COLIN MCPHEE (1900-1964): A COMPOSER IN TWO WORLDS (BALI, GAMELAN).
Item
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Title
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COLIN MCPHEE (1900-1964): A COMPOSER IN TWO WORLDS (BALI, GAMELAN).
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Identifier
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AAI8515648
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identifier
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8515648
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Creator
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OJA, CAROL J.
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Contributor
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H. Wiley Hitchkock
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Date
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1985
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Biography
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Abstract
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Colin McPhee was a pioneer among Western composers in turning to Asia for inspiration. His work in Bali during the 1930s provided a vital link between Debussy's first encounter with an Indonesian gamelan in Paris in 1889 and the East-West interchanges so prevalent today.;McPhee was born in Montreal in 1900 and raised in Toronto. He studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore (1918-1921) and, like many artists of his generation, was apprenticed in Paris (1924-1926). In 1926, he moved to New York and quickly became active in the new-music scene there. In the late 1920s, McPhee heard newly released Odeon recordings of the Balinese gamelan and was inspired by them to travel to Bali. He began an eight-year odyssey on the island in 1931, which continued, with a few interruptions, until late 1938. McPhee studied thriving Balinese musical traditions, as well as those that were on the wane, and revived Balinese interest in its dying repertory. While there he was in close contact with a group of Western anthropologists and artists, including Gregory Bateson, Jane Belo, Margaret Mead, and Walter Spies. After McPhee returned to New York in 1939, his circumstances changed dramatically. He composed only occasionally until in 1950s, when he responded to a series of commissions. From 1960 to 1963 he taught ethnomusicology and composition at UCLA. He died in 1964.;McPhee's most important musical composition was Tabuh-Tabuhan, a pathbreaking orchestral work of 1936 in which he pushed beyond exotic surface effects to achieve an aesthetic union of his Western heritage with that of Bali. His other important works include the Concerto for Piano and Wind Octet (1928), Symphony No. 2 (1957), Nocturne for Chamber Orchestra (1958), and a number of imaginative transcriptions of gamelan music for Western instruments. As a writer he produced a host of articles and two major publications: A House in Bali (1946), an evocative tale about his years on the island, and Music in Bali (published posthumously in 1966), which remains the principal treatise on Balinese instrumental music.;Appended to this study of McPhee's life and work are a catalogue of his musical compositions, an inventory of his transcriptions of gamelan music for Western instruments, and a list of his published writings.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
