This chapter outlines musical orality and musical literacy in the modes of transmission of musical traditions, knowledge and skills within the double island nation Trinidad and Tobago. It begins with a brief outline of some wider music educational tendencies which can in turn provide a lens through which to view music educational policy and practice in Trinidad and Tobago. This is followed by a discussion of some of the central music-making practices found there, their historical foundations, current performance, and respective accompanying manifestations of musical orality and musical literacy in their transmission.

The Introduction provides an overview of the Caribbean, its Indigenous peoples, particular colonial and slave histories, as well as migrant and immigrant pasts, all presented as reasons regarding why each island/country is culturally and musically distinct. Understanding Caribbean history is essential to understanding the musics of the islands. This introduction provides that broad summary of Caribbean history, emphasising its binding relationship with the music of the islands – a necessary task for understanding and appreciating forthcoming chapters of the book.

This chapter demonstrates how decolonisation serves as a crucial point of reference in this book. Each chapter has unpacked ‘the colonial encounter’ – that sustained collision of ‘new’ and ‘old’ worlds, from the mass movements of people (many taken into the Caribbean against their will) to imperialism’s continued economic, political and social conquests – through music analysis, thereby addressing the visibility of issues confronting the colonising methods and scope of music scholarship of previous scholarship on the Caribbean and Caribbean music.

This chapter introduces kokomakaku, a stickfight ritual from the Dutch island of Curaçao. Documenting its evolution and development, the chapter shows how music can be used to reconstruct a possible historical, social and cultural timeline of an island. Kokomakaku embodies the cultural encounters and conflicts that mark Curaçao’s past and present, its development, likewise, representing localised struggles for status and self-definition.

This chapter introduces the Big Drum through narratives of ‘return’ exploring the ritual as a medium for activating ancestral memories and crafting New World belonging. It is told through the works of two women—Lorna McDaniel and Zakia Sewell. Their works depict and speak to different Big Drum accounts of ’homecoming’, including the ritual’s promise of ancestral return.

This chapter introduces the Tambú, from Curaçao, and follows its resettlement in the Netherlands, where it is celebrated as a party attended a variety of immigrants, each searching for a sense of community; a space for sharing common experiences of marginalisation and discrimination. Through the theory of ‘interpretive diasporas’, the chapter insists on the necessity for a plurality of approaches to thinking about diaspora and belonging.