80 years ago, “quite by accident,” Colin McPhee, a young Canadian composer studying in Paris, heard a scratchy recording of Balinese gamelan.  He traveled to Bali shortly thereafter, accompanied by his wife, anthropologist Jane Belo.  Returning to Paris six months later, McPhee found himself culturally alienated and artistically blocked, and resolved to go back, to document the music before it was too late.  "Such music cannot survive much longer," he wrote.  The couple returned to Bali for two extended residencies, from 1932-35 and again from 1937-38.

They were part of a small enclave of Westerners living in Bali at the time.  Aside from scattered Dutch administrators, most of these orbited around Denpasar or the nearby beach towns of Kuta and Sanur, where tourism was nascent.  A notable exception was German painter Walter Spies, who had befriended the King of Ubud, a small village in central Bali, and built a house just outside it, on the banks of the Tjampuhan River.  Spies was a Zelig-like figure, a composer as well as a painter, born to German diplomats in St. Petersburg.  Exiled to Central Asia during the First World War, he moved to Berlin in 1918, where he served as Artistic Advisor Murnau’s Nosferatu, and finally landed a position as kapellmeister to the Sultan of Yogyakarta.  By 1927 he had decamped to Bali, where he adapted his mystical, naturalistic painting style to tropics.  He soon began teaching and mentoring young Balinese painters, eventually organizing the Pita Maha ("Our Ancestors") collective, which supported itself selling paintings first to tourists and later to the international art market.  

McPhee, having lost all desire to compose his own music, undertook an exhaustive study of gamelan and immersed himself in Balinese life.  Presaging the 'urban sprawl' that now overwhelms the Ubud area, he built his own house one river further out, on a ridge in the village of Sayan, overlooking the rapids of the Ayung River.  (Spies' house is now the Hotel Tjampuhan; McPhee's was replaced by the Sayan Terrace Hotel, and overlooks the Four Seasons Resort.)  In addition to voluminous gamelan transcriptions, McPhee also traveled extensively, attending temple ceremonies and trance rituals, and seeking out archaic ensembles in out-of-the-way mountain villages.  Back in Sayan he became an artistic patron, organizing a children’s gamelan, and designing and purchasing a set of classical semar pegulingan instruments, still in use today.
 

A third presence, arriving in 1936, was Margaret Mead, who with her husband Gregory Bateson resided to the north, in the small mountain village of Bayung Gede.  There the couple documented the minutiae of everyday life on film and in photographs, which she included in her 1942 book Balinese Character.  Mead found the Balinese inscrutable: in a 1937 letter, she described them as “the least responsive people I have ever known.” 

McPhee however had no such difficulties: he made numerous close friendships, including a special attachment to a young boy, Sampih, who had saved him from drowning in the river during a flash flood. McPhee brought the boy into his household, first as a domestic worker, and then providing him with dance training.   

McPhee’s reasons for leaving Bali in 1938 were ambiguous, even by his own account.  A combination of factors left him in a state of unease.  War was in the air, and he believed his house to be under surveillance by Japanese spies.  Lèyak – rice field ghosts - had been spotted in the vicinity.  Gamelan was changing in ways McPhee wasn’t sure he understood or approved: “more and more the new kebyars seemed to resemble each other, seemed intended only to dazzle and bewilder.”  And his protégé Sampih was getting moody and unruly, “aware of his charm” and “in need of discipline.”  Scores of white men were being rounded up, including Walter Spies, who was arrested just five days after McPhee’s departure.  The idyll was over, it was time to go home.

He never went back.  His post-Bali life was difficult, to say the least.  Returning to New York, he never was able to get his music or his career back on track, and he struggled with alcoholism and depression.  He had difficulty finishing his magnum opus, the encyclopedic Music in Bali, only completing it months before his death in 1964.  Meanwhile, both Spies and Sampih met unfortunate ends: Spies drowning in the Indian Ocean when a Dutch prison ship was sunk by the Japanese; Sampih brutally murdered upon his return from touring the world with John Coast’s “Dancers of Bali,” which played Broadway and Las Vegas in 1952.

McPhee’s memoir, A House in Bali, was published in 1946, with Mead helpfully publishing a rave review in the New York Times.  The book is a small gem, epigrammatic and insightful, witty and wistful, pitch perfect in describing the feel of being an outsider in a culture that is both more familiar and far stranger than one could have anticipated.  Its relation to actual events is intriguingly selective.  His western friends are pushed to the margins or excised altogether: Spies makes a cameo appearance, but there is no mention - none whatsoever! - of McPhee’s wife.  Yet his descriptions of sights and sounds are exactingly vivid, as are his accounts of conversations with the Balinese, with whom he clearly had a deep rapport.  

In America McPhee is frankly a marginal figure, but in Bali he looms large, particularly for the hundreds of western composers and musicians who have followed in his footsteps.  I am one of those followers, having had my own epiphany with Balinese music in 1979, 50 years after McPhee.  Unaware of his story, I followed a similar path, throwing everything aside to get to Bali, where I joined my own enclave of enraptured westerners.  I studied with McPhee's driver and confidante, I Madé Lebah, who was happy to reminisce in his own highly selective and entertaining manner.  For me, McPhee is both role model and object lesson, someone whose life - his triumphs and his tragedy, his personal strengths and very human weaknesses - I have contemplated for many years.

His book is hardly driven by narrative - its charm is in the set piece, the idyllic meander.  Within it though is a tragic love story, not between two people but between two cultures.  This is mirrored in McPhee's relationship with Sampih, in whom he sees everything he thinks he sees in Bali: purity, effervescence, an unconscious out-flowing of grace and beauty, unencumbered by restrictions and taboos of western culture.  It’s in the eye of the beholder.  Walter Spies dove into Balinese culture with epicurean unselfconsciousness, apparently remaining sanguine even in prison; Mead came and went as Apollonian observer, drawing her conclusions and moving on.  McPhee is caught between these two extremes - as enamored as Spies, as distant as Mead - and thus left on the ridge between the two cultures, in the end “always remaining the outsider.”

Cross-cultural contact – almost by definition - spans a gap between what one sees and how one is seen.  This triangulates when viewed across the generations: we admire and we disapprove through present-day filters.  The constant is the recording device: the wax cylinder, the paintbrush, the field notes, the camera.  McPhee's transcriptions are absolutely accurate but by definition cannot capture the nuance and feeling that brings Balinese gamelan to life.  Spies' gorgeous landscapes - emulated by numerous Balinese painters - look like the Bali we see, but have nothing in common with the ways the Balinese traditionally portray themselves visually.  Many of Mead's photographs and films of ‘everyday life’ were clearly staged.  

Our opera telescopes the story: it is a single journey, beginning with McPhee's Parisian crisis and ending with his final departure.  It balances on that ridge between two cultures, each singing in its own distinctive voice.  We see the action both directly and through the camera lens, itself projecting images from both past and present, filtered – literally - to blur the distinction.

Like McPhee, I have oscillated between two artistic worlds, west and east, for my whole adult life.  Circumstance provided me with many more avenues to bring them together than were available to him; for me, this project is a culmination.  Above all, it is thrilling to bring this particular collection of artists and designers together, and to find ways for us all to work together meaningfully.  Given the theme of this work – the tragedy of the in-between - this may seem ironic.  Nonetheless, the first meeting of Bang on a Can and Gamelan Salukat – in June 2009, in a dusty rehearsal space above the Ubud Market - will stand as one of the most inspiring moments of my life.   Soon thereafter, we staged the work outside the Puri Saraswati, a temple belonging to the present King of Ubud.  The rain held off until moments after the performance, and we all rode up to the cast party in a ‘villa’ on Sayan Ridge itself, a stone's throw from the house site.  Staring across the river, where McPhee had himself seen the lights of the lèyak demons, Nyoman Usadhi, the 13-year-old who plays Sampih, saw the lights of the Four Seasons Resort.  "Is that a hotel?" he asked...
                                                                                          - Evan Ziporyn