ᎦᎵᎡᎵ ᏥᏕᎾᎸ, O Johnette Makamaeakahaio'kaho'oponoponookapunahelekupuo'kaaina Martin ko'u inoa. No Makawao koʻu ahupuaʻa a o Hāmākuapoko, Maui mai au. Noho wau i Kololako (Colorado). As an ᏣᎳᎩ and Kanaka Maoli, cis-gendered, heterosexual woman and musicologist, Johnette’s research interests range from film music to representation, misinformation, and identity in Indigenous music cultures, particularly of the Americas and Polynesia. Born and raised in Hawai’i Nei, she grew up immersed in traditional Native Hawaiian practices, once denied to her ancestors. Being a musicologist is a passion that intensifies with her accomplishments in the scholarship and with the guidance of her fellow scholars and professors: past, present, and future. She started her collegiate music education with the goal of returning to her community to give back in the form of teaching academic art music. To this day, Johnette still aspires to contribute to her community as her kuleana or responsibility through teaching music and culture, but now including her Native Hawaiian and Cherokee cultures into the conversation of American Musicology. Her goals of inclusivity stretch from ethnic identity to gender, sexuality, and spiritual identity, i.e., the 2-spirited individual, pre-, and post-colonization. Johnette’s work also includes South Korean film music and pansori (South Korean folk music) to be featured in the Music and the Moving Image Journal as well as Mariachi vocals and pedagogy.
As an undergraduate and a graduate master’s student, Johnette attended the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, successfully accumulating a BA in Music Education: Secondary Instrumental on French classical saxophone and an MA in (Film) Musicology, respectively, while volunteering for Nā Pua No’eau and Kamehameha Schools to actively participate in the cultural education of Native Hawaiian children. In her master’s program, she completed and defended her thesis with respect to feminism and film musicology, “Musical Aesthetics in Alex North’s Score for The Bad Seed.” Johnette has most recently worked as a teacher of Native Hawaiian culture at Mid-Pacific Institute, a private college prepatory K-12 school in Mānoa, Hawai’i. Johnette is currently in the Ph.D. Musicology program at the University of Colorado – Boulder and works in the Norlin Library / American Music Research Center music archives. She is also the Director of the CU Boulder Latin American Music Ensemble, performing repertoire from all over Latin America including Ranchera from Mexico to Quechua folk songs from Peru. Johnette recently returned from a trip to Aotearoa New Zealand and will soon return to continue her ethnographic work on Māori ceremony in New Zealand society and cinema - a part of her dissertation work.
ᏙᏓᏓᎪᎲᎢ. No ka lāhui.