Arts and Literature

Musical Instruments

Music was an important part of Ancient Hawaiian life. When the first European explorers arrived on the Islands, they wrote accounts of the musical instruments that they saw in use. Captain Cook wrote of a performance seen on Kauai in January 1778 that the musical instruments seen among them were :

“a hollow vessel of wood like a platter and two sticks, on these one of our gentlemen saw a man play; one of the stick he held as we do a fiddle and struck it with the other.”

Later a Hawaiian musicologist identified the first ‘platter’ instrument as a PAPAHEHI or treadle board. The second refers to a gourd rattle, called a ULI-ULI. In the drawings made by these early foreign visitors, musicians are seen playing near dancers and performers in villages on different islands.

A collection of Hawaiian musical instruments published by the Bishop Museum can be viewed in this slide show:

Hawaiian Instruments

String Instruments

Wind Instruments

Percussive Instruments