XXI.—THE MUSIC AND MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF THE HAWAIIANS
A bird is easier captured than the notes of a song. The mele and oli of Hawaii’s olden time have been preserved for us; but the music to which they were chanted, a less perdurable essence, has mostly exhaled. In the sudden transition from the tabu system to the new order of things that came in with the death of Kamehameha in 1819, the old fashion of song soon found itself antiquated and outdistanced. Its survival, so far as it did survive, was rather as a memorial and remembrance of the past than as a register of the living emotions of the present.
The new music, with its pa, ko, li—answering to our do, re, mi [304]—was soon in everybody’s mouth. From the first it was evidently destined to enact a role different from that of the old cantillation; none the less the musical ideas that came in with it, the air of freedom from tabu and priestcraft it breathed, and the diatonic scale, the highway along which it marched to conquest, soon produced a noticeable reaction in all the musical efforts of the people. This new seed, when it had become a vigorous plant, began to push aside the old indigenous stock, to cover it with new growths, and, incredible as it may seem, to inoculate it with its own pollen, thus producing a cross which to-day is accepted in certain quarters as the genuine article of Hawaiian song. Even now, the people of northwestern America are listening with demonstrative interest to songs which they suppose to be those of the old hula, but which in reality have no more connection with that institution than our negro minstrelsy has to do with the dark continent.
Footnote 304:[ (return) ] The early American missionaries to Hawaii named the musical notes of the scale pa, ko, li, ha, no, la, mi.
The one regrettable fact, from a historical point of view, is that a record was not made of indigenous Hawaiian song before this process of substitution and adulteration had begun. It is no easy matter now to obtain the data for definite knowledge of the subject.
While the central purpose of this chapter will be a study of the music native to old Hawaii, and especially of that produced in the halau, Hawaiian music of later times and of the present day can not be entirely neglected; nor will it be without its value for the indirect light it will shed on ancient conditions and on racial characteristics. The reaction that has taken place in Hawaii within historic times in response to the stimulus from abroad can not fail to be of interest in itself.
There is a peculiarity of the Hawaiian speech which can not but have its effect in determining the lyric tone-quality of Hawaiian music; this is the predominance of vowel and labial sounds in the language. The phonics of Hawaiian speech, we must remember, lack the sounds represented by our alphabetic symbols b, c or s, d, f, g, j, q, x, and z—a poverty for which no richness in vowel sounds can make amends. The Hawaiian speech, therefore, does not call into full play the uppermost vocal cavities to modify and strengthen, or refine, the throat and mouth tones of the speaker and to give reach and emphasis to his utterances. When he strove for dramatic and passional effect, he did not make his voice resound in the topmost cavities of the voice-trumpet, but left it to rumble and mutter low down in the throat-pipe, thus producing a feature that colors Hawaiian musical recitation.
This feature, or mannerism, as it might be called, specially marks Hawaiian music of the bombastic bravura sort in modern times, imparting to it in its strife for emphasis a sensual barbaric quality. It can be described further only as a gurgling throatiness, suggestive at times of ventriloquism, as if the singer were gloating over some wild physical sensation, glutting his appetite of savagery, the meaning of which is almost as foreign to us and as primitive as are the mewing of a cat, the gurgling of an infant, and the snarl of a mother-tiger. At the very opposite pole of development from this throat-talk of the Hawaiian must we reckon the highly-specialized tones of the French speech, in which we find the nasal cavities are called upon to do their full share in modifying the voice-sounds.
The vocal execution of Hawaiian music, like the recitation of much of their poetry, showed a surprising mastery of a certain kind of technique, the peculiarity of which was a sustained and continuous outpouring of the breath to the end of a certain period, when the lungs again drank their fill. This seems to have been an inheritance from the old religious style of prayer-recitation, which required the priest to repeat the whole incantation to its finish with the outpour of one lungful of breath. Satisfactory utterance of those old prayer-songs of the Aryans, the mantras, was conditioned likewise on its being a one-breath performance. A logical analogy may be seen between all this and that unwritten law, or superstition, which made it imperative for the heroes and demigods, kupua, of Hawaii’s mythologic age to discontinue any unfinished work on the coming of daylight. [305]
Footnote 305:[ (return) ] The author can see no reason for supposing that this prolonged utterance had anything to do with that Hindoo practice belonging to the yoga, the exercise of which consists in regulating the breath.
When one listens for the first time to the musical utterance of a Hawaiian poem, it may seem only a monotonous onflow of sounds faintly punctuated by the primary rhythm that belongs to accent, but lacking those milestones of secondary rhythm which set a period to such broader divisions as distinguish rhetorical and musical phrasing. Further attention will correct this impression and show that the Hawaiians paid strict attention not only to the lesser rhythm which deals with the time and accent of the syllable, but also to that more comprehensive form which puts a limit to the verse.
With the Hawaiians musical phrasing was arranged to fit the verse of the mele, not to express a musical idea. The cadencing of a musical phrase in Hawaiian song was marked by a peculiarity all its own. It consisted of a prolonged trilling or fluctuating movement called i’i, in which the voice went up and down in a weaving manner, touching the main note that formed the framework of the melody, then springing away from it for some short interval—a half of a step, or even some shorter interval—like an electrified pith-ball, only to return and then spring away again and again until the impulse ceased. This was more extensively employed in the oil proper, the verses of which were longer drawn out, than in the mele such as formed the stock pieces of the hula. These latter were generally divided into shorter verses.