Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Singing with the Choir
Workmen were pulling up the tattered carpets of our college chapel at Oxford, which meant that our choir was temporarily homeless for our weekly rehearsal. After casting around for alternative spaces, our music director came up with a solution: we crossed Holywell Street and entered the grounds of nearby New College, making our way to…
Read MoreHow a Sentence Reverberated
We’re all connected. I was reminded of that when a neighbor mentioned he’d read my story for Alta Journal about traveling to the Arctic Circle last fall. One sentence leapt out at him: “Nothing seemed fixed: water, stars, sky, or people. It was all changing and rotating and moving in a dance governed by randomness.”…
Read MoreMy Dinner with Amy
I knew I’d found a soul sister who also loved research when I clicked onto Amy Stillman’s blog and found her posting, “Adventures in Archives.” For the past three years, I’ve been making trips to the treasure trove of Hawaiian historical archives located in Honolulu. Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, a Harvard-educated associate professor of music and…
Read MoreThe Queen’s Prayer
The last queen of Hawaii’s best known composition is Aloha Oe, which is heard in the soundtrack of everything from Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii” to the Disney movie “Lilo and Stitch.” But the one that brought tears to my eyes this morning was “The Queen’s Prayer,” a hymn she wrote when she was imprisoned for eight months following a failed insurrection against the 1893 overthrow of the independent kingdom of Hawaii.
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