Colin McPhee

Through nearly a decade of adventures and explorations in the eastern world, Colin McPhee

brought back to the western world a sound that composers have never heard before. The

catalyst for his passionate excursion was merely a recording on gramophone made in Bali of

"the clear, metallic sounds of the music were like the stirring of a thousand bells, delicate,

confused, with a sensuous charm, a mystery that was quite overpowering.” This recording of

Balinese gamelan music had brought on a mystery that McPhee was to uncover and ultimately

through which he defines the focus of his musical contribution to the world.

Colin McPhee was born in Montreal on March 15, 1901 and grew up in Toronto. Though

already a successful composer in Canada, having his first Piano Concerto performed with

Toronto's New Symphony Orchestra, he decided to escape the Victorian sensibility and moved

away after graduating and studying at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, to study

composition with Paul Le Flem and piano with Isidor Phillip in Paris. He also made certain not to

study with Nadia Boulanger with whom many contemporary composers studied. Among them

were names such as Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Elliot Carter, David Diamond, and

Phillip Glass. McPhee's strong personality is already seen through his reluctance to be taught

under conventional methods as Boulanger's.

In 1926 Colin McPhee moved from Paris to New York, studying with Edgar Varese (1883-1965),

the pioneer of electronic music who wrote Poeme Electronique in 1958, a work commissioned

for a sound and light show in Brussels. During his studies with Varese, McPhee was one of the
young North Americans to be chosen to have his compositions performed by Varese's

International Composer's Guild, a group founded in 1921 dedicated to perform American and

European new music.

During these early years of his compositional output, few has survived due to the composer's

own destruction of his music (including his Toronto Piano Concerto) and deliberate

discreetness about his personal writings and letters. Of more than 35 compositions he wrote

before he was 25, only two survived, one of which is the "Invention for Piano" of 1926.

His involvement with contemporary composers such as Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland,

and Edgar Varese among others during the 1920s has influenced him. Like many

composers at that time, McPhee's compositions were in the style of neoclassicism.

One of the works that survived was published by Henry Cowell in his musical periodical

"New Music" in 1930 named "Invention" for piano. While this piece was composed in

New York, it reflects McPhee's training in Toronto, Baltimore, and Paris. The composer

experiments with neo-classicism, using a classical (in this case, Baroque) form mixed

with atonal harmonies. He uses the D major diatonic scale in this case, and deliberately alters

the tonal center by employing strong dissonant intervals such as 2 nds, 7ths, 9ths, and

tritones occurring all on the downbeats of the measure, creating a resonant clash.

Within a very tightly constructed two-part writing, McPhee uses imitative counterpoint

technique and drives the piece with a fast tempo (marked Vivace) yet he distinctly

disrupts the rhythmic flow by changing meters and using accents on irregular beats to
throw off the symmetrical unity that if Bach himself heard it he would have to rethink his

Art of the Fugue.

This work of Colin McPhee bears a small taste of what Stravinsky was about to write two

years later with his Piano Sonata which resembles much of the invention in the areas of

dissonant harmony, precise rhythm, and changing meter. Other composers of McPhee's

generation also had similar tendencies, such as Virgil Thomson's Five Inventions,

Poulenc's Suite in C, and Villa Lobos' Cirandinhas, all of which display similarities to

Colin McPhee's daring and modem compositional style.

Another work that was composed during the New York years was his "Concerto for

Piano with Wind [Octette]". In this work, McPhee was able to amplify his tendencies of

a neo-classical idiom into a much bigger proportion simply because of the scope of the

work, the combination and diversity of instruments and harmonic vocabulary.

Again, with his mastery in contrapuntal writing, he carefully crafted the work with complex

rhythm and perpetual motion, employing disjunct rhythmic movements, polyrhythms and

ostinatos. Harmonically, he uses a consistent idiom which includes the use of the 11th and 13 th

chord that stems from the same root, and altering the modes within the triads to juxtapose

among the same tonic creating a resemblance of tonal chords yet supplying a distinct

dissonance. With the percussive nature of the piano combined with the wind octet, McPhee

alternated the role of the piano as a solo instrument, exchanging dialogues with the winds

while in other passages he cast the piano as a supporting member of the orchestra hammering

out ostinatos against the instruments.

branches of very different characteristics. With the trend of abandoning tonality in the early

1900's, Faure, Debussy, Ravel and other impressionists ventured to create strings of unresolved

dominants while the neoclassicists like Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Copland became

retrogressively interested in forms and structure while progressively in different elements of

music. Others, like Bartok, Liszt and Prokofiev emerged boldly into the nationalistic scene, each

integrating lyrical Bohemian or peasantry Hungarian folk tunes or magnificent revitalized

rhythms and innovative harmonic language into their music. McPhee, with a daring courage

and thirst to expand the sound palette to our existing instruments, decided to submerse

himself into a culture that was inspired by a sound that captured his musical interest for the

next decade of his life. Bali was his next destination in his music journey.

It was then when fate had brought him and his soon-to-be wife together. Jane Belo, an

anthropologist who shared similar passions, was the fuel and spark for McPhee's excursion.

Belo was a student at Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Sorbonne. She focused on psychology but was

also found interest in anthropology through her work with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at

Barnard. Her interest in anthropology also led her to become fascinated with non-Western

cultures and was inspired to visit the Middle East. Belo and McPhee began an intense

relationship after meeting in New York in 1928. Belo decided to depart from her husband

George Biddle, a painter with whom she traveled to Tahiti and cohabited. A child of a wealthy

Texan family, she was able to support McPhee financially for their trip to Bali, where they had
built a house to experience the rich traditions and gamelan-music filled island. They were

married on May 6, 1930.

While Belo worked on anthropological research here in Bali, gathering essays by Westerners

who worked on the island during the 1930s, McPhee began his musical renaissance. Balinese

music intrigued McPhee's intensive study since he already had an attraction to complex musical

textures, irregular ostinatos, and shifting rhythmic patterns.

With very little audio and recording equipment available to him in his time, McPhee had to

resort to transcribing and notating much of Balinese music himself. He was able to learn their

music intimately by living and traveling to remote regions of Bali and Java. McPhee worked

with local musicians, observing and watching their daily dances and ceremonies. "To try to

preserve in some form of record this period in Balinese music, while older styles and methods

survived, became my one desire. At that time, there was no adequate field equipment to be had

for recording such elaborate music as that of the Balinese gamelan, and I realized I must rely on

staff and [cypher] notation alone.”

Because the musical tradition was passed on orally alone, much of it depended on their daily

musical ceremonies and activities. To familiarize himself with an unwritten set of new music

theory, McPhee taught himself this "standardization" by working closely with musicians at his

home, at temples and at ceremonies. Writing a book called "Music in Bali", he surveyed music

that was performed in Balinese daily life, such as in village music clubs, temples, palaces, and at
plays and dances. Part two of his book described the actual musical instruments, scale systems,

tunings, and various different types of gamelan orchestras.

In trying to differentiate the intonation and scales of Balinese music and our western scales and

modes, McPhee described the tempered system with term "Cent". The tones of the scale are

determined by their vibrations per second and while Cent is equal to 1/100th of our

"semitone". Therefore, 50 Cents describes our quarter-tone, 100 cents our semi-tone, 150 a %

tone, and 200 a whole tone.

In "Music in Bali", McPhee does describe, however, that if a Balinese composer wished to write

down his music, he would use symbols which are derived from Balinese script. This system of

notation is limited, and can only capture the general melodic line and scale tones while leaving

out time values and durations of notes, very much like our own Gregorian notation of the 12 th

Century. Nonetheless, notation is not intended to be used during performances or rehearsals.

Only few musicians were trained to read such musical script and only for the purpose to refresh

the memory should a melody be forgotten from ancient changes and ceremonial music.

On an interlude to his journey in Bali, McPhee and Belo returned to the US in 1935 for

several reasons, two being the growing number of missionaries in Bali and high taxes

levied against Westerners. After returning to New York, McPhee was burning with

desire to test out his new ears and bring the sounds of Bali to the American crowd. In the

1935-1936 concert season, McPhee displayed three of his films of Balinese musicians
and his transcription of Balinese Music for two pianos. One of his most famous

contributions to the music repertoire is his "Tabuh-Tabuhan", written for two pianos and

orchestra. It is an imitation of Balinese gamelan and gongs, also subtitled "Toccata for

Orchestra and 2 Pianos". He stated that the sounds of the gamelan would not be possibly

be transcribed on one single piano. The premier of this piece in Mexico was a huge

success. The title itself is "a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms,

metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans and music essentially percussive." He also

announced that this piece is his most ambitious piece he had ever written.

It was a struggle for McPhee during the last few years before he left Bali to search for his own

voice in music. He had gone through methods of composing such as neoclassicism and folk-

inspired, but was never satisfied with his own work until Tabuh-Tabuhan. He described that

"The Absolute Music of Bali," "play[ed] a most important part in the life of the people." McPhee

found this fact a motivation to explorer gamelan music and investigate the differences between

traditional western music and Balinese practice. He created a bridge between the two worlds in

his masterpiece.

Tabuh-Tabuhan is an amalgamation of transcription and composition. It was written as a

celebration of Balinese gamelan music. Through this composition, we see Colin McPhee as both

a skilled composer and an ethnomusicologist. This three-movement concerto observes a

traditional form of fast-slow-fast. The way McPhee uses the transcriptions of Balinese melodies

is that he would use one melody per theme group, mixing in jazz elements, classical clear-cut
phrasings, and hypnotic, irregular ostinatos. After each theme group is stated, there is a reprise,

much like the sonata form and its recapitulation. The second movement has three

transcriptions and a return. It begins with a transcription of a Balinese flute melody, also using a

subtle ostinato on the two pianos below this quiet lyrical flute melody. It eventually builds up in

volume and seamlessly transforms into a modified version of the melody emerging from the

pianos taking over our attention. This second melody is a passage from a modem gamelan

piece, Kebiar Ding. The third section of this movement is a culmination of the flute and piano, a

melody from gamelan angklung. His skillful transcription of gamelan melodies onto western

instruments transforms the sounds of Balinese folk music into an imitated adaptive quality of

western instruments. "I tried composing light, percussive accompaniments for the piano,

choosing tones that would suggest gongs and other Balinese instruments ... Here, you might

say, the composer emerges somewhat, although remaining discreetly in the background." The

movement closes with the return of the melody used at the beginning called Lagu ardja. The

third movement, the very essence of this "toccata" has no reprise but a perpetual forward

upward motion with the pianos and the orchestra tuned as one entity instead of solo and

accompaniment, reflecting the qualities of a Balinese gamelan orchestra.

Various scales of Balinese and Javanese music were employed throughout this work. Two of

which are named pelog and slendro. McPhee mixes the usage of Balinese scales and traditional

western harmony by intertwining the transitions between various transcriptions of Balinese

melodies.
McPhee's fascination with the rhythmic complexities of Balinese music has earned him his

clever usage of it in this masterpiece, creating the accentuated dissonances derived from

eastern scales. "The oriental relies on rhythm to create dissonance; he is unconscious of it

melodically (or harmonically). Polyrhythm means dissonance."

While other contemporary American composers have also strived to look for non-Western

influence during this period, none has gone as far as McPhee in both his travels and his true

exoticism in music. While Tabuh-Tabuhan was a great success at its premier In Mexico City

under the direction of Carlos Chavez on September 4, 1936, the subsequent responses from

conductors such as Koussevitzky, Stokowski, Rodzinsky, and Iturbi were not as thriving. McPhee

soon became disappointed and unmotivated.

Though Bali was a place he had returned fall of 1936, McPhee never regained his original spark

and high spirits as before. After his return to New York in 1939, he became depressed and

alcoholic. He struggled to compose during the later years of his life and eventually moved to

California, accepting a post at UCLA, where he stayed until his death in 1964.

Though a virtually unknown composer to many of us, Colin McPhee survives through his legacy

by his compositions, his ethnomusicology, and his books that he wrote as a documentary of

Balinese gamelan music. Today, his music is still played in Europe and in Canada, his birthplace.

"It is a strange music, in its aura of legend, secrecy and taboo, in its
lovely
chiming tones, its organization, its endless repetition without the
slightest
change of nuance. It seems to revolve, gives the effect of something
suspended, spiritual or magical. . . There was none of the perfume and
sultriness of so much of the music in the East, for there is nothing
purer
than the bright clean sound of metal, cool and ringing and dissolving
in the
air. Nor was it personal and romantic, in the manner of our own
effusive
music, but rather, sound broken up into beautiful patterns. . . This, I
thought, is the way music was meant to be, blithe, transparent,
rejoicing the
soul with its eager rhythm and lively sound."

- Colin McPhee writing about Balinese gamelan music in his book Music in
Bali