Liliuokalani was educated at the Royal School in Honolulu, run by American Congregational missionaries, and the musical form she learned there shaped almost everything she wrote. Protestant missionaries had introduced four part harmony and the hymn, himeni in Hawaiian, and Hawaiian composers took the form and filled it with their own language, imagery and turns of phrase. She composed well over a hundred songs and chants in that idiom.
The best known outside Hawaii is Aloha Oe, written years before her reign, a farewell song whose melody has travelled far from any sense of who wrote it or why. The one that matters inside the Hawaiian churches is Ke Aloha o ka Haku, the Queen's Prayer, written in 1895 while she was confined in an upstairs room of Iolani Palace after the failed counter revolution. It asks for mercy on the one who is bound and offers forgiveness, and it is sung in Hawaiian congregations still.
Her hymnody sits inside a pattern that recurs wherever missions took root and were then outlived: the imported form is kept, the imported language is not, and within a generation the form is doing work its bringers did not intend. A prisoner of a Christian republic writing a Christian prayer in Hawaiian is a sharp instance of it, and the song's continued use in worship is the reason her name is heard weekly in places where the political history is not discussed at all.