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A review by yarnylibrarian
A House in Bali by Colin McPhee
4.0
I read this because I'm going to Bali to perform with a gamelan this summer, and this ethnography is on every bibliography about Bali.
McPhee describes his environment beautifully. Here is an enchanting moment from very early in the book:
I loved reading about the various gamelan orchestras he encountered, including his search for a legendary bamboo instrument he'd never seen called angklung. We have four of these in our little gamelan in Gettysburg, so maybe they've come back into style since the 1930s... McPhee made it sound like he'd rediscovered the lost grail or something.
This book is very much of its time and I resisted the urge to judge various elements by modern standards. Still, it was difficult to read about McPhee's plucking of a boy from his family and home to train him for the dance in another town (imagine a foreigner coming into my town and taking my child for some cultural training elsewhere). Likewise, it was difficult to imagine how many servants he really needed in a simple hut ... and how cavalierly he hired and fired them. Or built extra houses wherever he wanted to! I was left wondering where his money came from - it's not mentioned in the book at all, but some of the other reviews and comments in Goodreads indicate that his wife had family money (the wife never even appears in the book).
This passage about how gamelan music is composed had special meaning to me, as we are playing a composition (perhaps "arrangement" is a better word for Westerners) by famous musician I Ketut Gede Asnawa. Here it is:
McPhee spends most of his time studying Balinese music and composing Western music inspired by it. Only rarely does he sit down and play. He has this to say about one such experience, though:
I couldn't say it better myself.
McPhee describes his environment beautifully. Here is an enchanting moment from very early in the book:
...a new sound rose in the sky, high up, shrill and tremulous, sweeter than anything I had heard that day. I looked out. A block of pigeons circled in the last rays of the sun. The sound seemed to follow them, and I could not think what it was. I called the boy, who said that the owner of the birds had hung little bells to their feet and attached bamboo whistles to their tail-feathers. Round and round they flew, trailing across the sky wide loops of sound. And then they vanished, the bells dying suddenly into nothing. (6)
I loved reading about the various gamelan orchestras he encountered, including his search for a legendary bamboo instrument he'd never seen called angklung. We have four of these in our little gamelan in Gettysburg, so maybe they've come back into style since the 1930s... McPhee made it sound like he'd rediscovered the lost grail or something.
This book is very much of its time and I resisted the urge to judge various elements by modern standards. Still, it was difficult to read about McPhee's plucking of a boy from his family and home to train him for the dance in another town (imagine a foreigner coming into my town and taking my child for some cultural training elsewhere). Likewise, it was difficult to imagine how many servants he really needed in a simple hut ... and how cavalierly he hired and fired them. Or built extra houses wherever he wanted to! I was left wondering where his money came from - it's not mentioned in the book at all, but some of the other reviews and comments in Goodreads indicate that his wife had family money (the wife never even appears in the book).
This passage about how gamelan music is composed had special meaning to me, as we are playing a composition (perhaps "arrangement" is a better word for Westerners) by famous musician I Ketut Gede Asnawa. Here it is:
For a Balinese the actual process of composing is something very different from our own. Music is not emotional self-revelation; it is before all, functional, an accompaniment to rite or drama. Composing is evolving rather than creating, and these days a new melody was rare. What marked a piece as new was style rather than content, and no one ever dreamed of criticizing it on the grounds that he had heard the tunes before. (175)
McPhee spends most of his time studying Balinese music and composing Western music inspired by it. Only rarely does he sit down and play. He has this to say about one such experience, though:
I used a single hammer, in the modern style. This was enough, however, for me to experience the sensation of being, at least for the moment, completely united, in close and absolute sympathy with the players, lost with them in the rhythm of the music. I knew the melodies by heart, and as I played I felt both peace and exhilaration in this nameless, tacit accord. Here there was no conductor's stick to beat time, no overeloquent hands to urge or subdue. The drumming of Lotring was at times barely audible; you felt it rather than heard it, and the music seemed to rush ahead on its own impetus. You were swept along the stream, no longer knew what you were doing. It was something free and purely physical, like swimming or running. (181)
I couldn't say it better myself.