Colin McPhee was a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 and musicologist

Musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music. The word is used in narrow, broad and intermediate senses. In the narrow sense, musicology is confined to the music history of Western culture...

. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali

Bali

Bali is an Indonesian island located in the westernmost end of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east...

, and for the quality of that work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before such world music

World music

World music is a term with widely varying definitions, often encompassing music which is primarily identified as another genre. This is evidenced by world music definitions such as "all of the music in the world" or "somebody else's local music"...

–based compositions became widespread.

Chronology

McPhee was born in Montreal

Montreal

Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...

. He studied with the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse

Edgard Varèse

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse, , whose name was also spelled Edgar Varèse , was an innovative French-born composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States....

 before marrying Jane Belo, a disciple of Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead

Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....

, in 1931. He was involved in the circle of experimental composers known as the "ultra-modernists" and was among those—along with the group's leader, Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell

Henry Cowell was an American composer, music theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. His contribution to the world of music was summed up by Virgil Thomson, writing in the early 1950s:...

, John Becker, and Cowell protégé Lou Harrison

Lou Harrison

Lou Silver Harrison was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 – February 2, 2003) was an American composer. He was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K. P. H. Notoprojo Lou Silver Harrison...

—particularly interested in what would later become known as "world music." McPhee is said to have first encountered Balinese music

Music of Bali

Bali is an Indonesian island that shares in the gamelan and various other Indonesian musical styles. Bali, however, has its own techniques and styles, including kecak, a form of singing that imitates the sound of monkeys...

 while listening to a record in New York City. He and his wife moved to Bali together for Belo's anthropological work. Once there McPhee became so interested in the music that he studied, built, and wrote extensively about the gamelan

Gamelan

A gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included....

s. McPhee, who was gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

, divorced Belo in 1939. In the early 1940s he lived in a large brownstone in Brooklyn, which he shared with Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein

Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...

 and Benjamin Britten

Benjamin Britten

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...

, among others.

In 1942 he arranged Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge

Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge

Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, Op. 10, is a work for string orchestra by Benjamin Britten. It was written in 1937 at the request of Boyd Neel, who conducted his orchestra at the premiere of the work at that year's Salzburg Festival. It was the work that brought Britten to international...

, a work for string orchestra, for two pianos, to be used for Lew Christensen

Lew Christensen

Lewellyn Farr "Lew" Christensen was a ballet dancer, choreographer and director for many companies. He was largely associated with George Balanchine and the San Francisco Ballet, which he directed from 1952–1984...

's ballet Jinx.

McPhee was responsible for introducing Britten to the Balinese music that influenced such works by the British composer as The Prince of the Pagodas, Curlew River

Curlew River

Curlew River — A Parable for Church Performance is the first of three Church Parables by Benjamin Britten. The work is based on the Japanese noh play Sumidagawa of Juro Motomasa , which Britten saw during a visit to Japan and the Far East in early 1956...

, and Death in Venice

Death in Venice (opera)

Death in Venice is an opera in two acts by Benjamin Britten, his last. The opera is based on the novella Death in Venice by Thomas Mann. Myfanwy Piper wrote the English libretto. It was first performed at Snape Maltings near Aldeburgh, England on 16 June 1973.The astringent score is marked by some...

. Later in the decade, McPhee fell into an alcohol-fueled depression, but began to write music again during the 1950s. He became professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1958 and was also a respected jazz critic. He died in Los Angeles

Los Ángeles

Los Ángeles is the capital of the province of Biobío, in the commune of the same name, in Region VIII , in the center-south of Chile. It is located between the Laja and Biobío rivers. The population is 123,445 inhabitants...

.

On June 26 and 27, 2009, an opera about McPhee's life by the American composer Evan Ziporyn

Evan Ziporyn

Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music and music for Balinese gamelans. He plays the clarinet, bass clarinet, saxophone, and metallophone, borrowing from classical music, avant-garde, and jazz...

, entitled A House in Bali, premiered at Puri Saraswati in Ubud

Ubud

Ubud is a town on the Indonesian island of Bali in Ubud District, located amongst rice paddies and steep ravines in the central foothills of the Gianyar regency...

, Bali.

Published works

McPhee's A House in Bali, the chronicle of his life there, is still considered a valuable introduction to Balinese culture. His posthumously published Music in Bali was the first comprehensive analysis of Balinese music published in English.

His best-known musical work is Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, composed and premiered in Mexico in 1936. Its title translates as "collection of percussion instruments," and it combines Balinese and traditional Western musical elements. It is scored for Western orchestra but, in McPhee's description, the core of the ensemble is a "'nuclear gamelan' composed of two pianos, celesta

Celesta

The celesta or celeste is a struck idiophone operated by a keyboard. Its appearance is similar to that of an upright piano or of a large wooden music box . The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal plates suspended over wooden resonators...

, xylophone, marimba

Marimba

The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family. It consists of a set of wooden keys or bars with resonators. The bars are struck with mallets to produce musical tones. The keys are arranged as those of a piano, with the accidentals raised vertically and overlapping the natural keys ...

, and glockenspiel

Glockenspiel

A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...

," giving it a highly percussive balance of sound. The orchestra is augmented by two Balinese gongs and cymbals. The work is in three movements: "Ostinatos," a flute-inspired "Nocturne," and a syncopated "Finale." Some of the themes in it derive from Balinese folk sources.

• Angkloeng gamelans in Bali. (1937?)
• Balinese wajang koelit and its music. (1936?, 1981) ISBN 0404167659
• Children and music in Bali. (1938) Publisher: Overdruk Uit Djawa
• Club of small men : a children’s tale from Bali. (2002) ISBN 0794600743
• House in Bali. (1980) ISBN 0404167667
• Music in Bali: a study in form and instrumental organization in Balinese orchestral music. (1966, 1976) ISBN 0306707780
• Transitions for orchestra. (1954)

External links

• UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive including a slideshow and movies about Colin McPhee
• Colin McPhee - East collides with West
• Colin McPhee's entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia
• Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol Oja
• Walter Spies still used to receive guests at his house in Iseh, including the Austrian novelist, Vicki Baum: musician, Colin McPhee...

Listening

• Portrait of Composer Colin McPhee by Charles Amirkhanian (November 5, 1980)