McPhee, Colin (Carhart)

(b Montreal, 15 March 1900; d Los Angeles, 7 Jan 1964). American composer and ethnomusicologist. He studied composition and piano at the Peabody Conservatory with Harold Randolph and Gustav Strube (1918–21), then returned to Toronto for piano studies with Arthur Friedheim. In 1920 he gave the première of his Piano Concerto no.1 with the Peabody Orchestra and in 1924 performed his Piano Concerto no.2 with the Toronto New SO. From 1924 to 1926 he studied in Paris with Paul Le Flem and Isidore Philipp and then went to New York, where for five years he was an active participant in new-music societies and concerts. A decisive event in McPhee’s career occurred in the late 1920s, when he first heard newly released recordings of the Balinese gamelan. He was inspired to travel to Bali in 1931 and remained there, with only a few interruptions, until late 1938. His pathbreaking research on Balinese music documented a decade when the island was still relatively free from outside influences and culminated in the writing of Music in Bali, which remains the principal treatise on the island’s music. McPhee studied thriving musical traditions, as well as those on the wane, by travelling around the island to work with a variety of orchestras and by turning his native-style house in Sayan into a gathering place for local musicians. He founded several ensembles, including a gamelan semar pegulingan and a gamelan angklung, to revive dying repertories. While in Bali he associated with a group of Western anthropologists and artists that included Gregory Bateson, Jane Belo, Claire Holt, Margaret Mead and Walter Spies.

McPhee combined the roles of composer and scholar in his approach to Balinese music. He transcribed dozens of gamelan works for two pianos, solo piano, and flute and piano (a number of which he recorded with Britten and Barrère in 1941), and in 1936 he wrote Tabuh-tabuhan, his first major orchestral work to incorporate Balinese materials. It was first performed in the same year by Carlos Chávez and the Orquesta Sinfónica de México. After McPhee returned to New York early in 1939 he faced great difficulty in re-establishing and supporting himself. During the 1940s he worked for the Office of War Information (1945–7) and turned principally to prose as his creative medium. He wrote articles about Bali and reviews of scores and recordings for Modern Music, Musical Quarterly and Harper’s, and captured the atmosphere of his stay poetically in A House in Bali (1946). During this time he made a few unsatisfying attempts at musical composition, including incidental music for plays by Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and Four Iroquois Dances for orchestra. These works, together with most of his early music, were either destroyed or renounced by him. After Tabuh-tabuhan finally received its first American performance in 1953 (conducted by Stokowski), McPhee began to compose again. He received commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation, the Louisville Orchestra, the United Nations, the Contemporary Music Society, Robert Boudreau’s American Wind Symphony and BMI. Other honours included a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1954) and Guggenheim and Bollingen fellowships. He joined the faculty at UCLA in 1960.

The hallmark of McPhee’s musical style is an acute sensitivity to individual timbres coupled with a predilection for textures of multi-layered rhythms. These traits are present in his few surviving early pieces, especially the Concerto for Piano and Wind Octet (1928), a neo-classical work characterized by frequent explosive sound combinations, and they continue in the compositions McPhee wrote after he left Bali. No experimentalist, McPhee stayed within traditional forms and tonal harmonies even after his imagination was fired by the gamelan. He delighted in making large, dramatic gestures and wrote principally for orchestra and piano. In Tabuh-tabuhan, his best-known composition, McPhee used a standard symphony orchestra together with a ‘nuclear gamelan’ of Western instruments (two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel) and two Balinese gongs. Much of the musical material in this and his later works, such as the Symphony no.2 and the Nocturne for chamber orchestra, was drawn from the many transcriptions he made in Bali – all of which sensitively transfer note-for-note the gamelan’s intricate melodic interweavings to Western instruments.

WORKS

unpublished unless otherwise stated

MSS in US-LAuc, US-NYp

Principal publishers: Associated, Kalmus, Peters, G. Schirmer

dramatic

orchestral

choral

other works

WRITINGS

A House in Bali (New York, 1946/R)

A Club of Small Men (New York, 1948)

Maghi, musici e attori a Bali, trans. F. Cadeo (Milan, 1951)

Music in Bali (New Haven, CT, 1966/R)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Riegger: ‘Adolph Weiss and Colin McPhee’, American Composers on American Music, ed. H. Cowell (Stanford, CA, 1933/R), 36–42

C. Reis: Composers in America: Biographical Sketches (New York, 1938, 2/1947/R)

H. Cowell: ‘Current Chronicle’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 410–15

C. Sigmon: ‘Colin McPhee’, American Composers Alliance Bulletin, xii/1 (1964), 15–16

C.J. Oja: ‘Colin McPhee: a Composer who Fell in Love with Bali’, New York Times (7 Nov 1982)

R. Mueller: Imitation and Stylization in the Balinese Music of Colin McPhee (diss., U. of Chicago, 1983)

C.J. Oja: ‘Colin McPhee: a Composer Turned Explorer’, Tempo, no.148 (1984), 2–6

D. Young: ‘Colin McPhee’s Music’, Tempo, no.150 (1984), 11–17; no.159 (1986), 16–19

C.J. Oja: Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds (Washington DC, 1990)

R. Mueller: ‘Bali, Tabuh-tabuhan and Colin McPhee’s Method of Intercultural Composition’, JMR, x (1990–91), 127–75; xi (1991–2), 67–92

CAROL J. OJA