About this piece

               Musical selection from the Esprit/CBC CD Tabuh-Tabuhan - Music of/Musique de Colin McPhee

               Liner note (excerpted) written by Paul Kennedy

               . . . In the late 1950s, almost as a dying breath, McPhee composed the other works on this recording. . . Symphony No. 2 (commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra) might almost have seemed like McPhee's acceptance of the contract. He went out of his way to compose an 'approachable' piece. "This symphony," he wrote to Copland, "is meant to be as much understatement as Tabuh- tabuhan was the reverse."

What they say - About this piece

About the Composer

               "Everytime we'd play something (by McPhee), the phone lines would light up," explains Paul Kennedy about his stints guest-hosting CBC's Stereo Morning.
     — Peter Goddard for The Toronto Star, Sunday, March 23, 1997

               Liner notes written by Paul Kennedy, author of a 2-part radio documentary about McPhee for CBC's Ideas

               Colin Carhart McPhee was born in Montreal in 1900 (the year that Queen Victoria died), but he grew up in Toronto (a place where Victorian morality, at least, was rumoured to be still alive as late as 1965!). It was there he premiered his First Piano Concerto with Toronto's New Symphony Orchestra long before he was legally allowed to even toast his success with anything stronger than a sarsaparilla soda. McPhee hated the provincialism of the place from the very beginning. As he matured, he grew to despise Toronto's Victorian sensibilities. He escaped to Paris and New York as soon as it became possible to do so.

               In Paris, McPhee made a notoriously characteristic decision NOT to study with Nadia Boulanger, as so many composers of his generation had. He opted instead for New York, and the more avant-garde composer Edgard Varese. In New York, he met the woman who would soon become his wife, Jane Belo. She was a budding anthropologist (a graduate student of Margaret Mead), and on the rebound from her first marriage to a very rich man. One night at an exotic dinner party on Manhattan's East Side, Colin and Jane heard the siren song of Balinese gamelan music, scratchily captured on primitive early cylinder recordings from Bali. Within a matter of months, they were married and steaming across the Indian Ocean to the island of their dreams.

               Bali was just as far away from Western culture as one could go, back in 1931. It became, for McPhee, what Samoa was for Robert Louis Stevenson or what Tahiti was for Paul Gauguin. East meets West with fascinating results.

               Colin and Jane used Belo's alimony income to build a comfortable "house" (actually a multi-building Balinese compound) high up in the palm-shrouded hills that surround the island's sacred central volcano. They used McPhee's cross-cultural imagination to enter the unbelievably rich creative tradition of Balinese society. They went native.

               Throughout the 1930s, Colin McPhee immersed himself in an intensive investigation of Balinese gamelan music - which was (and still is!) quite literally everywhere in Bali. McPhee watched while craftsmen forged the metal gongs and brass bells that ultimately combine with wooden xylophones, skin drums and bamboo flutes to make up a gamelan ensemble. He criss-crossed the island in search of arcane local variants of both instrumentation and tunes. He painstakingly notated the melodic and percussive complexities of every gameland piece he heard played. Their titles were as exotic as their sounds: "Crow Stealing Eggs"; "Cow Drinks"; "Toad Climbs Paw-Paw"; or "Burning Grass." In many ways, McPhee quite literally and quite personally saved the Balinese gamelan tradition. During the time that he lived there, he happily commissioned the formation or reconstitution of gamelan ensembles that were already dead or definitely dying. He wrote a musicological masterpiece called Music in Bali which is still the standard textbook at the prestigious Conservatory of Music and Dance, in Bali's capital city, Den Pasar. McPhee's name remains a household word in Bali. His musical achievements are only now beginning to be acknowledged by the rest of the world.

               Tabuh-tabuhan will always be McPhee's signature piece. In the midst of its composition, in the middle of 1936, Colin wrote to Henry Cowell announcing the imminent arrival of a "concerto for two pianos and large orchestra using Bali, Jazz and McPhee elements." It would be difficult to come up with any more accurate explanation of the musical forces deployed. Melodies and rhythms have been borrowed from Bali. Jazz links are everywhere. And the ultimate result is quintessential, classical Colin McPhee. It received a standing ovation at the Mexico City premiere under Chávez in 1936. It languished without another performance, however, for more than a decade, despite McPhee's best efforts to bring it to the attention of a number of prominent conductors. In a 1949 letter to Aaron Copland, after the first North American radio broadcast performance of Tabuh-tabuhan, McPhee confided that "I simply can't believe I wrote it."

               By then, McPhee was in the middle of a desperate drinking depression. He had never really recovered from the painful separation of actually leaving Bali - which had coincided with the end of his marriage to Jane Belo. Theirs had been a rather bizarre relationship from the very beginning. He was openly gay. She was clearly bisexual. Bali had allowed them to go their own ways. For a short while in the 1940s, McPhee lived in a cooperative brownstone in Brooklyn, New York, where his roommates included W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Truman Capote, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Leonard Bernstein and Gypsy Rose Lee! McPhee and Briitten and Bowles and Bernstein apparently fought for periodic possession of the grand piano. One could only have wished to be a fly upon the wall!

               In the late 1950s, almost as a dying breath, McPhee composed the other works on this recording. Transitions was commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation in 1954 to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. McPhee toyed temporarily with other titles - Marine Horizons and Atlantis - before ultimately opting for Transitions. It announced his own transition back into the world of Western commercial acceptability.

               Nocturne was premiered in December of 1958 by Leopold Stokowski (who had also overseen Tabuh-tabuhan's first live concert performance in the United States, in 1953). The Concerto for Wind Orchestra (which quotes almost unapologetically from Tabuh-tabuhan) was premiered in 1960. It was to be his last completed piece. Colin McPhee died of cirrhosis of the liver four years later in California.

               Given McPhee's near-legendary disdain for Canada, there is an almost perverse connection between much of his music and the country of his birth. His original departure to study in Paris was underwritten by whiskey funds, with an interesting one-time-only scholarship from Toronto's Gooderham & Worts Distillery. Transitions was premiered in Vancouver. Even Tabuh-tabuhan - arguably McPhee's most exotically Balinese and least Western work - received its New York City premiere at a Carnegie Hall concert of Canadian compositions! Perhaps it wasn't all that far from Toronto to Tabuh-tabuhan, after all.

               Noteworthy: ". . . Perhaps McPhee's most improbable creation was his own life. He was born in Montreal, where his father was a sales representative for The Globe and Mail. The family soon moved to Toronto, where the young piano prodigy devoted his youthful energy to the pyrotechnics of Liszt. Solo recitals in Massey Hall were followed by study at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. On a visit to his home town, he played his own piano concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and a local businessman was so impressed that he sent McPhee to Paris for further studies from 1924 to 1926. . .

               McPhee never really re-entered Western society. "My heart is in the East," he said. Now that the world is trying to trace his steps, his writing as a music critic for Modern Music in New York has been unearthed by scholars. It shows his lucid pen, even when criticizing his old chums from Brooklyn. He also found refuge in jazz and visits to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem eventually took the place of expeditions into the Balinese countryside.

               After the Brooklyn house was closed to make way for a freeway in 1947, McPhee moved from one flophouse to another, losing or destroying many of his important papers. His meager income as a music critic was occasionally augmented by Belo, composer Aaron Copeland and anthropologist Margaret Mead. Long stretches were spent as a guest of composer Henry Cowell and his wife, who treated him as a son.

               Toward the end of his life, McPhee was offered a job teaching music at the University of California in Los Angeles. He moved there and was on the home stretch of completing (his book) Music in Bali when his drinking and poor health caught up with him. . . He was often suicidal and shortly before he died, wrote wistfully to a friend. "I've come to discover a beautiful mystery in life. My few friends admire or love me not for my accomplishments, but for what I might have done." - excerpted from an article (Canada's world music pioneer) written by Ulla Colgrass for The Globe and Mail, Saturday, March 22, 1977

What the Composer Says

What they say - About the CD

               ". . . His immersion in Balinese culture and his intensive study of its gamelan music tradition resulted in a fascinating blend of styles. . . Tabuh-tabuhan, written for orchestra and two pianos over sixty years ago, is an intensely romantic and exciting piece. McPhee was obviously influenced a great deal by Henry Cowell. Elements of Charles Ives and Stravinsky also appear in the opening theme's heavy rhythmic accents and driving force. He focuses on melody, without sacrificing his main goal of exploring subtle orchestral textures and juxtapositions. The constantly undulating background accompaniment is effective, as is the expansion of the second theme passed on from flute to strings under a ponderous piano. The undulating motive reappears in the final movement, beautifully transformed and shimmering in a higher register, while the exciting climax exploits the orchestra's capabilities to the fullest. The Esprit Orchestra under Alex Pauk, treats Tabuh-tabuhan both delicately and emphatically, and the ensemble's rhythmic precision is evident here and throughout the CD. . . The Concerto for Winds is an almost cinematic panorama depicting different landscapes or natural scenes with lush, smooth transitions. The piece is performed thoughtfully and delicately. The crystalline clarity of the instruments here effectively highlights the compositional spaces. Transitions is equally skillfully played. . . After listening to these five works spanning 22 years, it becomes apparent that McPhee's great skill lay in creating lushly romantic textures and in cleverly employing the resources of a percussion-bolstered orchestra. It is unfortunate that these main compositional strengths have been overshadowed by the fact that the influence of Balinese gamelan elements was the identifying characteristic of most of his works."
     — Tom Lillington, Musicworks 70, Spring 1998