We continuously celebrate the great performers of music history...but what about the instruments they played? Of course there are those which have provenances as long as masterpieces in any museum, instruments which have been passed from master to master and now speak with an accumulated wisdom of age. How unlike tubes of paint waiting to be incorporated into pictures (or which might wind up in a murky heap on the corner of the palette) or paper on which poems will be drafted (or which might become shopping lists.) Where do such instruments come from? They come from the loving labor of craftsmen like musician and steel drum maker Terrance Cameron.

In our age of disposable culture, it's almost trite to observe that craftsmanship seems anachronistic. Even those things whose manufacture we praise pale in comparison to their material ancestors from before the age of mass production. But there is no way to mass-produce a steel drum, which is made by reclaiming a 55-gallon steel barrel and painstaking hammering it into precisely pitched pans. Mr. Cameron notes that there are no standard patterns for the steel drum. Each master's drum has a singular sound, a sound that often cannot be reproduced by a musician other than the one for whom the instrument was made. It's therefore not a case of whether a composition sounds better on this or that particular instrument, but perhaps of whether or not it's even possible on another drum. Any musician may play the revered Stradivarius, but the steel drum might not be coaxed into speaking except by certain geniuses.