Today I had several visitors to my condo for lunch — and the topic was Early Music! Specifically, Early Music Hawaii, an organization I’ve been involved with since 2010 when the Lutheran Church of Honolulu collaborated with EMH to present the Monteverdi Vespers in 2010.

Since then, I have been responsible for designing most of Early Music Hawaii’s promotional materials like postcards and flyers, and their programs. When my husband passed away in 2014, I was asked to replace him on the Board of Directors as Vice-President and Artistic Advisor.

Yesterday we had a board meeting when I suggested that the current president, Scott Fikse, meet two distinguished people in our community, Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert, a musicologist, and his wife, Elina G. Asato Hamilton, who teaches musicology at the University of Hawaii, both of whom moved to Hawaii in 2020 and with whom I’ve come to know as parishioners at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church where I am the organist.

Here’s Michael’s biography as found online:

Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert (Myke), is a co-founder of Artusi and from 2006–2024 was a (tenured) professor of music at M.I.T. where he taught classes in music theory, fundamentals, musicology, and computational music theory. He received his bachelor’s (summa cum laude), master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in music from Harvard University where he studied music theory with teachers including David Lewin and Kofi Agawu, composition with Mario Davidovsky and Judith Weir, and musicology with Thomas Forrest Kelly and Christoph Wolff, among others. He is the creator of “music21”, the leading computational library for analyzing music and is an expert in medieval and minimalist music. At MIT, Michael won the top institute awards for teaching (in general) and for teaching with technology. In 2024, he left M.I.T. to work full-time on Artusi and to be with his wife Elina, who is a music professor at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa (Honolulu).

Dr. Elina G. Asato Hamilton is a historical musicologist whose primary research area explores the history of music theory in fourteenth-century England. Her work on the intersection between theoretical texts and musical sources focuses on the interaction of theorists among themselves, with other musicians, and with main-stream thoughts in the Middle Ages. Her current project examines how shifts in thought transformed the way theorists in England discussed music, especially during the period when arguments for a consonant third were being established. Her book, Sweet Consonance: Musical Discourse in England, c. 1280–1370, is under contract with Liverpool University Press. Her research has been published in Studi musicali, Musica Disciplina, Notes, and in several edited volumes published by Routledge, Brepols, and Boydell & Brewer. 

In her secondary area of interest, Dr. Hamilton actively contributes to scholarly discussions on Western music in Japan. As a native speaker of Japanese, she aims to transcend the traditional divides between Ethnomusicology and Musicology by bringing a crucial yet underexplored global perspective to the twentieth-century expansion of classical music. She currently serves as co-chair of the Global East Asian Music Research Study Group (American Musicological Society) and is an editorial board member of the East Asian Journal of Popular Culture.

Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa, she taught courses at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.

Dr. Hamilton holds a Ph.D. and a master’s degree with Distinction from Bangor University in Wales, UK, where she organized several international conferences, including a conference on the discussion of innovative music notation (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council) and several workshops on the history of medieval music theory. While at Bangor University, Dr. Hamilton advocated for the promotion of new music and was festival manager for the annual Bangor New Music Festival. She received her BM in piano performance from Portland State University where she studied piano with Harold Gray (former director of Portland Piano International) and counterpoint and composition with Bryan Johanson.

Our discussion was lively from the outset and we came up with many ideas to make Early Music Hawaii more visible in our community to hopefully attract a bigger audience. Our programming is innovative and different from any other organization in town, and the level of musicianship is high. We hope to create a bridge between the University of Hawaii and Early Music Hawaii so that this exciting repertoire can be passed on to future generations.

In the meantime, I hope to see you tomorrow night, September 19, at the next Early Music Hawaii concert, which is called Portuguese Polyphony. I will be playing four settings of Ave Maris Stella by Manuel Coelho (1535-1635), in addition to a duet with Philip Gottling on tenor recorder and the last piece on the program with the whole ensemble, “Botay Fera” by Gaspar Fernandez (1566–1629).

The program is dedicated to the late Ian Capps, former President of Early Music Hawaii and host of “The Early Muse” on Hawaii Public Radio, who died just about one year ago, September 21, 2025.

Here’s what his colleague, Gene Schiller, wrote for the program:

Ian, as we all know, was well-traveled—he spoke of his years as a tour guide in Greece, where he learned the language; he spent years in Brazil, working as a reporter for Reuters, and so spoke fluent Portuguese as well.  But, I think he really found his niche here in the islands, speaking the language of Music, as both founder of Early Music Hawaii and as host of The Early Muse on Hawaii Public Radio. 

We tried, time and again, to woo him into the fold as a permanent all-purpose music host, a position for which he was ideally suited….we actually offered him real money (unusual for a non-profit organization), but he refused. “Once I start working for money,” he said, “all the fun will drain away; the joy will be gone.”

And, that about sums it up; Ian didn’t do it for money…he did it for love.  And how can you not love a guy like that. 

— Gene Schiller, Hawaii Public Radio