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Cymber Lily Quinn

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SATURDAY SEPT. 8, 10 AM: QUEEN LILI’UOKALANI BIRTHDAY FESTIVAL

Please join me and my flutist, Kathy Dorn, next Saturday, September 8 at 10 am in Lili’uokalani Gardens in downtown Hilo. Kathy and I will be opening the He Hali`a Aloha No Lili`uokalani festival, playing original tunes composed by the last monarch of Hawaii, Queen Lili’uokalani. I will also be playing during the Ho’okipa ceremony, where Hawaiian dignitaries will offer gifts in honor of the Queen.

The annual festival is held on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday and is a free family fun event all day long. Featuring children’s activities, entertainment, craft and demonstration booths, food trucks, tea ceremony, and mass hula. (I once danced in this festival about 10 years ago. Now I feel incredibly blessed to perform the Queen’s music.)

 

Cymber Lily Quinn, harp meditations, Hilo Hawaii
Queen Lili’uokalani, composer

Monarch and Talented Composer

Like all royals of her day, she received a solid musical education in the Western tradition from the missionaries who arrived on Hawaiian shores. The Queen showed particular talent and composed more than 300 tunes in her lifetime, many of them while she was under house-arrest in the I’olani Palace.

Kathy and I will be playing old favorites, like “Aloha ‘Oe” and “Sanoe.” And some that we played earlier this year at the Palace Theatre in the Ho’okia’i: Lili’uokalani, like a love song for the forest of Puna and a little ode to a water sprinkler…

 

 

For more information

Cymber Lily Quinn, harp meditations, Hilo HawaiiThis event is co-sponsored with County of Hawaii Parks & Recreation Department Culture & Education Division and Lili`uokalani Trust. For more information, visit the event’s Facebook page at: https://www.facebook.com/events/1857406794554886/

 

 

 

 

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Listen to “Seasons of the Soul” on NPR’s “Hearts of Space”

I was fortunate to be included on an episode of National Public Radio’s “Hearts of Space”.  The show focused on the “chordophone” family of instruments:

Let’s consider, gentle listener, the “chordophone” family of musical instruments. It’s a large, diverse brood including almost anything with stretched strings: zithers, lyres, harps, lutes, guitars, the violin family, hundreds of ethnic string instruments like the Japanese koto and the African kora, and not least keyed zithers like the harpsichord and the piano.

Chordophones can be plucked, strummed, bowed, keyed, or struck. Looking back in time, zithers, lyres and harps were the foundational instruments of the chordophone family. They were used in antiquity to accompany recitations and promote healing. On this transmission of Hearts of Space, we ride the soft strings of the harp and zither to a place close to silence, on a program called CHORDOPHONICS.

You can listen the show in its entirety here >  https://www.hos.com/#program/1016

 

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CONCERT AT THE PALACE THEATER, HO’OKIA’I: LILI’UOKALANI. PART 1

Cymber Lily Quinn first moved to the Hilo area in 2004, and first met the Queen’s music through Keola Beamer’s lovely interpretation of “Sanoe.” Cymber quickly fell in love with slack key music and a deeper affair with modern Hawaiian music in general.

At a visit to Queen Emma’s Summer Palace on O’ahu, Cymber found The Queen’s Songbook, the music of Queen Lilu’okalani, and began studying the stories and structures behind her songs. From the beginning, Cymber felt a deep but mysterious familiarity in the Queen’s music. “How could a culture so different produce music that felt so homey?” she wondered.

By tracing the lineage of the Queen’s influences, Cymber realized that the music had come from American missionaries and other church influences from the East Coast. That church music had in turn traveled hundreds of years before from England and Europe, where Cymber’s ancestors had immigrated from in 1638. The folk music of Cymber’s ancient Welsh ancestors had started traveling to America in the guise of church music 400 years ago. The music traveled again to meet Queen Lili’uokalani, who took to it like a fish to water…

 

ACT 1: THE QUEEN’S MUSIC

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