Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

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. However, what isn’t so obvious is that the only Western element in the performance above is the piano, because this music is meant to be a work of ethnomusicology, reproducing actual gamelan performances.

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.