Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T08:11:58.307Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Colin McPhee's Music: (II) ‘Tabuh-Tabuhan’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2010

Douglas Young
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his prefatory ‘Note’ to the full score of Tabuh-Tabuhan (eventually published by AMP Inc. 1960), McPhee wrote:

Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936 and first performed by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technique. The title of the work derives from the Balinese word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat… Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive. In a subtitle I call the work Toccata for Orchestra and two pianos.

Type
Research Article
Information
Tempo , Issue 159 , December 1986 , pp. 16 - 19
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

* My contempt for ‘pseudo-mystical’ pretensions in Messiaen and elsewhere does not extend to works which genuinely attempt to capture (however imperfectly) the spirit of true mystical experience: Tippett's Vision of St. Augustine for instance. Similarly, there is all the difference in the world between the discipline of Zen, and the I-Ching-a-lings of John Cage & Co.

* It is important to remember that Balinese music had itself undergone a ‘democratization’ after the Dutch disbanded the great Court gamclans in 1906. The new, popular style—Kebyar—that resulted strongly influenced McPhee. He referred to it, significantly, as ‘a music as contemporary as jazz’.