Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

I have been listening to Balinese gamelan records. Not just any gamelan records — I was looking for a particular variety known as gamelan semar pegulingan. The sound of semar pegulingan is delicate and gentle — if the aggressive gong kebyar is the bebop of gamelan, semar pegulingan is its cool jazz. I didn’t want to listen to this music just as pleasant sounds playing in the background, so I decided to dig into the historical context of these records. What I’ve learned relates to some of the most dramatic moments in the history of Bali, so I think it’s worthy to tell the stories here.

In the 1994 novel The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco, a modern editor studied fragmented manuscripts of uncertain origin (possibly recovered by Abel Tasman in his 1642 expedition of the South Pacific) and attempted to reconstruct the history of a 17th century Italian nobleman stranded on a mysterious deserted ship. The nobleman was likely a spy of Cardinal Mazarin — and, remarkably, may have spotted a quokka on what is now Rottnest Island, Western Australia, decades before the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh made landfall there. The other novel is Mason & Dixon, published in the same decade. In it, a clergyman of questionable denomination was stranded at his sister’s house in 18th-century Philadelphia over Christmas and resorted to telling tall tales to entertain the unruly children — and occasionally the adults. He did this by recounting the history of the two British astronomers who charted the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland in colonial America. The good Father might or might not have been a member of Mason and Dixon’s legendary 1763–1767 expedition and most certainly had fabricated a lot of his stories.

Spoiler alert This post is my thoughts on the puzzle design in Steve Meretzky’s 1990 adventure game Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls. It is NOT a spoiler-free review. If you haven’t played the game, stop right here. It’s a game worthy of playing, so you should enjoy it yourself. Reading further will absolutely spoil the fun for you. Jimmy Maher at the Digital Antiquarian has written about the historical context of this game in great detail, so I won’t repeat it here. Briefly, Spellcasting 101 was game designer Steve Meretzky’s first published game after the demise of Infocom. Although billed as a graphical adventure game, it is an Infocom-style text adventure through and through. The graphics are worthless add-ons. During my 2025 holidays, I decided to play this game instead of Meretzky’s Infocom-era oeuvre, because I’m not quite ready to tackle the proper Infocom catalog yet.

I have been fascinated by Balinese Ceremonial Music - a suite of three piano compositions published by composer and musicologist Colin McPhee in 1940. What makes these compositions so interesting is that they seem to inhabit the twilight zone at the intersection of two different worlds. On one hand, they work perfectly well in classical music concerts: The melodies do sound exotic at times, but they don’t appear to be too unexpected in a modern concert hall. Every time I listen to this music, I can’t help feeling it was composed by Colin McPhee himself.

Colin McPhee (1900-1964), a Canadian composer and musicologist who lived in Bali in the 1930s, was one of the first Western scholars who study Balinese gamelan as a research topic. He was forced to leave Bali in 1938 at the onset of WW2, and spent the next 20+ years working on Music in Bali - a monumental book in ethnomusicology published posthumously in 1966. In his memoir A House in Bali, McPhee wrote that during his life in Bali, he delighted (or maybe amused?) his Javaese and Balinese friends with a couple of informal concerts where he performed piano arrangements of gamelan music. Three of these piano pieces were published in 1940 under the title Balinese Ceremonial Music. They caught the attention of Béla Bartók, who was among the first to perform them in public.