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INTRODUCTION

MUSICALLY SPEAKING, Colin McPhee is Bali’s bridge to the West. Although his reputation as a composer and writer is based on a comparatively small body of work—essentially three significant books about Bali and its music, four major musical works, and about forty transcriptions of Balinese music—McPhee’s influence on world music, and in particular in enlightening the world on the sacred gamelan of Bali, has been major. Without his pioneering voyage of discovery into the music of Bali, which resulted in years of intensive investigation and writing, Western music would have had no well-documented model for the sweeping new style of music, known as “Minimalism”, that appeared at the end of the twentieth century. McPhee provided that essential key.

During the twentieth century, most composers had faced the dilemma of following one of two styles of composition: the dense and complex “twelve-note” music, or the accessible neoclassical style. McPhee led the way to a new path—a middle way. A House in Bali is the story of his voyage of discovery, a story which he tells in a charming and subtle way. Into this book McPhee has poured not only his love of Bali and the Balinese and their musics, but in the process also informs us, without any hint of lecture, about a culture that has survived not only centuries of continuous living, but also the onslaught of the twentieth-century tourist invasion. In his sensitive prose, he rarely explains anything, but gives the context, and leaves it to the reader to make deductions.

Although the Dutch had occupied Indonesia for 400 years, the island of Bali itself was not successfully invaded until nearly a hundred years ago, in 1906. McPhee observed and recorded Balinese music a mere thirty years after this event, in the 1930s. He was thus able to capture a unique society in transition, almost in crisis, one could say. He does it with love, tenderness and laughter, and in the most graceful prose, all tinged with nostalgia and regret at a changing culture. His record of this change, beautifully chronicled in A House in Bali, is therefore of as great an importance to the Balinese heritage as it is to the West’s perception of the value of other cultures.

Born in Montreal, Canada, in 1900, of Canadian and Scottish parents, McPhee was raised in Toronto, where he had an early and standard music education. Here he studied under a pupil of the famous composer Franz Liszt. He became a virtuoso pianist and performed, to much acclaim, concerti with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He then moved to New York where he immersed himself in the “New Music” scene and began to compose seriously. He had a special interest in jazz, and learned to play it well enough to perform in New York nightclubs. He regularly visited Harlem to listen to its music and its singers, among them Billy Holiday. At this time, Latin American and Cuban music, in addition to jazz, were all having a major impact on Western music in Europe as well as in America. It was during this period that McPhee adopted American citizenship.

In late 1926, McPhee went to Paris to further study composition, as did so many American composers in the 1920s. Back in New York, in 1929, he, together with the budding anthropologist Jane Belo, was introduced to gamelan by way of early gramophone recordings at an exotic dinner party on Manhattan’s East Side. In them, McPhee recognized the music sounds of his dreams. These were rare recordings (now available on CD, largely due to the discovery of McPhee’s personal collection) made by the European companies Odeon and Beka in 1928. Although about 48 double-sided disks had been issued, of which McPhee heard perhaps nine or ten, in those days they were made on fragile shellac, at 78 rpm. That meant about 27 minutes of music. It was enough, however, to rivet his attention. Here was a music that was complex, as energized as jazz, and with a fascinating rhythm.

In Paris again, in 1930, McPhee met the Mexican artist and traveler Miguel Covarrubius, and his wife Rose, who had just arrived from Bali. They further fueled his interest in Bali. Here, too, McPhee heard Balinese gamelan live, for the first time, performed at the Colonial Exhibition by a group of Balinese dancers and musicians from the village of Peliatan, led by the great Balinese musician Anak Agung Gedé Ngurah Mandera. It was to change his life forever. The gamelan music of Bali became an obsessive passion for McPhee, totally permeating his musical life.

Within months of meeting the wealthy Jane Belo, she and McPhee married, and together, in 1931, they enthusiastically set out for Bali. With the aid of the extraordinarily talented painter/musician Walter Spies, who had been resident on the island for some years, they soon built a working kampong—a collection of wooden structures—in the adjacent village of Sayan. McPhee’s music pavilion was built on a ridge with a spectacular view down to the river Ayung.

McPhee and his wife lived in Sayan on and off until the approach of the Second World War. In his music pavilion, McPhee proceeded to make an intense study of the complex music of the Balinese gamelan, so different from that of Java. He developed an intimate knowledge of all the musical genres of Bali, documenting them in Western notation, one of the first composer musicians to do this. Together with I Made Lebah (1903-98)—musician, drummer, driver and friend—McPhee scoured the island’s palaces, temples and remote villages, listening to and studying the various musics still to be found there, and documenting them on paper, in notes and notation, and in photographs and film (tape recorders not yet being invented and available until after the war!). McPhee, sometimes with his wife and sometimes without, also traveled widely in Java, and then further afield, to Cambodia, Thailand,Vietnam, China and Japan, experiencing at first hand the complex as well as the simple music of non-Western cultures.

Henry Cowell, his friend and mentor, and one of the generation of talented young composers working in New York at this time, noted that while he himself stayed at home and listened to recordings, Colin McPhee actually went to hear these musics at first hand. His wife Jane also undertook various projects in Bali, in particular a study of trance. She was to publish articles and books on her research. McPhee never alluded to his wife in his books as he believed that the introduction of a domestic situation would cloud the impact of his story.

Fortunately for Belo, and for McPhee, the young American anthropologist Margaret Mead and her British husband Gregory Bateson arrived in Bali at this time, where they began a long and painstaking research into the lives of Balinese hill people. Their friendship and professional expertise assisted each other. Mead went on to become a famous international figure, and was to encourage McPhee’s interest in Balinese music all his life.

Both McPhee and Spies feared that the intense culture and the arts of Bali were headed for decline because of a lack of sponsorship. Previously, the custodianship of the arts and culture of Bali had rested in the hands of the provincial aristocracy, in the massive palaces and, of course, in the thousands of Hindu Dharma temples present in every village. Neither McPhee nor Spies would have foreseen the overwhelming effect of mass tourism that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Tourism became the next great wave of sponsorship. However, it came at a great price. That price included a startlingly reduced repertoire, which now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, consists mostly of a small collection of the most popular works, truncated for the limited attention span—and available time—of international tourists.

Dance is inseparable from music in Bali. McPhee saw this, and took a great interest in the symbiosis of dance. He discovered a huge talent in one of his small houseboys, Sampih, who was part of a noisy group of brown dolphin children who liked to swim in the river below McPhee’s house. One day Sampih saved McPhee from almost certain drowning during a flash flood which coursed down the river Ayung from the mountains beyond, snaking under McPhee’s house. McPhee had been caught unawares, but Sampih knew all the river’s boulders and snags and was able to guide him back to safety. Seeing the great Tuan safely on shore, Sampih vanished in a flash of shyness and was not seen for a week.

McPhee brought in some of the best dance teachers for Sampih and soon he became a star in his own right, eventually touring in America and in Europe in 1952 with the top gamelan group from Peliatan, the neighboring village to Ubud, which was rapidly becoming the center of the arts in Bali. When Sampih was murdered in Bali in 1954, McPhee was devastated.

At the end of 1935, McPhee took a break from Bali, traveling to Mexico where he finished composing a work based on Balinese music. Written for a standard Western symphony orchestra, but with the addition of an enlarged percussion section, it was commissioned and conducted by Carlos Chavez and played by the Mexico Symphony Orchestra. Years later it was repeated in New York, conducted by Leopold Stokowski. Called Tabuh Tabuhan, the work is available in several performances on CD.

McPhee returned to Bali at the end of 1936, and renewed his studies on Balinese music, sensing that time was running out for him. By the end of 1938, with the threat of war looming, the expatriate community of artists began to evacuate, and on Christmas Day 1938, McPhee left Bali for America, never to return. His wife, from whom he was recently divorced, had left Bali many months before. His major work had been done. His documentation and comprehensive notes, photographs, film, notations of music, all were in his trunks on the ship that took him back to New York via the Cape of Good Hope.

To produce a book from his field work was to take another twenty-five years of labor. He became obsessed with it, finding it hard to relinquish to a publisher. A perfectionist, he drove his editor to despair. The outcome, a musicological masterpiece called Music in Bali, was eventually published posthumously by Yale University Press in 1966. Although it is long out of print, Music in Bali remains the classic work on Balinese music, and is the leading reference work for Balinese musicians, composers, dancers and choreographers. Western composers such as Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Peter Sculthorpe, are all deeply indebted to McPhee’s love for, and scholarship on, Balinese music.

What happened to Colin McPhee after he returned to New York? There is where A House in Bali ends. When McPhee left Bali, Walter Spies looked after the house and its gamelan instruments until he was imprisoned by the Dutch authorities as a German citizen. He subsequently lost his life on a prisoner-of-war ship traveling from Sumatra to Ceylon when it was bombed by a Japanese warplane. Everyone on it perished. Theo Meier, the Belgian painter and another long-time resident in Bali, then stayed in the McPhee house after war was declared in Europe.

The next occupant was the legendary Hungarian pianist Lili Kraus. On a world concert tour, and stranded in Jakarta by the war, she fled to Bali, and through her network of artist friends soon came to live in the village of Sayan, in McPhee’s house. Amazingly, McPhee’s concert grand Steinway piano, which his wife had bought for him for his music pavilion, was still there. In Bali, Lili Kraus would present to local expatriates a weekly recital of Mozart and Schubert, before she, in turn, was incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp. When she was finally released, she resumed her world concert tour, many claimed as an even greater performer of the world’s great Western classics.

In New York in the climate of a world war, few were interested in the exotic music of Bali. Nonetheless, McPhee set to and wrote his few articles about Bali, and worked on his groundbreaking books. First of all, there was A House in Bali, first published in 1947, although copyrighted by the author in 1944. It received excellent reviews but sold limited copies. Next came the charming children’s book, A Club of Small Men (1948), . . . “this innocent tale . . .”, as he wrote in his dedication to Peggy Glanville-Hicks, his friend and kind of amanuensis. His monumental tome, Music if Bali, as noted above, was finally published in 1966. Besides his musical talents, McPhee was an excellent photographer, as seen in A House in Bali. His collection of photographs, field notes, papers and correspondence, and recordings of Balinese music, are lodged at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

McPhee became tangential to mainstream music in America. He led a frugal life, and was subject to bouts of self-destructive depression and alcoholism. He desperately missed Bali, its way of life, his strong friendships with his group of Balinese musicians, and the daily experience of a music, the mysteries of which he had so painstakingly unraveled for himself and, through his books, the world. His precarious existence did not change until the doyen of American ethnomusicologists, Mantle Hood, offered him a salaried position in 1960 at the recently created Music Department at UCLA. By this time, he had been commissioned for the first time and had composed his Symphony No. 2 (1957) and a work called Nocturne (1958), now both recorded, and both expressing the quintessence of nostalgia for Bali, his dream country. He died in California in 1964 of cirrhosis of the liver.

During the 1990s, McPhee’s musical achievements began to be acknowledged, and today his position in world music is assured. In America and Europe, there are now many hundreds of Balinese gamelans being studied and performed on by non-Balinese musicians. Many composers have written for the gamelan or used a knowledge of gamelan to inform their work for Western instruments. Of McPhee’s house in the kampong in Sayan, the setting for A House in Bali, nothing remains except the remnants of the original foundations and his music studio, which has long been renovated. Still extant are some of the original instruments of The Club if Small Men, and indeed, several of the small men themselves, now great-grandfathers in their seventies.

JAMES MURDOCH

Ubud, Bali

January 2002