No Ke Kanu Ana o Ke Kupapau
A service for the dead in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi

A companion work for Fauré’s Requiem in the Hawaiian Language

Mele, the traditional music and poetry of Hawaiʻi, played a vital role in the culture of Native Hawaiians, long before the introduction of choral music in 1820. Prior to Western contact, mele was integral to the historical, political, and cultural fabric of Hawaiian culture. Mele, both chanted alone as in oli or danced to as in hula, was an essential form of expression, communicating ancestral knowledge, genealogical records, and celebrating the natural world. To this day, the oral traditions of Native Hawaiians have allowed for the preservation and perpetuation of this rich cultural heritage, serving as a cornerstone of Hawaiian identity. The introduction of western choral music and literature opened a new tradition of choral music in the Hawaiian language that has many diverse traditions that continue to evolve today.

No Ke Kanu Ana o Ke Kupapau was commissioned by Jace Saplan for Ke Aloha Pau ‘Ole as a companion piece for Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem in D minor. I want to explore what a culturally responsive companion piece for a requiem might look like, using the same instrumentation as the original work but framing it in a Hawaiian music-making lens. The immediate hurdle was considering a text. Having spent six years in the Cathedral of St. Andrew, much of the Hawaiian sacred music I was familiar with was framed by King Kamehameha IV, Queen Emma, and the Anglican service music of their church during the Hawaiian worship services. King Kamehameha IV translated the 1662 Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England in 1862, giving his new church a prayer book in their language. I felt it was appropriate to use his translation of the 1662 “Order for the Dead”, or No Ke Kanu Ana O Ke Kupapau. The themes of this service center on the very human experience of grief and hope.

We begin with John 11:25-26, which gives us the promise of eternal life in Jesus’ own words at the very beginning of a service where we mourn the loss of a loved one. We know that those words are designed to inspire hope with the promise of resurrection, but in our human experience, hope is complicated. Hope is joyful and rejuvenating, but in the context of a memorial service, it is wrapped in layers of grief. I explore this complicated relationship with hope harmonically with open and sometimes incomplete or conflicting cadences.

Psalm 39, the Dixi Custodiam, digs deeper into this presence of grief within hope. God can feel so very far away in our moments with grief. Through light instrumentation and overlapping verses, I hope to capture the intimate cries to God in our time of mourning. Psalm 90, on the other hand, is driving, propelling the congregation forward into hope, into all of the joyful and rejuvenating moments of hope combining elements of Hawaiian chanting with the warm embrace of a thickly textured orchestration.

The Lord’s Prayer is an ode to my father and to my personal relationship to the text. Traditionally, it is a communal prayer “Our Father... give us this day... forgive us our tresspasses,” but to me it was a prayer I said alone with my father every night as a child before I went to sleep. It’s a request for protection from a small voice, and that’s how I chose to set the text here.

The Dismissal is an ode to my mother, who, having grown up in New Orleans, has a dramatically different relationship with how a funeral service should end. It’s raucous, it’s bombastic, it propels the souls of the living and the souls of those we’ve lost towards hope.

To Ke Aloha Pau ‘Ole, mahalo nui for letting me share this with you.