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.
I have a particular fondness for the second piece in this suite, Gambangan. Here is a 1941 recording performed by McPhee himself with the English composer Benjamin Britten:
Listening to Gambangan as a piece of classical music 🔗
What fascinates me is that, unlike the other two pieces in this suite, Gambangan doesn’t sound overtly Asian. It appears to have the familiar harmony that you expect in Western music - so familiar that I don’t think it would raise any eyebrows if it’s played in a hip coffee shop. It could easily be mistaken as a Philip Glass composition, except that it was published decades before Minimalism became prominent in America.
Below is another version which substitutes one of the pianos with a cello. Although the Dutch performers wore the traditional headdresses for Balinese musicians in this video (pretty cool!), their interpretation has a romanticism that seems very Western. The flowing emotion makes the performance an enjoyable listening experience for me, but I suspect that it’s not intended in the written music.
I found another version in an electronic music album which takes a more percussive approach. It is less classical music-like, but it reminds me of Aphex Twin’s experiments with mechanical acoustic music.
Listening to Gambangan as Balinese gamelan 🔗
In the notes of the published Balinese Ceremonial Music, McPhee presents himself as an ethnomusicologist rather than a composer. He explains the basic concepts of gamelan, the characteristics of the instruments, and the unique tuning system used in Bali. He even includes photos of the Balinese musicians in action. It is explicitly stated that the arrangement was based on an exact transcription of a performance of a gamelan ensemble. His piano arrangement was clearly meant to be a practical means to make Balinese music more accessible to Western societies of the 1940s.
However, in doing so, Colin McPhee couldn’t help introducing Western sounds to his transcription. The piano is obviously very different from gamelan instruments. I naturally want to listen to Gambangan performed by a gamelan. That turns out to be non-trivial. It took me months to discover this video:
It was recorded in a groundbreaking tour in 1953 (after the independence of Indonesia), during which the gamelan orchestra of the Pliatan village in Bali performed in the USA, UK, and continental Europe [1]. It is not the exact composition transcribed by McPhee, but you can clearly hear the haunting melody starting around 1:45.
Another fantastic rendition from the same tour can be heard in a track titled Gambangan (Ancient Melody) in the album Dancers of Bali (which is available from Arbiter Records). The “main melody” starts around 1:30.
Which Gambangan? 🔗
It took me a while to find a Balinese source, not because the title Gambangan is obscure. Rather, the trouble is that the title belongs to one of the most significant Balinese gamelan compositions of the 20th century. Created by I Wayan Lotring around 1926 for his own ensemble in Kuta, Bali, it was recorded in 1928 by a European record company, even before Colin McPhee moved to Bali. In fact, it was one of the recordings that inspired McPhee’s interest in gamelan in the first place.
Here is a later recording made in 1972, with Lotring himself playing the kendang (drum) in his 80’s.
The trouble is that it doesn’t sound like McPhee’s transcription. I can detect some vague similarities in the melodic contour between the two pieces, but the lyricism of McPhee’s version is replaced by an energetic jauntiness. Lotring’s Gambangan features prominent batèl sections (e.g., 0:45-1:09), where the main melody is replaced by rhythmic textures. It’s entirely missing in McPhee’s version.
Is it possible that McPhee transcribed a different Gambangan? It seems plausible to me. According to the liner notes of the 1953 recording (recall that this version has the melody in McPhee’s transcription):
Gambangan: One of many compositions for gamelan kebyar based on musical elements from the ancient gambang ensemble, the piece recorded here is still frequently performed and heard on radio programs. This piece is not to be confused with Wayan Lotring’s seminal work of the same name composed for his gamelan pelegongan in the 1920’s.
Another clue can be found in the notes that McPhee wrote in the published Balinese Ceremonial Music, in which he stated that
This arrangement is an exact transcription of a modern Balinese version, arranged by a certain Balinese musician for the gamelan gong, a large orchestra with gongs and some thirty players.
I Wayan Lotring’s music activities in the 30’s were closely associated with Gamelan Pelegongan, an ensemble form mainly developed for the legong dance. I don’t think he led a Gamelan Gong (a different type of ensemble) in that period of time, if ever.
The word gambang refers to Gamelan Gambang, an ancient ensemble used only in ceremonies of the cremation of the dead. Lotring was inspired by the Gamelan Gambang repertoire and composed a secular, modern interpretation. The title Gambangan means “in the style of Gambang”. In Music in Bali, Colin McPhee (who befriended Lotring in the 1930s) wrote
Created in 1926 for the Kuta gamelan, this composition caused a sensation among Balinese musicians because of its originality, and gambangan compositions gradually became part of many gamelan repertories.
Perhaps Colin McPhee’s piano Gambangan was based on a different composition “in the style of Gambang” that was modeled on Lotring’s seminal work. McPhee did transcribe Lotring’s Gambangan in full, but it wouldn’t be published until 1966. In Chapter 18 of Music in Bali, the piece is called Gending Pelugon (gambangan), because Pelugon is the Gambang melody that Lotring based his own composition on. I found the following video of Pelugon:
This is a modern performance. I don’t know if it’s close to the music that inspired Lotring, but it gives us rough ideas about what it might have sounded like.
Is this cultural appropriation? 🔗
I watched a YouTube video by composer David Bruce, who said that McPhee’s transcription of Gambangan was an act of cultural appropriation, because McPhee did not credit I Wayan Lotring as the composer.
Maybe this is because the music that he transcribed was, in fact, not by I Wayan Lotring? I don’t think Colin McPhee needed a lecture about recognizing Lotring as a composer, given that he devoted an entire chapter of his scholarly work Music in Bali to the analysis of one single composer - I Wayan Lotring. The name is mentioned numerous times in the book, as evidenced by this Index entry:
I Lotring, composer, xvii, 62, 152, 165, 197, 204, 227, 348; biographical sketch of, 308; compositional method of, 308-09; music described, 309-27.
Likewise, McPhee’s memoir A House in Bali (1947) has a chapter titled Lotring, in which he explicitly called Lotring a composer [2]. As I re-read that chapter, I was struck by how in awe McPhee was about Lotring as a composer. He didn’t see Lotring as a peer. He appeared to see him as one of the greatest composers ever. Not being a musicologist, I am in no position to judge, but I suspect that very few Western composers in the 1940s showed so much admiration for a non-Western peer [3].
Having said that, the issue of cultural appropriation does not go away so easily. I see several videos of McPhee’s piano transcriptions performed in music halls as regular concert pieces, showing little if any awareness of the cultural context of the Balinese source. This might be partially because the piano arrangements took away most of the otherworldliness of gamelan. This can only be helped by actual gamelan performances outside Indonesia.
Notes 🔗
[1] Interestingly, according to Music in Bali, Colin McPhee attended one of the concerts in New York and chatted with the Pliatan musicians.
[2] At 7:09 of David Bruce’s video, you can even see Colin McPhee, in his own words, calling Lotring a composer.
[3] Percy Grainger apparently called Duke Ellington “The greatest composer who ever lived” around the late 1940s or early 1950s.