Mana Music Quartet

Music of Queen Lili‘uokalani 

Nero, we are told, “fiddled while Rome burned.” The fiddle, of course, had not yet been invented in Roman times. But the emperor did play music. He is depicted on coins of the period strumming on the lyre. Reportedly, he was devoted to this instrument, and quite bad at playing it. 

Nero was not unique among world leaders in devoting himself to delusions of his own competence while the world crumbled around him. But there have been other leaders who showed genuine talent in their musical pursuits. One of Nero’s unsavory successors as leader of the Italian peninsula, Benito Mussolini, did fiddle, on no less than an Amati instrument. (Mussolini’s son Romano was a successful jazz pianist.) King Frederick the Great of Prussia was a skilled flautist and composer, who supplied Bach with the theme upon which the Musical Offering was built. The great piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski became Prime Minister of Poland in 1919. One attendee of a Paderewski concert some years before this, Harry S. Truman, was himself an enthusiastic pianist, as was Richard Nixon. The two U.S. presidents never made beautiful music together: Truman wrote that “the idea of a duet with Nixon is singularly repellent, and my answer to your invitation is, of course, no.” Nixon also played the violin, clarinet, saxophone, and accordion, while an earlier president, Thomas Jefferson spent many hours of his youth practicing violin and cello. British Prime Minister Edward Heath conducted the London Symphony, and wrote a book called Music—A Joy for Life, while West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt recorded Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos with Christoph Eschenbach and Justus Franz. Among recent leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron earned a piano diploma at Amiens Conservatoire, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer studied flute at the Guildhall School of Music, and Croatian President Ivo Josipović wrote an opera about John Lennon. 

And then there was the Hawaiian royal family, among the most talented and accomplished musician-leaders in history. Queen Lili‘uokalani and her three siblings all composed and sang, and were well-trained in solfeggio and musical notation. Younger brother William Pitt Leleiohoku II was a mast‘er guitarist, while Lili‘uokalani herself played the keyboard, guitar, zither, and autoharp, and had perfect pitch. 

For the royal family, music was not just an aesthetic pursuit separate from politics. As many in this audience will know, Lili‘uokalani and her three siblings have been called Na Lani ‘Ehā, that is, The Heavenly Four, in recognition of their enrichment and promotion of Hawaiian music and culture. They grew up during the reign of Kamehameha III, when many Western laws and customs were being adopted. Amidst an influx of Western political might, missionary fervor, and cultural influence, the siblings and all of Hawai‘i’s ali‘i (aristocrats) sought out a difficult and delicate balance between the protection and perpetuation of their Hawaiian identity and power, on the one hand, and the embrace of the new on the other. The authors at the Lili‘u Project explain: “As a young student, ‘Lili‘u’ (as she was known) was immersed in Christian education, taught by her missionary teachers. While these colonial instructors discouraged Hawaiian beliefs, her family simultaneously nurtured her Hawaiian identity. Thus, from an early age, she developed a unique synthesis of Hawaiian and Western cultural values…” 

The embrace of the new was sometimes a matter of necessity: from a governmental standpoint, Hawai‘i needed to Westernize in order to be taken seriously by Western powers. But Western music and musicians were adopted enthusiastically: “Honolulu prided itself as a cosmopolitan port of entry, welcoming the most current artistic voices from around the world. Indeed, new innovations in Western music were quickly embraced by the Hawaiian ali‘i and their people, who already possessed strong cultural traditions of poetry, chant and dance.” Among the effects of this embrace were the founding of the Royal Hawaiian Band, the importation of Prussian bandmaster Henri Berger, who was personally close to both Lili‘uokalani and her brother King Kalākaua, and the composition of a great many songs by Na Lani ‘Ehā, especially Lili‘uokalani. 

Lili‘uokalani composed more than 160 songs in her lifetime; her earliest published work was written in 1860. As might be expected given her background, these compositions blend traditional Hawaiian musical elements with features of the Christian hymns she learned in her youth and popular ballads and waltzes of the day. They include many love songs, which display their composer’s mastery of kaona, that is, hidden meaning. In 1866, when she was twenty-eight, her standing as a composer was already such that King Kamehameha V came to her and, in her words, “brought to my notice the fact that the Hawaiian people had no national air. Each nation, he said, but ours had its statement of patriotism and love of country in its own music; but we were using for that purpose on state occasions the time-honored British anthem, ‘God save the Queen.’” In response, she wrote He Mele Lāhui Hawai‘i. 

Later, Lili‘uokalani would bring her mastery of kaona to her political song-writing. In 1887, as is well known, the Hawaiian League, a secret society working to force annexation of Hawai‘i by the United States, forced Kalākaua to sign the so-called Bayonet Constitution, which weakened the power of the monarch relative to the Euro-American business elites. When Kalākaua died four years later and Lili‘uokalani became queen, she attempted to overturn the constitution. This led, in 1893, to a coup against the queen, the arrival of U.S. marines, and eventually, the queen’s arrest. During her imprisonment, Lili‘uokalani composed some of her finest works, including Ke Aloha O Ka Haku and Ku‘u Pua I Paoakalani. Each one is political, the first overtly if not altogether specifically, and the second subtly and by means of kaona. You can look forward to this concert’s performers talking story about these and Lili‘uokalani’s other richly meaning-laden songs. 

Eddie Kamae, E Ku‘u Morning Dew 

The cultural flowering during the reign of King Kalākaua in the 1870s has been called the First Hawaiian Renaissance. The renewed interest in Hawaiian culture and language that gained steam about a hundred years later has been called the Second Hawaiian Renaissance. Among the leaders of this revival were the Sons of Hawai‘i, with their ‘ukelele star Eddie Kamae. 

Like Lili‘uokalani, Kamae was the product of varied influences. His grandmother was a dancer at Kalākaua’s court. In his youth, he imbibed Latin and jazz rhythms from the radio and listened to Hawaiian music at the Queen’s Surf. Under the influence of jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian and Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat, Kamae became an innovator and virtuoso on the ‘ukulele, in addition to being a singer, bandleader, and composer. 

In the 1970s, Kamae took lessons in the Hawaiian language from a young teacher, Larry Kimura. One night, he gave the first and last dinner party of his life, attended by Kimura. In the middle of dinner, out of the blue, a song came to him: E Ku‘u Morning Dew. Kimura would supply the lyrics. 

Dvořák, “American” Quartet 

In the second year of Lili‘uokalani’s two-year reign, as Hawai‘i’s Euro- American business elites were working toward annexation with the United States, the United States itself was celebrating the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ arrival on America’s shores. A new arrival in the States that year was Antonín Dvořák, come to serve as director of New York’s National Conservatory. 

Just as Hawai‘i had welcomed Western music in the nineteenth century, the United States was crazy specifically for European musicians and music. Dvořák was a great prize for the National Conservatory. But Dvořák, it turned out, became fascinated with the music he found waiting for him in America, which he was able to hear in short order at celebrations for the Columbus anniversary. He was impressed with African American music (he insisted that Black students should study for free at the National Conservatory, and wrote that “In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”) And he was impressed with Native American music. 

During the summer of 1893, Dvořák vacationed in the heavily Czech Iowa village of Spillville. There, he wrote the “New World” Symphony and the “American” Quartet, incorporating the new raw materials he had heard into his own Central European style. The quartet’s first movement opens in a pentatonic framework. The pentatonicism has been linked to both plantation songs and Native American music. Possibilities abound for the origins of the Lento second movement. It has been said to express Dvořák’s homesickness for Bohemia, and to express the melancholy of the African-American spiritual. A more specific connection to the music of the Plains Indians has also been forwarded: the melody in the first violin may recall the Plains singing style, while the drone and pizzicato in the lower voices may approximate the drums and rattles with which that singing was commonly accompanied. 

Indisputable, on the other hand, is the appearance of the scarlet tanager. The call of this red-and-orange bird, which frequented the pathways around Spillville where Dvořák often walked, includes a short downward whistle, followed by a longer one that goes up and then down again. It appears in mm.21-24 of the scherzo. (Details of the encounter between bird and composer may be found in the children’s book Two Scarlet Songbirds: A story of Anton Dvorak.) A last American sound can, according to some, be heard in the finale: the railroad train. 

©Sasha Margolis