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.

Many years ago, I got myself Bill Frisell: An Anthology - a collection of music written by guitarist Bill Frisell. I can’t really read music, so to me, it had been a coded book, which I keep in my collection as an object of curiosity. But there is something fascinating about it that even a non-musician can feel. It just seems … profound. What amazes me about Bill Frisell’s written music is that each piece is just a couple of pages of simple notes and chords. Many of them are so basic that they look like they belong in a children’s piano book.

One music album that I used to play a lot of was called Night of Short Lives. It was published in the 90’s under the artist name Frame Cut Frame. It’s very hard to describe what kind of music it was. The publisher called it “unclassical music”, because the music had the classical texture, but not the classical form. The CD was just one of those random things that I had. I don’t remember why I had it. I had no idea who made it or why it was made. It was published by an independent Belgian label called SubRosa so I had assumed that it’s European.