Your love is up here in the wildwood.
This mele hoipoipo, love-song, like the one previously given, is from Kauai. The proper names that abound in it, whether of places, of persons, or of winds, seem to have been mostly of Kauaian origin, furnished by its topography, its myths and legends. They have, however, become the common property of the whole group through having been interwoven in the national songs that pass current from island to island.
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.