Learned From The House Of Bali By Colin Mcphee Summary
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A lot is learned from the House of Bali story by Colin McPhee. When he resided in Bali in the 1930s, where he studies and catalogued Balinese music, Colin McPhee explored deeply the culture of Balinese and the people are around the city. Through the story, a number of themes present themselves; however, the main theme that shall be explored by the paper is that of Balinese culture and music.
The theme of Balinese music culture. This is the vivid theme that has been brought out clearly and precisely in a number of ways by the story. Colin McPhee was a Canadian composer/musicologist and is famous for being the first Western composer to explore the ethnomusicological study of Bali (McPhee 3). During his study, he also composed music that was influenced by the Java and Bali…show more content… McPhee explored the Balinese music instruments used in the gamelan. He noted that the instruments in the gamelan were played in pairs but tuned in different ways. When the instruments were played, they created an interference beat and a shimmering sound of a gamelan was produced. This is characteristic of two opposite sounds played together in unison. The Balinese musical culture believed that the interference beats were a symbolic sign of God’s reminder of his existence. The shimmering sound is unique and bewitching, a non-existence sound in the Western music. The aspects of history, dance, music, storytelling, and religion were intertwined in the culture of Balinese (McPhee 14). From the story, it is learned that the Balinese dance was intriguing to McPhee. Their dances were always based on a certain story in the history of the island. The stories, as noted from the play, never changed; everyone knew the outcome of the play, just that it was not clear at the beginning which plays was being performed. McPhee was so intrigued by the dances that he even went ahead to recruit some promising dancers and trained them more (McPhee