A HOUSE IN BALI
A
HOUSE
IN
BALI
Colin McPhee
With an Introduction by
James Murdoch
Paperback edition published with the permission of
the Colin McPhee Estate by Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd, 2000
Copyright © Colin McPhee 1944, 1945, 1947
Introduction © James Murdoch, 2002
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
First published in 1947 by Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, 1947
First Periplus edition, 2000
Second printing, with an Introduction, 2002
ISBN 978-962-593-629-1
ISBN 978-1-4629-1752-5 (ebook)
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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.