Grove Koger
Chances are you’ve never heard of Colin McPhee, but if that’s the case, you have an aural treat in store.
Born in Montréal, Canada, in 1900, McPhee studied at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute, where one of his professors was Edgard Varèse. The avant-garde composer would play an important role in McPhee’s development, but more important still was McPhee’s wife, Jane Belo, whose inherited wealth allowed the couple to travel.
McPhee and Belo visited Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies) in the 1930s and eventually settled in a village on the island of Bali. There they befriended a cosmopolitan group of dancers, composers, anthropologists (including Margaret Mead), and ethnologists drawn to the island’s rich culture. Belo herself concentrated on photographing and filming Balinese life, while her husband studied the island’s music, particularly the ensemble of largely percussive instruments known as the gamelan.
McPhee’s “discovery” of gamelan music, which is common throughout much of Indonesia, was decisive. Before visiting Bali, he had been fortunate enough to hear a recording of a typical gamelan piece. As he later wrote of the experience, “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.… I couldn’t imagine what type of a culture could produce music like that. This was nothing that I had ever been taught to think could be music, and yet these were sounds that always seemed to have been in my own mind.” Now, on Bali, he attended a gamelan concert for the first time, and in time learned to play some of its instruments.
Thanks to YouTube, you can listen to authentic gamelan performances here and here. And for a sample of McPhee’s gamelan-influenced music, you can listen to his Tabuh-Tabuhan for 2 pianos & orchestra here. According to YouTube user Gwan Go, the recording is illustrated with the works of Belgian painter Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès, “who lived in Bali from 1931 to 1957 and who married a Balinese dancer. After his death she donated his paintings to the Indonesian government, which declared their house in Sanur a museum dedicated to the paintings.”
Now that you know the context, I urge you to sit back, relax, and immerse yourself in the flow of these sonorous, sensual works.
The photograph of gamelan performers in Java was taken by Gunawan Kartapranata, and the map of Bali was created by Sadalmelik; both are reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. The portrait of McPhee is by Carl Van Vechten and is reproduced from the Carl Van Vechten Photographs collection of the Library of Congress, while the striking painting you see above is by Le Mayeur.
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