Music

I bet music came into my life before my mother and I were released from Honolulu’s Queen’s Hospital in October 1940, a time in history when it was thought ten days hospitalization was enlightened birthing. I actually remember her singing Brahm’s Lullaby to me when I was about four, but I bet she had already sung it to me a thousand times. It became so familiar that, eighty years later, I still remember the whole melody and most of the words. “Lullaby, and good-night/With roses bedight…”

My dad sang too, Hawaiian songs from his years boarding at Kamehameha School for Boys in the 1920s, and American songs from then and earlier. But it was my mom who finagled piano lessons for me when I was eight and signed me up for St. Christopher’s Junior Choir the next year. Second only to art, my favorite subject in school was music. In our weekly sing-along reluctantly led by ill-trained fifth and sixth grade public school teachers we requested American standards of the day. My favorites were “Bury Me Not on The Lone Prairie” or “My Grandfather’s Clock.”

I started boarding at Kamehameha School for Girls in seventh grade. It was the most singing school, and still is. We sang every night at dinner. We sang in choruses, choirs and classes.  We sang in our annual song contest. We sang at all special occasions and holidays. We sang in the gang showers in the gym and the dorms. We sang outdoors on the lawn after school. We sang on the school bus going on a field trip. We sang four-part because we loved singing. We learned the notes by listening to older girls behind us on the bus.

In college I kept right on singing. Church choirs, Bach Society Chorus. A few years later I even taught myself basic guitar, to accompany the new folk songs surging through the U.S. in the Fifties and Sixties.

After I was asked to give my granddaughter a Hawaiian name at her birth in 2010, I decided it would be good for her to have a name song as well as the name. I wrote and recorded “Keolaokeao” in 2012 and gave it to her for her second birthday. By then I had decided she should become acquainted with more Hawaiian music and I wrote enough additional songs and recorded  them along with some traditional songs and chants to make a whole CD.  This kind of creativity breeds more of the same. By 2019, with the help of numerous musicians more talented than I, I produced two additional CDs of original work, including several new name songs. Made 100 copies and gave them all away. The latest song, Kamanuwai, is so new it’s still a stand-alone, but available on this website.

I learned long ago to take advantage of acoustics. It’s no wonder people sing in the shower. Great acoustics. I once sang in a cave in New Zealand for the same reason. And I discovered years ago camping in a state park in Oregon that, although a vault toilet is not the most pleasant of places generally speaking, it does have grand acoustics.

Even though my once-soprano voice has slipped a couple of octaves I still sing  whenever and wherever I can.