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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Irving Berlin’s Musical Theater
of War Interview with Tom Cipullo by Doug Cohen Bernstein in Boston, conference review by Paul R. Laird Celebrating African American Art Song, conference reviews by Naomi André and Ann Sears |
Performing Hawaiian by Kevin Fellezs
Who is a real Hawaiian? The question has been raised by members of the Hawaiian hip hop group, Sudden Rush, performers of na mele paleoleo (Hawaiian rap), who have implicitly registered cultural hybridity as a component of authentic Hawaiian-ness by combining the Hawaiian and English languages within an urban African American idiom. My own interest is in the ways Hawaiian-ness is articulated through another hybrid musical form, ki ho’alu (slack key guitar), and how its practices and distribution networks, including the transmission of musical knowledge from master to student, complicates notions of Hawaiian cultural membership. My thoughts are similar to those of Rona Halualani, who claims that our positions as ethnic Hawaiians born and raised in California obscure, even deny, our identification as “real” Hawaiians.1 In addition to officially sanctioned blood quantum requirements for state recognition of Hawaiian ancestry, she lists the various ways Hawaiian identity is constructed and articulated—native-born, indigenous, Local–all of which provide little space for those in the Hawaiian diaspora a generation or more removed from living in their homeland. Our own claims to Hawaiian identity, lying outside these definitions, appear specious. The situation of diasporic Hawaiians is further complicated by a prevailing concept that Halualani and Haunani-Kay Trask have dubbed “Hawaiian in the heart.”2 This idea, they argue, misinterprets the original meaning of Aloha (often translated simply as “love”) in order to inscribe Hawaiians as a naturally benevolent and generous people, a concept that allows anyone, regardless of ethnic or cultural background, to claim a type of Hawaiian-ness. According to Halualani, the term Aloha was used to describe various relationships between Hawaiian social classes on which their “harshly lived social hegemony [was] sanctified through religion.”3 In other words, Aloha articulated a political relationship between Hawaiian kings, nobility and commoners, each of whom interpreted Aloha somewhat differently following their rankings within the sociopolitical structure. On a simple level, Aloha may be seen as loyalty to the king for commoners while, for Hawaiian monarchs, it marked a sense of obligation towards his or her subjects. I have chosen to listen to the ways Hawaiian identity is complicated through ki ho’alu not only because it is heard by contemporary audiences as an authentically Hawaiian music practice (despite roots extending to non-Hawaiian cultures) but also as it has both incorporated and displaced older, traditional Hawaiian musical practices. The transcultural threads of ki ho’alu are visible in the troubled weavings of Hawaiian musical aesthetics, British naval power, which allowed the importation of cattle to Hawai’i, and the Mexican vaqueros who brought the guitar to Hawai’i in the nineteenth century when they came to teach Hawaiians better cattle husbandry techniques. When the vaqueros returned to Mexico, many left their guitars with their Hawaiian paniolo (cowboy) companions. Some historians speculate that Hawaiian paniolos sought to emulate the two-guitar sound of the vaqueros in the familiar fingerpicking style of ki ho’alu, where the thumb provides bass lines and rhythm chords on the lower pitched strings and the other fingers pick the melody or improvise fills on the two or three higher pitched strings. Others, however, argue slack key guitar style borrowed from antecedents in the Hawaiian folk tradition, especially the mele hula chants and their subsequent development into the Christian hymn-influenced hula ku’i, perhaps most famously represented by popular tune “Aloha ‘Oe.” (The common speculation that Hawaiian musicians slackened guitar strings because they didn’t know how to properly tune a guitar may be countered by noting the dominance of major tonalities in the most common open tunings used by ki ho’alu musicians, which is reflective of Hawaiian musical sensibilities and indicates a systematic adaptive approach.) Mele is perhaps the most important cultural expression of the Hawaiians. It is the way ancient Hawaiians prayed and passed on legends and lore, linking their prehistory with their present life. The chant, and its two main divisions, mele oli (chants done a cappella) and mele hula (chants with dance and/or music) contribute to the rhythmic basis of ki ho’alu, which was originally played on the ipu, a gourd, and the pahu, a drum formed from hollowed-out coconut or breadfruit tree logs with sharkskin membranes for heads. Traditional rhythms are based on two- or four-beat patterns linked to specific dance steps. Typically for Hawaiian music, the accompaniment does not parallel the song melody on guitar but repeats small, related melodic fragments that are varied and improvised on within strict conventions, creating a polyphonic texture. In solo guitar contexts, ki ho’alu can achieve this same melodic overlapping. Because slack key guitar is a picked, rather than strummed, style, with a melody accompanied by a plucked bass, a musician creates a polyphonic sound not unlike ragtime or stride piano styles, with improvisation of melodic and rhythmic patterns in both the bass and treble registers. Syncopation is common, as are triplets and dotted eighths with sixteenths. While early solo jazz piano styles used these effects to provide rhythmic and melodic tension, ki ho’alu achieves a rolling, rhythmically calm sensation. As ki ho’alu evolved it began to replace mele and hula. The decline of mele can be attributed to a decrease in native Hawaiian religious practices due to enforced proscriptions by missionaries. The divorcing of hula from its traditional, native associations contributed to the commodification of Hawaiian culture for non-Hawaiian consumption.4 However, ki ho’alu was not immune to the social and political transformations affecting other Hawaiian cultural practices. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were concerted efforts by British and United States elites to discourage and even eradicate Hawaiian culture, denying the use of the Hawaiian language, religious rituals and other cultural practices, including ki ho’alu. Scholars such as Noenoe K. Silva and Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio have documented how these efforts, prompted by a need for political and capital gain, simultaneously elided the political and cultural opposition of Native Hawaiians.5 The result was a narrative of Hawaiian cultural loss that obscured the ways Hawaiian cultural traditions managed to survive. Ki ho’alu’s apparent disappearance occurred as Hawaiian cultural producers moved their art and folkways underground to avoid continued harassment by colonial authorities and the zealous proscriptions of missionaries. Ki ho’alu survived through the careful preservation by various ohana (families), not as “closely guarded family secrets,”6 as one slack key guitar history has claimed, but because as Hawaiian cultural suppression became official state policy, ki ho’alu musicians acted in politically prudent ways. As noted Hawaiian musician Keola Beamer asserts: I’m old enough to remember when we all thought slack key would die. There were many reasons for that. One of them was that our kupuna (elders) had lost so much: their land, their religious system, their sense of place in the universe. The last thing they wanted to lose was their music, so tunings became very cultish and protected. The irony was that by way of holding the secrets too close, this art form was actually dying, suffocating because the information wasn’t being communicated.7 Though its survival depended on secrecy during much of its history, some musicians, such as Beamer, claim that ki ho’alu’s continuation in more recent times has relied on its widespread dissemination. From their perspective, ki ho’alu is no longer threatened by external cultural forces but, rather, is increasingly hindered by its insularity. Within a contemporary political context, Beamer, Kane and others have begun teaching ki ho’alu primarily to non-Hawaiian students throughout the world, with the belief that spreading knowledge of ki ho’alu is fundamental to ensuring its continued survival and creative vitality. Moreover, as ki ho’alu is increasingly learned through recordings rather than oral tradition, Beamer argues teaching by Hawaiian masters will ensure the retention of a certain degree of Hawaiian cultural integrity. As he notes on his website, Because many of the beautiful old traditions in Hawai’i have been changed by outside influences, this greatly increased respect for the older slack key traditions and the sharing of tunings is helping to ensure that traditional slack key guitar will endure and be shared.8 Ki ho’alu as a solo guitar tradition divorced from mele is a relatively recent performance style and its role as an accompaniment to vocals and/or dance has been underserved by the majority of ki ho’alu recordings, which feature solo guitarists. In fact, Elizabeth Tatar’s taxonomy of Hawaiian music in her essay “Toward a Description of Precontact Music in Hawai’i,”9 lists only mele, himeni, monarchy songs, folk songs, hapa haole and contemporary (a term she uses to describe musicians who integrate Hawaiian themes and/or musical elements with non-Hawaiian popular music, such as Sudden Rush’s rap). Following Tatar’s categorization, ki ho’alu uncomfortably overlaps mele hula, folk songs and contemporary, simultaneously evoking a pre-contact Hawaiian musical aesthetic and the contradictory post-contact musical stereotypes of both laconic pleasure and excitable native impulses. Additionally, ki ho’alu recordings circulate within the commercial networks that have rendered Hawaiian culture in ways Trask has likened to prostitution.10 I would hesitate to claim that all non-Hawaiian participation and commercial interest in Hawaiian culture is primarily appropriative or exploitive given that, as Halualani reminds us, many diasporic Hawaiians access Hawaiian culture through those very mediations. Indeed, ki ho’alu’s current vitality as a commercial genre as well as its acceptance as an artistic form outside of Hawai’i can be attributed, in no small part, to non-Hawaiian musician George Winston, pianist, guitarist and owner of Dancing Cat Records, a label he formed expressly to record and preserve the creative work of both himself and other ki ho’alu artists. Moreover, the discrepant positions ki ho’alu guitarists such as Winston and modern ki ho’alu master Charles Philip “Gabby” Pahinui occupy in relation to Hawaiian culture highlight the debates surrounding authenticity and a musical idiom viewed as part of a Hawaiian folk tradition. Indeed, despite its transcultural roots, ki ho’alu is closely linked to Hawaiian culture and portrayed as an expression of native Hawaiian music aesthetics. Ironically, given ki ho’alu musicians’ indigenizing of the guitar and the corresponding disturbance of clear demarcations among ethnic and cultural divisions, ki ho’alu continues to be rendered as the sonic representation of “vivid, warm tropical images that transcend the Islands to express universal feelings.”11 George H. Lewis, writing about Hawaiian music in the 1970s notes, “Many of the new songs also used musical forms that were associated with native tradition — from the chants of early Hawaii to the song stylings of the slack-key guitarists.”12 In what has become known as the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s, young Hawaiian musicians not only began performing older styles of Hawaiian music but also invigorated them with a number of innovations, including the merging of traditional and modern instrumentation. They often sang in the Hawaiian language, effectively making their music less attractive to tourists and challenging the dominance of hapa haole songs in the commercial music arena. Singing in Hawaiian was a political act, a way to combat the attempts to eradicate Hawaiian culture by British and American missionaries and political elites, whose legacy remains in the English-language dominance of the educational and legal systems. Yet, as ki ho’alu became known as an instrumental guitar music, it could evade the politics of language use and entered the public imagination as the “soft, inviting sounds” of Hawai’i, allowing its performance and appreciation without knowledge of the Hawaiian language or culture. There is nothing new about this practice: a survey of popular music trends from the early twentieth century to the contemporary moment quickly reveals a history of blending ideas about Hawaiian culture, particularly its easy accessibility by non-Hawaiians, with Hawaiian sounds such as the steel lap guitar and the rolling rhythms of ‘ukulele players. Clearly, ki ho’alu is a musical idiom that has become firmly attached to a certain type of Hawaiian-ness for audiences inside and outside the geographical space of the Hawaiian Islands. On one hand, well-known guitarist Bob Brozman has described his interest in the music of various Pacific Island cultures, including ki ho’alu, as the result of “hang[ing] around at the fringes of colonialism, where you get non-Europeans playing European instruments. . . . Whenever the colonizers arrived with guitars, the colonized did very interesting things with them.”13 On the other hand, California-born and raised Patrick Landeza credits his mother, Frances Kawaipulou Kuakini O’Sullivan, for instilling a love of Hawaiian music in him, which eventually led to studies with Hawaiian master musicians such as Ray Kane, Sonny Chillingworth, and Saichi Kawahara.14 Taken together, ki ho’alu musicians, Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, indicate that there may be different kinds of Hawaiian-ness articulated in the performance and creation of a musical idiom marked “Hawaiian soul music” by the subtitle of one documentary film on ki ho’alu.15 We hear in ki ho’alu the various articulations of Hawaiian cultural membership in the ways I have outlined above: the indigenization of a foreign instrument that marks Hawaiian music in an explicitly hybrid way (against the so-called purity of traditional mele); the use of ki ho’alu as a traditional music in contrast to the mainstream popular music stylings of hapa haole songs during the Hawaiian Renaissance of the 1970s; the rise of ki ho’alu masters such as Patrick Landeza who are born and raised outside of the Hawaiian Islands; the teaching of ki ho’alu beyond the confines of a master guitarist’s ohana and, increasingly, to musicians like Bob Brozman who make no claims for Hawaiian identity yet find in ki ho’alu a resonant musical idiom. Brozman is not the only non-Hawaiian who enjoys what he cogently expresses as “hanging out at the fringes of colonialism.” But for Hawaiian musicians, their cultural legacy is not at the fringes but in the very center of colonialist desire, exploitation, and displacement. And Gabby Pahinui’s historic recordings of slack key guitar in the late 1940s through the 1970s, as well as contemporary guitarists such as Keola Beamer, have helped ki ho’alu make a remarkable return to the public sphere. As ki ho’alu musicians closely identified with “real” Hawaiian-ness such as Beamer, Kane, and Kaapana actively pass on their knowledge of ki ho’alu, the circle of legitimate ki ho’alu musicians widens, including diasporic Hawaiians who do not fit easily within current categories for real Hawaiian identity. This latest cohort of guitarists, sailing from the fringes of colonialism, will take ki ho’alu to unfamiliar places, sounding out new definitions Hawaiian identity may yet embrace and embody. —Kevin Fellezs University of California at Merced Notes 1 Rona Tamiko Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians: Native Identities
and Cultural Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 2 See Halualani, In the Name of Hawaiians,
and Haunani-Kay Trask, “‘Lovely Hula Hands’: Corporate
Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture,” in From a Native
Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 1999 [1993]). 3 Halualani, 25. 4 See Trask for a trenchant critique of
Hawaiian cultural exploitation. 5 See Noenoe K. Silva, Aloha Betrayed:
Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2004) and Jonathan Kamakawiwo’ole Osorio, Dismembering
Lahui: A History of the Hawaiian Nation to 1887 (Honolulu: University of
Hawai'i Press, 2002). 6 From Blue Book: A Short History
of Slack Key Guitar (Ki ho’alu), available on the Dancing Cat
website www.dancingcat.com/skbook8-acknowledgments.php 7 This quote is taken from
Beamer’s comments about the song, “Lei ‘Awapuhi,” in
the liner notes to his recording, Moe’Uhane Kika: Tales of the Dream
Guitar (Dancing Cat, 1995). 8 Keola Beamer, “Sending Aloha
from Maui, Hawai’i.” www.kbeamer.com/sk_history.html 9 Elizabeth Tatar, “Toward a
Description of Precontact Music in Hawai’i.” Ethnomusicology,
25/3 (September 1981), 481-92. 10 See Trask, From a Native
Daughter. 11 Liner notes to Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar
Masters: Instrumental Collection (Dancing Cat, 1995). 12 George H. Lewis, “Storm
Blowing from Paradise: Social Protest and Oppositional Ideology in Popular
Hawaiian Music,” in Popular Music 10/1 (1991), 63. Emphasis
added. 13 Bob Brozman, interview, Beat
4 (April 2001), n.p. Available online at: www.bobbrozman.com/inter_beat.html 14 Patrick Landeza, interview with the author,
14 November 1996. 15 Ki Ho’alu, That’s Slack Key
Guitar: Hawaiian Soul Music, dir. Susan Friedman, VHS, Studio on the
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