Page 275 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

MODERN 1900–1950 273
TABUH-TABUHAN (1936), COLIN MCPHEE
IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Gamelan influences
BEFORE
1882 French composer
Louis-Albert Bourgault-
Ducoudray writes Rapsodie
cambodgienne, which includes
gamelan instruments.
1890 Erik Satie’s piano pieces
Trois Gnossiennes echo the
Javanese gamelan music he
heard at the Paris Exposition
the previous year.
AFTER
1945 John Cage’s Daughters
of the Lonesome Isle is one of
many gamelan-inspired pieces
written for “prepared piano”—
a piano in which the sound is
modified by placing objects
on or between the strings.
1951 American composer
Lou Harrison writes Suite
for Violin, Piano, and Small
Orchestra, which includes
movements that reproduce
the sounds of a gamelan.
US_272-273_Prokofiev_McFee.indd 273
BALINESE MUSIC RETAINED
A RHYTHMIC VITALITY BOTH
PRIMITIVE AND JOYOUS
amelan is an orchestra
that plays the traditional
G music of the Indonesian
islands of Java and Bali. It is noted
for its wide use of percussion, such
as drums, gongs, and chimes. The
music was first exposed to a wide
Western audience at the 1889 Paris
Exposition, where a gamelan from
Java inspired composers such as
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.
Gamelan musicians perform in Bali.
Elusive sounds The pitch of gamelan music varies
The freedom and constant variation between instruments, with most
of gamelan music made it difficult orchestras using a five-tone scale rather
than the seven tones of Western music.
to capture. Therefore, in 1928, the
German Odeon and Beka record
companies sent agents to Bali to Balinese, tabu-tabuhan refers to
make gamelan recordings. A year the rhythms and sounds of the
later, Colin McPhee, a Canadian- percussive gamelan instruments,
born composer and follower of which McPhee sought to recreate
“absolute music” (music that exists using a Western orchestra. In 1941,
for its own sake), heard one of the McPhee and the young Benjamin
recordings. He was so mesmerized, Britten made a recording of some
he set off for Bali and spent much gamelan transcriptions for two
of the 1930s there studying the pianos. Britten would continue to
island’s music. draw inspiration from Balinese
McPhee’s three-movement music, along with other composers,
symphonic work Tabu-Tabuhan including Olivier Messiaen, John
was first performed in 1936. In Cage, and Philip Glass. ■
See also: Parade 256–257 ■ Quartet for the End of Time 282–283 ■
4´33˝ 302–305 ■ November Steps 314–315
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