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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
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.
* 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’.
