Kani ka ‘ōpala: A Musical Redemption of Rubbish
by Benjamin Fairfield
I hope these albums will inspire listeners to think about what, how, and why we discard, and whether there even is an “away” to which things can be thrown.
I was standing at the intersection of University and Dole (as in Dole Pineapple) waiting for my turn to cross when I glanced at my phone: “Mostly Cedar Scraps” read the subject line of an email from a former student.
The walk sign lit up, but I stayed put. The student explained in her email that she’d picked up some cedar pieces from a local temple being renovated and had left these at my office in case I could find a use for them.
Ask any teacher. A note from a student received after the class is over can make your summer, or your decade. This one was especially validating, as the student was from a university ensemble course of my own creation, MUS311, which I had to beg the administrators to get listed, scrounged to find funding for, and even organized promotional flash mobs for in order to boost registration .
The goal of the MUS311 course at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa had been pretty straightforward:
1) collect junk,
2) build instruments, and
3) learn music from Northern Thailand.
I’d learned to pay attention to junk from a young age because of my father, who, along with the Karen people of SE Asia, taught me that anything can sing, everything has a voice, and any “junk” can be redeemed.
Reared by Bostonian puritans who lived by the New England credo Waste not want not, my father famously never threw anything away that could one day have a purpose (a grace he extended to people, too). He instilled in me an attention to roadside discards, downed trees, thrift-store treasures, and their potential for redemption.
I’d learned to pay attention to junk from a young age because of my father who, along with the Karen people of SE Asia, taught me that anything can sing, everything has a voice, and any “junk” can be redeemed.
This interest in discarded objects, it turned out, fit pretty well as I went on to pursue studies in ethnomusicology. The village from my Peace Corps days was geographically situated in Thailand, but most of the people were ethnically Karen (also called Pgaz k’Nyau), an indigenous and stateless population residing in contemporary Myanmar and Thailand. And they were, at one time in their history, known for the tehnaku, a curve-necked harp that every bachelor was supposed to know how to play for courting purposes. The harp has some notable components: the curlicue strings (actually untwisted moped brake cables) and the twangy metal resonators (flattened out paint thinner canisters) were just the beginning of a tradition rich in repurposing things forgotten, discarded, and devalued. Obviously there were parallels to a forgotten, discarded, and devalued indigenous people and cultural tradition here, too, as evidenced by contemporary social issues, national and religious assimilation campaigns, and ongoing indigenous land rights movements in Thailand.
MUS311 spring 2022 course, featuring an artist-in-residence masterclass with famed tehnaku performer Chi Suwichan Phatthanaphraiwan and his wife, Khuewa.
Years later, in my MUS311 class, students and I would navigate through the more “serious” academic issues of Southeast Asian organology through learning to build, create, and play instruments. But it would be inspired by a participatory kind of fun typical of everyday activities in “the Land of Smiles.” And for our final act of subtle subversiveness, we’d perform on stage at Orvis Auditorium — the (as one colleague put it) “Carnegie Hall” of Hawai‘i — with our homemade junk instruments as a testament to the worth of cultures, materials, and traditions otherwise written off and devalued as less than deserving.
It is this combination of creative and fun musical exploration coupled with serious issues of climate change, microplastics, landfills, rampant consumerism, and more that I later sought to explore in three albums that I composed and recorded. I hope these albums will inspire listeners to think about what, how, and why we discard, and whether there even is an “away” to which things can be thrown. My hope is to focus the conversation on the potentials of discards rather than letting the climate conversation wallow in despair, anger, or litterbug shaming. Turning trash into music provides a means of acknowledging and redeeming human error, reminding us that everything we attempt to cast away has potential, worth, and purpose.
To help guide your listening, below are three songs to consider. No instruments other than those I created from junk were used in the recording of these albums, and all were made from trash found on the neighborhood sidewalks and beaches of Honolulu. For more information on the larger scope of the project, please visit: https://kanikaopala.com/. The title of the project, Kani ka ‘ōpala, is a play on the Hawaiian phrase, kani ka pila (backyard jam session). I have turned the phrase, substituting ‘ōpala (rubbish) for the original pila (instruments). The literal meaning is thus along the lines of “jamming with trash” (or more literally, “the sound of trash”).
1. “Keep Singing.” Adapted from the American Quaker hymn “How can I keep from Singing” by Robert Lowry, I aimed to turn this hymn into a more down-to-earth lament, a call to observe the beauty and fragility of this planet and to acknowledge our responsibility to it. I attempt this through slight lyrical rewrites. For example, the original “that Rock” (a spiritual grounding) becomes “this rock” (a wobbly sphere spinning through the cosmos) and seeks to align with what astronauts experience as “the overview effect.” This psychological perspective is something gained when viewing our life-sustaining planet from space and results in a profound sadness, where life (the fragile earth and atmosphere) and death (vast and empty space) are so starkly and strikingly juxtaposed, and the destruction levied upon the earth by humanity becomes increasingly obvious as being unnecessary. I accompany this lament with a cello I made by repurposing a broom handle and a salvaged cat food can left out for feral cats at a local beach. There’s also a PVC-pipe flute solo.
2. “Banyan Tree.” Halfway through recording the first of these albums, a 90-year-old banyan tree at a local church fell over during a windstorm. This tree was massive, and was home to a multitude of nesting myna birds. For many in the congregation, losing this tree was like losing a family member. Seeking to mourn with the mourners and find a way to honor and sustain the memory of this banyan, I composed a song about loss and return, but I also obtained a chunk of the fallen tree, as well as a cedar shingle from the reroofing, and turned them into an ukulele. The result is an obituary for the banyan that, lyrically and physically, keeps the tree present. While it no longer provides shade and shelter, it, like the dispersed myna birds, hasn’t lost its voice.
3. “Kaho‘olawe.” When I moved to Honolulu 20 years ago, I got a job as an Americorps volunteer in a homeless shelter. . One year, the fundraising office tried a mail solicitation, and one of the response forms came back with an anonymous handwritten note that read, “I’ll give you folks money if you use it to ship them [the homeless] all to Kaho‘olawe. Get rid of those bums!” Kaho‘olawe is a sacred island in the Hawaiian chain that was requisitioned by the US military and defaced for decades as a bombing range. The song’s chorus echoes this draconian call to “send them away.”
The idea that there is an “away” that we can send unwanted people (or things) to is an unfortunately persistent and utterly false trope. Exile, disposal, and scapegoating are convenient actions in that they prevent us from reflection, from dealing with systemic issues, and from constructive, compassionate, and collective action.
For this song, I salvaged a cheaply made trinket ukulele. This one I found on the beach in Waikiki; the glue holding down the bridge and fretboard had become soft in the afternoon sun. It had been appreciated maybe for a hot minute, and then tossed aside. To help it find its voice again, I fitted it with bamboo and scrap wood to make a neck and tightened fishing line strings with tuning pegs made from chopsticks. The “vio-lele” was then layered over 8 tracks for a full chamber ensemble sound.
Benjamin Fairfield served as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Karen village in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and received his MA and PhD in ethnomusicology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He founded the Thai Ensemble at UH (MUS311), where his students create their own instruments from repurposed rubbish found on campus, and has developed the course into an illustrated children's book that is forthcoming with UH Press (Fall 2025). His ongoing projects can be viewed at his website, www.kanikaopala.com.
