Musicians - Colin McPhee

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	Musicians - Colin McPhee

Colin McPhee (February 15, 1900 in Montreal or Toronto, Canada - January 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, CA) was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that groundbreaking work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before any other similar world music influenced compositions.

He studied with the pronounced modernist Edgard Varèse before marrying Jane Belo, who had studied with Margaret Mead, in 1931. The two moved to Bali together for Belo's anthropological work, once there McPhee became so interested in the local music he studied, built, and wrote extensively of the gamelans. McPhee, who was gay, divorced Belo in 1939. In the early forties he lived in a large brownstone in Brooklyn, shared with Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten among others. In the late forties he fell into an alcohol fueled depression, but began to write music again the fifties. He became professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1958 and was also a respected jazz critic.

McPhee's A House in Bali, the chronicle of his life there, is one of the best introductions to Balinese culture -- a must read for anyone going to visit Bali. His posthumoustly published Music in Bali was the first comprehensive analysis of Balinese music published in English.

His best-known work, Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, was composed in Mexico in 1936 and combines both Balinese and traditional Western musical elements. It is scored for traditional Western orchestra, but according to McPhee the core of the orchestra is a "'nuclear gamelan' composed of two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel," giving it a highly percussive balance of sound. The orchestra is augmented by two Balinese gongs and cymbals. The work is in three movements, Ostinatos, Nocturne, and Finale. Some of the themes in it derive from Balinese folk sources.

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