In 1929 Colin McPhee, a classically trained pianist and composer, happened to hear some gramophone records that changed the course of his life. They were recordings of the gamelan orchestras of Bali, virtually unknown to western ears: ‘the clear, metallic sounds of the music were like the stirring of a thousand bells, delicate, confused, with a sensuous charm, a mystery that was quite overpowering.’

McPhee later said,

I couldn’t imagine what type of a culture could produce music like that. This was nothing that I had ever been taught to think could be music, and yet these were sounds that always seemed to have been in my own mind.

From that moment he lived for the day when he would see it played live. A year later with his new wife, the anthropologist Jane Belo (a former student of Margaret Mead), they embarked on their journey and arrived in Bali intending to stay six months but stayed for seven years.

First Impressions

In A House in Bali, McPhee’s enchanting account of his time in this fabled island, he describes entering a Chinese temple soon after arrival in the little port town of Buleleng, where he saw a live gamelan for the first time. A gamelan orchestra is a collection of tuned percussion instruments: metal gongs and xylophone-type instruments, cymbals struck by hammers or mallets, sometimes accompanied by flutes, and drums to register the beat.

With graceful and synchronised movements, the musicians in the temple played a piece called ‘The Sea of Honey’.

The Melody unrolled like some ancient chant, grave and metallic…seeming to fill the temple with faintly echoing sound.

Afterwards Sarda drove them to their destination on the other side of the island – over a mountain, through forests, past a volcanic crater, its inner wall covered with jungle, and down a long road toward a purple sea. They passed rice paddies, copulating horses, chanting women with offerings on their heads, and the occasional tottering, starving dog that would be knocked aside by the car with a thud. They reached Denpasar, Bali’s capital, which was then a rambling colonial settlement with a couple of streets of shops, surrounded by a shantytown.

Village Life

McPhee and his wife moved into a musty little village house in nearby Kedaton, with a deep verandah and a view of rice paddies and the sea. Each morning would begin with the aroma of frying coconut oil and sra, a putrid paste of shrimps that had been ground, dried and fermented underground. A pea-sized amount was sufficient to add a ‘racy, briny tang’, which McPhee soon found himself craving, ‘as an animal craves salt.’

The layout of their village was the typical square grid, with a network of roads and lanes. Houses were barely visible behind walls overhung with palms, breadfruit and frangipani trees bursting with ‘starry blossoms’. Toward the outskirts stood a collection of communal temples, for the ‘origins’, the village elders, the earth’s axis, and the rice goddess Sri. Past the graveyard stood the temple for the Dead, exquisitely carved, with its wall reliefs of animals, its ‘atmosphere of peace, silence and decay, of neglect and loving care.’ Religious ritual permeated daily activity; then as now, it was inseparable from cultural life and the people’s sense of meaning and connection.

Every three days while the women set up their stalls in the busy marketplace, the local men would gather under the banyan tree, idly chatting and appraising their fighting cockerels. As evening fell, they would move to the thatched hut where they kept their gamelan, and by a blaze of lamplight would play their silvery music until late into the night.

Visitors dropped by McPhee’s house at all hours to chat or just sit quietly. Among the gifts they brought were a monkey and a cockatoo that roamed the house and fought one another. On the two-tiered deck a whole etiquette developed around the seating arrangements for guests, according to caste.

A Teacher Arrives

Nyoman Kaler was one of the first visitors to the house. A shy, gentle man in his early thirties, he was one of the headmen of Kedaton, in charge of all three gamelans in the village.

He had been raised in one of the old royal courts as a dancer. These courts had been established by princes, religious scholars and warriors from the collapsing Hindu Majapahit Empire who fled Islamic influences that were sweeping Java in the 1520s. To the safe haven of Bali they brought their wives, concubines, soldiers, writers, craftsmen, actors and musicians. The princes became brilliant patrons of the arts which led to a flourishing of culture and religion in what became known as the Golden Age of Bali, when the royal courts rang with music.

But in 1916 the Dutch launched an offensive against Bali, the last remaining independent kingdom in Indonesia. Rather than submit to the humiliation of colonial subjugation, members of the royal families dressed in ceremonial white, together with hundreds of their followers – men, women and children – walked into the gunfire of the Dutch army. Their glittering kingdoms were destroyed and their patronage of the arts became a thing of the past. Now the pawnshops were crammed with royal treasures. Surviving princes would rumble into Denpasar in open Fords that were constantly breaking down by the roadside.

Yet in the villages music continued to thrive. McPhee became the first westerner to learn from Balinese masters and Nyoman Kaler was the first of a number of important teachers. He listened intently to Kaler’s own gamelan orchestra as it practiced regularly at the Temple of Origins, noticing that the music was neither personal nor romantic like the music of the west, ‘but rather, sound broken up into beautiful patterns.’ This was an utterly new musical language for him.

Although the music had originated in Java and, earlier still, in India and China, successive generations of Balinese have transformed it, quickening its rhythms and modifying the instruments. Pairs of instruments, tuned slightly differently, produce interference beats that symbolise for the Balinese the presence of their gods. The intricate interplay of notes and voices create a rich, delicately ornamented web, a ‘shimmering and pulsating sound’ in which no part is greater than the whole. Try listening to this mesmerising piece performed by the gamelan of the master Taman Sari. This is mostly an oral tradition, the musicians learning the intricate pieces by ear from teachers who have committed it to memory.

In return for his teaching, McPhee introduced Nyoman Kaler to western music but to him it sounded like an endless, complicated noise with no order. After listening to a waltz or sonata he would ask, ‘But where is the beat?’ The exception was Jazz, which he enjoyed immensely. He thought Louis Armstrong’s trumpet was fantastic, and found its rhythms close to his own tense and syncopated music.

A Temporary Farewell

Six months into their visit, McPhee and Belo’s visas had almost expired but the prospect of leaving made McPhee ‘infinitely depressed’. His last two weeks were spent feverishly recording, filming and documenting the Balinese musicians, their instruments and music. Packing all his material into a trunk, he felt he was ‘storing a folio of pressed flowers.’

In Paris McPhee could not get Bali out of his mind. Concert performances of new music that would once have delighted him now seemed ‘dull and intellectual’.

I thought of the sunny music I had listened to in the open air, among people who talked and laughed, hearing yet not hearing the musicians, but cheered and exhilarated by the sounds. Here, as I looked about me in the hall, I felt suddenly shut in, and I could hardly wait for the end of the concert.

Making an Impact

The call was too strong and one year later the couple returned to Bali. McPhee set out to compile the most complete record of its music possible. In the cool and peaceful hills close to Ubud, they built a house and garden in the village of Sayan, on the edge of the magnificent Ayung River Valley.

This time, McPhee gained a deeper understanding of the different genres of the music, and began work to stimulate the revival of semar pegulingan, an older style of gamelan from the seventeenth century that had almost disappeared. To his mind its sound was sweeter and more restrained than the more modern, ‘melodramatic’ gong kebyar.

The loss of royal patronage had come at a huge cost to music and dance and the great traditions had started to dwindle. Today sponsorship comes in the form of mass tourism, but at a price: repertoires are reduced to a handful of well worn pieces which are truncated for short attention spans.

McPhee could already sense the start of such changes. Boat loads of travellers arriving on Dutch liners began signalling the end of the island’s isolation, and he complained about the number of western people building houses in Bali. ‘Everyone wants to be Robinson Crusoe, and takes other footprints in the sand as personal insults,’ he said. His compulsive mission for preservation seemed increasingly ‘important and urgent’.

McPhee involved himself in many aspects of Balinese cultural life. He prevented a number of orchestras from breaking up by donating money for instruments and covering the cost of musicians’ travel to performances. He established his own gamelan and learned to play some of the instruments: ‘I knew the melodies by heart and as I played I felt both peace and exhilaration…’ And he discovered some extraordinarily talented musicians and dancers, on his travels to many parts of the island to research, film and document the various traditions.

Leaving Bali for the last time

McPhee and his wife divorced in 1938, probably on the grounds of his open homosexuality. Jane Belo is never mentioned in A House in Bali, which McPhee wrote nearly ten years after their divorce. But she had spent these years fruitfully studying children’s art and ceremonial life, particularly trance states, and made important scholastic contributions. See an article about Belo in American Anthropologist.

Belo had funded their years in Bali so their separation left McPhee impoverished. Homosexuality had always been tolerated on the island but as part of the Dutch East Indies, Bali had become a target for Nazi witch hunts. On Christmas day in 1938 McPhee was obliged to flee the island for New York, and never returned.

Musical contribution

In 1936, while on a break from Bali, McPhee composed a piece based on Balinese music that is regarded one of his most significant works. Tabuh-Tabuhan (meaning ‘percussive rhythms and sounds’) was commissioned by Carlos Chavez and premiered in Mexico City with a performance by the Mexico Symphony Orchestra. In this piece McPhee aimed to evoke the atmosphere of gamelan and its musical patterns using a western orchestra.

After Bali, McPhee moved back to New York and for a while lived in ‘February House’, a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. It was a communal home for creative strays, including poet W.H. Auden, novelist Carson McCullers, writers Paul and Jane Bowles, the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee and the then unknown British composer Benjamin Britten. The house was so named because many of them had birthdays in February.

McPhee shared his love of Balinese music with Britten, who was always looking for new sources of inspiration, and was highly receptive. McPhee had arranged for some of the gamelan music he had transcribed in Bali for two pianos, and together, they performed these pieces called Balinese Ceremonial Music several times in the US. Britten later performed them when he returned to London at the Wigmore Hall in 1944. McPhee and Britten also recorded these works and the result was a six record collection called The Music of Bali, released by Schirmer in May of that year. It is a vivid, evocative work, full of the ambience of Balinese gamelan.

The music of the gamelan made a lasting impact on Britten’s own work especially his ballet The Prince of the Pagodas. He also borrowed McPhee’s gamelan transcription Taboeh teloe for the interlude ‘Sunday morning’ from his opera Peter Grimes, to evoke the sounds of the chiming church bells of Suffolk.

McPhee’s life never reached the same heights. People in the west seemed interested in the music of Bali but he was disappointed that his piece Tabu-Tabuhan was so rarely performed in America. Forced to live frugally, he was prone to bouts of self-destructive depression and alcoholism. He yearned for pre-war Bali and the friends he had made there. And more than anything he longed to immerse himself in its music on a daily basis again.

Writing

Although he composed very few musical works in his final years, McPhee wrote two ground breaking books. A House in Bali was the first to be published in 1947. It is not just about music; it contains lyrical descriptions of the Balinese culture, its people and landscape.

And for the next twenty-five years McPhee toiled on a book based on his fieldwork. His perfectionism made his editor despair, as he refused to relinquish the manuscript until just prior to his death. Music in Bali was published posthumously in 1966 by Yale University Press. It was McPhee’s magnum opus and although currently out of print, it is regarded as the essential reference work for Balinese musicians, dancers, composers and choreographers, and an important contribution to ethnomusicology.

In his introduction to A House in Bali, musicologist James Murdoch writes: ‘Western composers such as Benjamin Britten, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Peter Sculthorpe, are all deeply indebted to McPhee’s love for, and scholarship on, Balinese music.’ John Cage can be added to this list too.

McPhee served as a faculty member of the UCLA Department of Music for the last few years of his life. One of his colleagues, composer Lou Harrison, said that after McPhee composed Tabuh-Tabuhan, he gave up composition in absolute frustration. He felt defeated by an established and rigid European musical tradition that allowed little room for experimentation. McPhee wanted to start composing music from his own tradition again, but he found the influence of Bali overwhelming. It was a love affair that had consumed him.

In A House in Bali, McPhee wrote that towards the end of his time in Bali he had listened to music,

…that by now had grown so familiar, its laws, its form, its design seemed clear at last. I thought back on how, through scraps of conversations, notes, expeditions and discoveries I had gradually put the puzzle together. There seemed nothing more to do. The parts fitted; the mystery was solved…But as I listened to the delicate, nervous drumming of Lebah or one of the radiant compositions of Lotring that seemed to burn with new creative life, the essence of music, its nature, its final meaning, seemed elusive and indefinable as ever.

Music

Colin McPhee: Balinese Ceremonial Music (Gambangan)

‘Gambangan’ is the fourth movement of McPhee’s six movement arrangement for the Western instrumental ensemble, which was performed by the New York Ballet Society in January 1947. Three of the movements including ‘Gambangan’ were adapted from his Balinese Ceremonial Music in his composition for two pianos (that he played with Benjamin Britten). ‘Gambangan’ was transcribed from a gamelan piece composed by the great musician and dancer I. Wayan Lotring. Balinese Ceremonial Music was dedicated to McPhee’s friend, the anthropologist Margaret Mead.

Connection

As well as leaving his wife out of A House in Bali, Colin McPhee also failed to mention that he had been part of a vibrant community of expatriates in Ubud, headed by Walter Spies, a free-spirited, talented painter and musician. Spies had been part of the avant garde in Berlin in the 1920s. He was friends with leading Expressionist painters Otto Dix and Oscar Kokoschka and became the lover of film director Friedrich Murnau, who involved him in the making of the film Nosferatu. In 1923 he fled the rise of National Socialism, boarding a cargo ship and travelling via Java to Bali, where he settled in 1927.

Charismatic and curious, Spies attracted large numbers of local artists to his bungalow, and was soon involved in numerous rich collaborations in dance and music. He founded an art society that reinvigorated the Balinese painting scene and had a lasting impact on the arts for decades after his death. And he developed a dream-like style of painting incorporating elements of magic realism. His works depict detailed scenes of everyday life in Bali: temple ceremonies, cockfights, market activity, and work in the fields.

With Indonesian dancer Wayan Limbak, Spies choreographed a modern version of the ketjak dance, often known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant. This extraordinary dance (you can see a version here) involves one hundred dancers or more, emulating monkeys involved in a battle scene from the Hindu Ramayana epic.

Like Colin McPhee, Spies learned the instruments of the gamelan and his transcription of Balinese music using two pianos is likely to have influenced McPhee’s own efforts. But McPhee gave Spies only passive mention in The House in Bali. This astonished the dancer and photographer Beryl De Zoete, who had co-authored Dance and Drama in Bali (1937) with Spies:

Mr. McPhee was of course at liberty, as his story is personal, to make no allusion to other European or American residents in Bali. But as he does make casual mention of that very original painter and musician, Walter Spies, the most learned, beloved and trusted of all alien inhabitants of Bali, whose death by drowning during the war was far more than a personal calamity, one feels that recognition of the writer’s many debts to him would have been a becoming gesture. Perhaps this awaits Mr. McPhee’s book on Balinese music, which no one is so qualified to write as he.

In the thirties, a number of wealthy travellers visited Spies. Among them were the anthropologist Margaret Mead, writer H.G. Wells, former President of France (and great friend of Claude Monet’s Georges Clemenceau), and the heiress Barbara Hutton, who fell for the handsome Spies in a big way.

Charlie Chaplin visited Bali and met Spies in 1932. At the time he was undergoing a creative crisis due to the rise of the ‘talkies’ which had led to the demise of silent film. ‘Some people suggest that a tramp might talk but this is unthinkable. Dialogue does not have a place in the sort of comedies I make’, he said. He also confessed that he had become ‘obsessed by a depressing fear of being old-fashioned.’ Chaplin’s brother Sydney felt that travel would help Charlie through this impasse, and the visit to Bali became part of a 16-month world tour. In his travel memoir A Comedian Sees the World, Chaplin wrote of Bali:

How different, I thought, from anything I’d ever seen. How far removed I felt from the rest of the world. Europe and America seemed unreal – as though they’d never existed. […] How easy [sic] man falls into his natural state. What does a career, a civilisation matter in this natural way of living?

Chaplin returned to Bali few years later when composer Noël Coward happened to be visiting too, who could not resist penning this bit of doggerel:

As I said this morning to Charlie,

There is far too much music in Bali.

And although as a place it’s entrancing,

There is also a thought too much dancing.

It appears that each Balinese native

From the womb to the tomb is creative,

And although the results are quite clever,

There is too much artistic endeavour.

Walter Spies took care of McPhee and Belo’s house when they left Bali until he was imprisoned by Dutch authorities as a German citizen and on charges of indecency. He lost his life in 1942 on a prisoner-of-war ship leaving Sumatra for Ceylon, when it was bombed by a Japanese war plane. All on board perished.