Comments about her life's work in her own words
If my views on those of my activities/products that have led to honors would be helpful: they have resulted from chance, circumstances I encountered or requests; and my responses to them, though often considered strange/unjustified at the time, in retrospect seem normal/logical rather than exceptional – and very fortunately, their results have been personally gratifying and, more importantly, beneficial to others.
I. University of Hawaii program in Ethnomusicology
In 1949 as a young faculty member at a highly regarded school of music, I had no interest in seeking another job when I received a note to see the Dean. When I went to his office, he told me that if I ever wanted to leave Eastman it was the year to do so because he had requests from six universities to help fill new positions for a combination of piano and theory (specifically as developed and taught at Eastman) for all of which I was “more qualified than anyone else at Eastman.” He laid out the materials for me to quickly scan, then told me to come back the next morning to tell him whether to notify which, if any, I would accept appointment. Teaching in a newly established department (the University of Hawaii’s was then only one year old) in the Territory of Hawaii seemed an interesting and worthwhile experience for a year or two, that would be very different from what I had been having at Eastman, though I had no idea that that it would result in a major change in the focus of my career to what would later become known as ethnomusicology.
With very few exceptions, my students at the University of Hawaii – both those who entered directly from high school and those on the GI Bill – were of Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Okinawan [then governmentally separate from Japan], Filipino or mixed ancestries of these or with European or American, and after I had become quite well acquainted with them and their hopes for the future, I began to ask some of them about music of their ancestral heritages, and was disappointed when told that they knew nothing about it, and quite concerned when some referred to it as inferior and not worth knowing. That came to mind at the book exhibit in Belgium at a 1953 UNESCO-sponsored international conference on music education where I found that the texts for elementary schools of each European country contained songs of only that country, whereas those of the United States songs of many European countries plus one or two then designated as ‘negro’, but none of Asia or Hawaii.
A few months later, I unintentionally overheard some of our students discussing the disjuncture between their studies and who they were, and realized that what I was teaching, though valuable per se was contributing to their problems and thought that something about Hawaiian and Asian musics should be added to the curriculum. My colleagues emphatically disagreed but, because I continued to believe that our students’ needs as persons outweighed my colleagues’ views, began to try to learn what I could in whatever time I could. Finding nothing relevant at the library, I located a koto teacher and began taking lessons through which I became increasingly convinced that presumptions of worthlessness were wrong, and that a way must be found to introduce these musics to the UH music program. Failing to find anyone qualified or willing to become so, I felt obligated to undertake it in spite of the University’s limited resources, by collecting and studying of books, scores and recordings, consulting with scholars and others, lessons on instruments and playing them as needed/requested, and using a grassroots approach of presenting programs of local performers of the Hawaiian and Asian music and dance to audiences that had previously ignored them and getting some of them appointed to the faculty for part-time teaching of their specialty, thus balancing the University’s mandate for outreach service to the community with ‘inreach’ from it and, as the program developed, effectively contribute to its mission in relation to Asia and the Pacific.
II. Publications
Though my publications are just offshoots of my “people- rather than paper-oriented” focus as a teacher, since they are considered important in academe’s “publish or perish” world, I will mention what led to some of mine. Music in World Culture (special issue of Music Educators Journal & reissued as a book). In contrast to other members of the Society for Ethnomusicology most of whom felt that students should have a thorough grounding in Western music before acquaintance with or study of other musics of the world, I believed that school children – at least those in Hawaii – should learn to sing not only songs of Europe and America, but also of Hawaii and Asia. Since my university schedule would not permit spending time in Hawaii’s public elementary schools, in 1959 I asked a newly appointed teacher of part-Hawaiian ancestry to join me in developing a course for in-service elementary school teachers and advanced UH students of music education, “Pacific and Asian Music in Music Education.” Not feeling qualified to choose what songs from China, Japan, Korea, Okinawa and the Philippines to include, I went to leaders of those ethnic communities to ask what songs and dances of their heritage they would like children of all ethnicities to learn, then located people in those communities to bring to class from whom to learn them, notating as they taught what would later serve to remind class members of what they learned as preparation for their teaching to their classes. This soon led to presentations at national and regional meetings of MENC, then appointment to the Editorial Board of MEJ, and then to the 1972 special issue.
