unravel this knot would rule Asia.
Enter Alexander III, the greatest-known military leader of European antiquity. Between BCE 336 and 334, he was crossing into Persia, having brought all the Greek states to heel. In 333 he encountered the knot–the Gordian Knot. And what Alexander does is fundamental to what I’m thinking at this time. He doesn’t try to untie the knot or to unravel it. Instead, he takes out his sword, and he cuts it! In other words, he solves the problem by abolishing it. He doesn’t engage with the intricacies and complexities of the problem. He is not interested in its significance, save and except that it is a challenge which he is not prepared to address in terms other than his own.
It is instructive to note that Alexander, a Greek, adopted Persian absolutism, even dressing himself in Persian attire and enforcing Persian court customs. By the time he died at the age of 33, after a night of long feasting and drinking, he had created an empire, the greatest that had existed to that time, which extended from Thrace to Egypt and from Greece to the Indus Valley.
He was not a popular young man. His empire could only exist if the many and varied societies which he conquered were in agreement with him and each other. Alexander understood this perfectly well, and he had tried to achieve it by promoting a Persian-Macedonian master race and a hugely unpopular policy of racial fusion.
It is difficult in this context not to remember that Eric Williams regarded the words of José Martí, the Cuban patriot, as being relevant to the Trinidadian situation. Martí had said:
“Man in the West Indies is more than white, more than mulatto, more than Negro, more than Indian, more than Chinese. He is West Indian.”
Indeed, Williams himself had advocated in Woodford Square, as early as 1955, the development of a West Indian nationalist consciousness as ‘the only salvation’ for a community divided on the basis of race, colour and religion.
Alas, alas, the nationalists of the time had forgotten the story of the Gordian Knot. The West Indians today remain divided, not only by insularity but also by ethnicity, class, religion and all those other strands which, together, constitute the Gordian Knot–which cannot be abolished, however hard we try. And the task of unravelling it is long, hard and fraught.
It is my contention that Caribbean history is a sequence of Gordian Knots which people–manifestly less imaginative and visionary than Alexander–have cut, time and time again. None of our knots have been unravelled with care and a sensitivity to their material and intellectual properties. In other words, our problems and circumstances have typically been addressed by the sword–literally and figuratively. Our problems have been ‘abolished’, but they have not been solved. And it is perhaps in this kind of situation that the notion of ‘societies in crisis’ arises.”
—Pat Bishop, 2005
To be continued next week with reflections from Pat Bishop’s sister, Gillian Bishop, and Barbara Jenkins—writer, former Lydian, close friend, and director of the PALM Foundation.
Ira Mathur is a freelance journalist and a columnist for Guardian Media. Mathur is the author of Love the Dark Days, which won the 2023 OCM Bocas Prize for Non-Fiction.
