This review first appeared at Green Man Review.
Colin McPhee: Symphony No. 2, Concerto for Piano with Wind Octette, Nocturne for Chamber Orchestra, Balinese Ceremonial Music
Lou Harrison: Suite for Symphonic Strings
Chinary Ung: Inner Voices
Colin McPhee: Tabuh-Tabuhan
Colin McPhee, the Canadian-American composer and writer who is too little known to contemporary audiences, arguably had a tremendous influence on later generations of American musicians through his study and dissemination of the music of Bali. Fortunately for us, his music is now more widely recorded than it had been in the past, and offers some fascinating glimpses into what true “fusion” is all about.
Colin McPhee’s Symphony No. 2 (1957), one of the composer’s later works, reveals the enduring influence Balinese music had on his thought: McPhee does not merely import phrases here and there to lend color: the structure and development of the symphony are fundamentally affected. There are passages of amazing intricacy and fully Balinese character that give way seamlessly to thoroughly Western orchestral interludes that fade into passages in which rhythmic structures, derived from gamelan, underlie melodies that are Western but somehow — different.
The Concerto for Piano with Wind Octette dates from 1928, thoroughly in the neoclassical mode that McPhee employed at that period — about the same time he first encountered Balinese music — and owing much to Stravinsky, as so many “serious” works did in the 1920s and 30s in America. This is not to dismiss the piece: there is solid thinking here, and boldness in coloring and definition that make this a work that is more than a little interesting.
Nocturne for Chamber Orchestra, from 1958, is another piece that incorporates Eastern music — and I do mean “incorporates.” It is once again an integrated work, a true fusion of East and West. (There are melodic passages here that sounded very familiar, and I had to think for a moment before I remembered where I had heard them: on recordings of Balinese gamelan. They don’t sound at all out of place in McPhee’s piece.) It also happens to be simply lovely.
The Balinese Ceremonial Music was first performed in 1941 by Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten, both composers influenced by Balinese music and both superb pianists. These are direct transcriptions of Balinese gamelan works, out of a group of over forty that McPhee did in the 1930s. I can’t really follow some of McPhee’s Balinese audiences and wonder aloud how he captured the colors and textures — they are not that rich — but the essentials are there, and they are, although comparatively lean, mesmerizing in the same way that gamelan is.
Lou Harrison, while perhaps not, as the notes declaim, the “composer who has most devotedly taken up McPhee’s Indonesian torch,” is certainly in the running. (A strong argument can be made for Indonesian music having had an overwhelming impact on such composers as Terry Riley and the serial minimalists who followed him, an influence much more obvious than anything Harrison displays in the work presented here.) It is somewhat strange that his Suite for Symphonic Strings was selected for this collection — it is a work that does not really reveal the influences of Eastern music on Harrison’s thought, as do such works as the Suite for Violin, Piano and Small Orchestra and, while a wonderful piece of music, it is more reminiscent of the American avant-garde of the decades preceding its first performance in 1961 than any global consciousness. (Harrison dates the piece as “1960-1936,” reinforcing this retrospective idea.) The seven sections of the Suite make reference to folk dances from the south of France, the round form of vernacular song, the Baroque fugue, and other sources of Western music. It is a very rich piece, ably delineated by Davies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic, lively, moody, and thoughtful by turns.
Chinary Ung’s Inner Voices brings us headlong into a fusion of two different traditions. His career brings home very sharply the sometimes astonishing gaps between East and West: Cambodian by birth, he did not hear an orchestra until he was seventeen years old, and until he began the formal study of music, he never realized that there was such a thing as musical notation, pointing to a substantial difference in pedagogy, East and West. That said, Inner Voices reveals the ready assimilation of Western musical history, particularly that of the twentieth century, and the infusion of a somewhat rarified, pan-Asian sensibility. This is again a puzzling inclusion for this album — there are passages that call to mind such works as Toru Takemitsu’s November Steps, but equally well one can hear echoes of Béla Bartók or John Harbison. Not to gainsay my remarks about a “pan-Asian” sensibility, and notwithstanding some lovely, delicate flute passages, it is much more Western music by an Asian-born composer than anything else.
Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan, the most important of his earlier symphonic works, leaves no doubt from the very beginning that it was born in Bali. This is, however, a translation, in the full sense of the word: the sense is of Balinese gamelan, but the idiom, while relying heavily on that tradition, also incorporates Western symphonic music and jazz (another area of music toward which McPhee had much affection, and one that the Balinese reportedly found very sympathetic). McPhee called it “a toccata for two pianos and orchestra,” and indeed, the structures are largely Western; the rhythms and colors are in places pure Bali. Cast in three movements, it is a lively, scintillating, brilliant piece that in places shimmers and in other places jerks us upright with its force. One wonders how this work, premiered in Mexico City in 1936, could have remained ignored in the United States as long as it was.
The all-McPhee album makes more sense as a collection – at least there is the unifier of a single composer; the works on the Argo disc, however, are interesting, even if the context is puzzling. McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan, which I suspect was the justification for issuing that recording, is wonderful.
While globalism may still be a matter of controversy in commerce, it is a reality in the arts, and Colin McPhee is one of the people who made it happen. One can only hope that we will see more of his music recorded and, ideally, making its way into the repertoire of our orchestras.
(MusicMasters, 1996) Stephen Drury, Yukiko Takagi, pianos; the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor
(Argo, 1995) Peter Basqin and Christopher Oldfather, pianos; American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, conductor
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