Volume 38, Number 17 · October 24, 1991
Bali H'ai
By Robert Craft
Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds
by Carol J. Oja
Smithsonian Institution Press, 353 pp., $39.95
A House in Bali
by Colin McPhee
Oxford University Press, 214 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Carol J. Oja's brief biography of Colin McPhee, the Canadian-born (1900) writer, composer, pianist, and ethnomusicologist, provides a survey of his compositions, or rather the fewer than half of them not lost, with a generous selection of examples in music type. As one in a series on American composers, the book naturally gives more space to McPhee's music than to his writings, which are far more prized (if apples may be preferred to oranges), particularly his memoir, A House in Bali, but also his technical study Music in Bali.[1] Still, the facts of his life are of interest in themselves.
Review, 4107 words
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