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Colin McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan, part I (1936)

From the album Tabuh-Tabuhan

The Canadian composer Colin McPhee was born in Montreal in 1900.  He lived in New York in the late 1920s, where he was actively involved in the city’s thriving scene for modern music; McPhee consorted during this time with the circle of American composers known as the “ultra-modernists,” comprising among others Dane Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford Seeger.  It was around this time that he was exposed to a recording of Balinese gamelan music.

From 1931 to 1938, McPhee lived in Bali, where his wife, Jane Belo, was conducting anthropological research.  During this time, McPhee undertook a thorough study of the musical traditions of the island.  His book Music in Bali, published only after his death in 1964, was a groundbreaking study in the fledgling discipline of ethnomusicology and is still seen as a crucial reference work on its topic.

McPhee’s 1936 composition Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, premiered in Mexico City under the baton of Carlos Chávez, represents one of the earliest attempts for forge a genuine syncretism of “classical” and “world” music traditions, a trend that would become one of the dominant tendencies in the later 20th century, with results ranging from fascinating to unfortunate. Tabuh-Tabuhan, scored for a conventional orchestra plus what McPhee called a “nuclear gamelan” (two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba glockenspiel, and two Balinese gongs) goes beyond mere exoticism to seek a sincere fusion of disparate musical traditions.  The work also highlights the link between compositional appropriations of non-Western musical styles and the emergence of minimalism, which McPhee’s composition anticipates by some 30 years.

January 13, 2011, 4:40pm