Music of Indonesia
Gongs from Java
Timeline • Samples
Genres
Classical Kecak Kecapi suling Tembang sunda Pop Indo Dance-pop Dangdut Hip hop Kroncong Gambang kromong Gambus Jaipongan Langgam jawa Pop Batak Pop Minang Pop Sunda Qasidah modern Rock Tapanuli ogong Tembang jawa
Specific forms
Gamelan Angklung Beleganjur Degung Gambang Gong gede Gong kebyar Jegog Joged bumbung Salendro Selunding Semar pegulingan
Regional music
Bali Borneo Java Moluccan Islands Papua Sulawesi Sumatra Sunda

Bali is an Indonesian island that shares in the gamelan and various other Indonesian musical styles. Bali, however, has its own techniques and styles, including kecak, a form of singing that imitates the sound of monkeys. In addition, the island is home to several unique kinds of gamelan, including the gamelan jegog, gamelan gong gede, gamelan gambang, gamelan selunding and gamelan semar pegulingan, the cremation music angklung and the processional music bebonangan. Modern popular styles include gamelan gong kebyar, dance music which developed during the Dutch occupation and 1950s era joged bumbung, another popular dance style. In Balinese music you can also hear metallophones, gongs and xylophones.

Characteristics[link]

Balinese musicians.

Balinese music can be compared to Javanese music, especially that of the pre-Islamic period. During that time, Javanese tonal systems were imported to Bali.

Balinese gamelan, a form of Indonesian classical music, is louder, swifter and more aggressive than Javanese music. Balinese gamelan also features more archaic instrumentation than modern Javanese gamelans. Balinese instruments include bronze and bamboo xylophones. Gongs and a number of gong chimes, are used, such as the solo instrument trompong, and a variety of percussion instruments like cymbals, bells, drums and the anklung (a bamboo rattle). There are two sizes of bamboo flutes, both used in theatrical music, and a rebab (two-stringed spike fiddle).

Modern forms of Balinese gamelan include kebyar, an energetic style played by clubs, which generally compose their own music.

References[link]

• Encyclopedia.com

External links[link]

• An Introduction to Balinese Music by Michael Tenzer

Triguna: A Hindu-Balinese Philosophy for Gamelan Gong Gede Music by Made Mantle Hood

Colin McPhee photo taken by Carl Van Vechten, 1935

Colin McPhee (March 15, 1900  – January 7, 1964) was a Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily known for being the first Western composer to make an ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before such world music–based compositions became widespread.

Chronology[link]

McPhee was born in Montreal. He studied at Peabody Institute since 1918, with Gustav Strube in composition and Harold Randolph in piano, and then with the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse before marrying Jane Belo, a disciple of Margaret Mead, in 1931. He was involved in the circle of experimental composers known as the "ultra-modernists" and was among those—along with the group's leader, Henry Cowell, John Becker, and Cowell protégé Lou Harrison—particularly interested in what would later become known as "world music." McPhee is said to have first encountered Balinese music while listening to a record in New York City.^[1] He and his wife moved to Bali together for Belo's anthropological work. Once there McPhee became so interested in the music that he studied, built, and wrote extensively about the gamelans. McPhee, who was gay,^[2] divorced Belo in 1939. In the early 1940s he lived in a large brownstone in Brooklyn, which he shared with Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten, among others.

In 1942 he arranged Britten's Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, a work for string orchestra, for two pianos, to be used for Lew Christensen's ballet Jinx.^[3][4]

McPhee was responsible for introducing Britten to the Balinese music that influenced such works by the British composer as The Prince of the Pagodas, Curlew River, and Death in Venice.^[5] Later in the decade, McPhee fell into an alcohol-fueled depression, but began to write music again during the 1950s. He became professor of ethnomusicology at UCLA in 1958 and was also a respected jazz critic. He died in Los Angeles.

On June 26 and 27, 2009, an opera about McPhee's life by the American composer Evan Ziporyn, entitled A House in Bali, premiered at Puri Saraswati in Ubud, Bali.

Published works[link]

McPhee's A House in Bali, the chronicle of his life there, is still considered a valuable introduction to Balinese culture.^{[citation needed]} His posthumously published Music in Bali was the first comprehensive analysis of Balinese music published in English.

His best-known musical work is Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for Orchestra, composed and premiered in Mexico in 1936. Its title translates as "collection of percussion instruments," and it combines Balinese and traditional Western musical elements. It is scored for Western orchestra but, in McPhee's description, the core of the ensemble is a "'nuclear gamelan' composed of two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba, and glockenspiel," giving it a highly percussive balance of sound. The orchestra is augmented by two Balinese gongs and cymbals. The work is in three movements: "Ostinatos," a flute-inspired "Nocturne," and a syncopated "Finale." Some of the themes in it derive from Balinese folk sources.

• Angkloeng gamelans in Bali. (1937?)
• Balinese wajang koelit and its music. (1936?, 1981) ISBN 0-404-16765-9
• Children and music in Bali. (1938) Publisher: Overdruk Uit Djawa
• Club of small men : a children’s tale from Bali. (2002) ISBN 0-7946-0074-3
• House in Bali. (1980) ISBN 0-404-16766-7
• Music in Bali: a study in form and instrumental organization in Balinese orchestral music. (1966, 1976) ISBN 0-306-70778-0
• Transitions for orchestra. (1954)

Films[link]

• 1985 - Colin McPhee: The Lure of Asian Music (dir. Michael Blackwood)

References[link]

External links[link]

Indonesia portal

• UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive including a slideshow and movies about Colin McPhee
• Colin McPhee - East collides with West
• Colin McPhee's entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia
• Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds by Carol Oja
• Walter Spies still used to receive guests at his house in Iseh, including the Austrian novelist, Vicki Baum: musician, Colin McPhee...

Listening[link]

• Portrait of Composer Colin McPhee by Charles Amirkhanian (November 5, 1980)

Photo by Yousuf Karsh, mid 1950s

Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten,^[1] OM CH (22 November 1913 – 4 December 1976) was an English composer, conductor, and pianist; and one of the central figures of 20th century British classical music. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to international fame. For the next fifteen years he devoted much of his compositional attention to writing operas, establishing him as one of the leading 20th century figures in this genre.

Britten's interests as a composer were wide-ranging; he produced important music in such varied genres as orchestral, choral, solo vocal (much of it written for his life partner, tenor Peter Pears), chamber and instrumental, as well as film music. He also took a great interest in writing music for children and amateur performers, and was an outstanding pianist and conductor.

Life[link]

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 22 November 1913, the youngest of four children. His father, Robert, was a dentist, and his mother Edith, a talented amateur musician who gave Britten his first lessons in piano and notation. He showed musical gifts very early in life, making his first attempts at composition aged five, and thereafter composing prolifically as a child.^[2] He started piano lessons with a teacher from his pre-prep school when aged 7, and viola lessons with Audrey Alston when 10 years old.

John Piper's Benjamin Britten memorial window in the Church of St Peter and St Paul, Aldeburgh

Britten heard Frank Bridge’s orchestral poem The Sea at a festival and was, as he put it, ‘knocked sideways’.^[2] Alston was a family friend of Frank Bridge and was able to arrange an introduction. After examining Britten's work, Bridge took him on as a composition pupil, and the first lesson took place on 10 January 1928, a few weeks after Britten's 14th birthday.^[3] One of the first pieces composed during the period of Bridge's tutelage was the Quatre Chansons françaises for soprano and orchestra, though it appears that Britten's abilities as an orchestrator were essentially self-taught rather than learned from Bridge.^[4]

He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and then studied, 1930–33, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland (composition) and Arthur Benjamin (piano). Britten also used his time in London to attend concerts and become better acquainted with the music of Igor Stravinsky, Gustav Mahler, and Dmitry Shostakovich. Although ultimately dissuaded by his parents (at the suggestion of College staff), Britten had also intended postgraduate study with Alban Berg in Vienna.

Britten was a prolific juvenile composer: some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention were the Sinfonietta Op. 1, A Hymn to the Virgin (1930) and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1934 for the BBC Singers. In this same period he wrote Friday Afternoons, a collection of 12 songs mostly for unison singing, for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn where Britten's brother, Robert, was headmaster.^[5]

Early professional life[link]

In April 1935 he was approached by the film director Alberto Cavalcanti to write the film score for the documentary The King's Stamp, produced by the GPO Film Unit.^[6] He subsequently met W. H. Auden, who was also working for the GPO Film Unit; together they worked on the films Coal Face and Night Mail.^[7] They also collaborated on the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers Op. 8, radical both in politics and musical treatment, and other works.

Of more lasting importance to Britten was his meeting in 1937 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his life partner. In the same year he composed a Pacifist March (words, Ronald Duncan) for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member, but the work was not a success and soon withdrawn. One of Britten's most noteworthy works from the 1930s was Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge for string orchestra, Op. 10, written in 1937.

In April 1939 Britten and Pears followed Auden to America. There, in 1940, Britten composed Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first of many song cycles for Pears. Already friends with the composer Aaron Copland, Britten encountered his latest works Billy the Kid and An Outdoor Overture, both of which manifestly influenced his own music.^[8] While in America Britten wrote his first music drama, Paul Bunyan, an operetta (to a libretto by Auden). The period in America was also remarkable for a number of orchestral works, including the Violin Concerto Op. 15, and Sinfonia da Requiem Op. 20 (for full orchestra).

In the meantime, Britten had had his first encounter with Balinese gamelan music through the transcriptions for two pianos made by the Canadian composer Colin McPhee. Britten first met McPhee at Stanton Cottage in the summer of 1939, and the two subsequently performed a number of McPhee's transcriptions for a recording.^[9] This musical encounter was to bear fruit decades later in several Balinese-inspired works including The Prince of the Pagodas,^[10] Noye's Fludde^[11] and Death in Venice.^[12]

Return to England[link]

Britten and Pears returned to England in April 1942, and both applied for recognition as conscientious objectors; Britten was initially allowed only non-combatant service in the military, but gained unconditional exemption on appeal. He completed the choral works Hymn to St. Cecilia (his last large-scale collaboration with Auden) and A Ceremony of Carols during the long sea voyage. He had already begun work on his opera Peter Grimes based on the writings of Suffolk poet George Crabbe; its première at Sadler's Wells in 1945 was his greatest success thus far. However, Britten encountered opposition from sectors of the English musical establishment and gradually withdrew from the London scene, founding the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival the following year, partly (though by no means solely) to perform his own works. From 1949 to 1951 he had his only private pupil, Arthur Oldham. One of Oldham's achievements was the setting for full orchestra of Britten's Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, for the Frederick Ashton ballet Le Rêve de Léonor (1949).^[13]

Peter Grimes was the first in a series of English operas, of which Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were particularly admired. His Shakespeare opera, A Midsummer Night's Dream, followed in 1960. These operas share common themes. Even in his comic opera Albert Herring of 1947, all feature an 'outsider' character excluded or misunderstood by society. Often this is the eponymous protagonist, as in Peter Grimes and Owen Wingrave.

Britten was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the Coronation Honours, 1953.^[14]

An increasingly important influence was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour with Pears in 1957, when Britten was struck by the music of the Balinese gamelan and by Japanese Noh plays. The fruits of this tour include the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) and the series of semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968). The greatest success of Britten's career was, however, the War Requiem, written for the 1962 consecration of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral.

Britten developed close friendships with Russian musicians Dmitri Shostakovich and Mstislav Rostropovich in the 1960s. He composed his Cello Suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for Mstislav Rostropovich, and conducted the first Western performance of Shostakovich's Fourteenth Symphony. Shostakovich dedicated this score to Britten, and often spoke very highly of his music. Britten himself had previously dedicated The Prodigal Son (the third and last of the 'Church Parables') to Shostakovich. He was honoured again by appointment to the Order of Merit (OM) on 23 March 1965.^[15]

In his last decade, Britten's health deteriorated, and his later works became more and more sparse in texture. They include the operas Owen Wingrave (1970) and Death in Venice (1971–1973), the Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was" (1974) and Third String Quartet (1975)— which drew on material from Death in Venice— as well as the dramatic cantata Phaedra (1975), written for Janet Baker.

	Op92; A Birthday Hansel for high voice and harp (1975) Part 1 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Performance by Alexander Kaimbacher (Tenor) and Volker Kempf (Harp).
Problems listening to these files? See media help.

Having previously declined a knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage on 2 July 1976 as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.^[16] A few months later he died of heart failure at his house in Aldeburgh. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul's Church there, with a gravestone carved by Reynolds Stone. The grave of his partner, Sir Peter Pears, lies next to his, and near to that of Imogen Holst, a close friend. A memorial stone to him was unveiled in the north choir aisle of Westminster Abbey in 1978.

The Red House in Aldeburgh, where Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lived and worked together for almost thirty years, is now the home of the Britten-Pears Foundation, established to promote their musical legacy.

Music[link]

Operas[link]

Britten's operas are firmly established in the international repertoire. According to Operabase, he has more operas played worldwide than any other composer born in the 20th century,^[17] and only Puccini and Richard Strauss come ahead of him if the list is extended to all operas composed after 1900.^[18]

Other genres[link]

Britten was an accomplished pianist, frequently performing chamber music and accompanying lieder and song recitals. However, apart from the Holiday Diary (1934), Piano Concerto (1938), Young Apollo (1939), Diversions (written for Paul Wittgenstein in 1940), Scottish Ballad (1941), he wrote relatively little music that puts the piano in the spotlight, and in a 1963 interview for the BBC said that he thought of it as "a background instrument".

One of Britten's best known works is The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (1946), which was composed to accompany Instruments of the Orchestra, an educational film produced by the British government, narrated and conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Its subtitle is Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell; the theme is a melody from Henry Purcell's Abdelazar. Britten gives individual variations to each of the sections of the orchestra, starting with the woodwind, then the string instruments, the brass instruments and finally the percussion. Britten then brings the whole orchestra together again in a fugue before restating the theme to close the work. The original film's spoken commentary is often omitted in concert performances and recordings.

Britten's church music is also considerable: it contains frequently performed 'classics' such as Rejoice in the Lamb, composed for St Matthew's Northampton (where the Vicar was Revd Walter Hussey), as well as A Hymn to the Virgin, and Missa Brevis for boys' voices and organ.

As a conductor, Britten performed the music of many composers, as well as his own. Among his celebrated recordings are versions of Mozart's 40th Symphony and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius (with Pears as Gerontius), and an album of works by Grainger in which Britten features as pianist as well as conductor.

Nocturnal after John Dowland for guitar (1963) has an indisputably central place in the repertoire of its instrument. This work is typically spare in his late style, and shows the depth of his lifelong admiration for Elizabethan lute songs. In each of the eight variations Britten focuses on a different feature of the work's theme, Dowland's song Come, Heavy Sleep, or its lute accompaniment, before the theme emerges complete at the close of the work.

In 2005, the Britten-Pears Foundation in partnership with the University of East Anglia was awarded funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to produce a thematic catalogue of Britten's works. The project is distinguished by being the first composer thematic catalogue to be published initially online. (All previous thematic catalogues have been print publications, though some have been published online later.) The work involves gathering and cataloguing manuscript and published notation and published recordings, producing a chronology, and assigning identifiers to Britten's works. These identifiers are in addition to Britten's own opus numbers and, after the style of preceding thematic catalogues such as BWV for J.S. Bach, comprise the letters 'BTC' followed by numbers assigned in chronological order. The catalogue includes numerous unpublished works and is expected, when completed in 2013, to include around 1,200 works. (Britten's published output includes around 200 works, of which 95 were assigned opus numbers.)

Reputation[link]

The Scallop by Maggi Hambling is a sculpture dedicated to Benjamin Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh. The edge of the shell is pierced with the words "I hear those voices that will not be drowned" from Peter Grimes.

Early in his career, Britten made a conscious effort to set himself apart from the English musical mainstream, which he regarded as complacent, insular and amateurish. Many contemporary critics distrusted his facility, cosmopolitanism and admiration for composers such as Mahler, Berg, and Stravinsky, not at the time considered appropriate models for a young English musician. Britten's status as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century is now secure among professional critics. However, criticism of his music is apt to become entangled with consideration of his personality, his politics (especially his pacifism in World War II) and his sexuality.^{[19][not in citation given]} Humphrey Carpenter's 1992 biography further described Britten's often fraught social, professional and sexual relationships, as did Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, set while Britten is composing the opera Death in Venice and centred on a fictional meeting between Britten and W. H. Auden (Britten was played in the premiere production by Alex Jennings).

In 2003, a selection of Britten's writings, edited by Paul Kildea, revealed other ways that he addressed such issues as his pacifism.^[20] A further study along the lines begun by Carpenter is John Bridcut's Britten's Children, 2006, which describes Britten’s infatuation with a series of pre-adolescent and adolescent boys throughout his life, most notably David Hemmings.^[21]

For many musicians, however, Britten's technique, broad musical and human sympathies and ability to treat the most traditional of musical forms with freshness and originality place him at the head of composers of his generation. A notable tribute is Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten, an orchestral piece written in 1977 by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.

Awards[link]

• UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers 1961, (for A Midsummer Night's Dream)
• Grammy Awards 1963 – Classical Album of the Year, Best Classical Composition by a Contemporary Composer, Best Classical Performance – Choral (Other Than Opera) (all for War Requiem)
• Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, 1964
• Sonning Award 1967 (Denmark)
• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 1974
• BRIT Awards 1977 – Best Orchestral Album (of the past 25 years) (for War Requiem)
• Grammy Hall of Fame Award 1998 (for War Requiem)

Recordings by Britten[link]

• Facets of Benjamin Britten Pearl, Pavilion Records (0220 GEM)
• Benjamin Britten – Premiere recordings 1938–46 Pearl, Pavilion Records (0002 GEM)
• Britten the Performer (BBC Legends Music)
• Benjamin Britten: In Rehearsal and Performance with Peter Pears

See also[link]

Ballet portal

• Britten's Children
• List of compositions by Benjamin Britten

References[link]

Sources[link]

• F. Avellar de Aquino. "Song of Sorrow". in The Strad Magazine, London, v. 117, Vol. 1391, p. 52–57, 2006. (on Britten's 3rd. Cello Suite)
• Philip Brett. "Benjamin Britten", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 18 October 2004), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
• Bridcut, John, Britten's Children, Faber and Faber, 2006. ISBN 0-571-22839-9
• Britten, Benjamin (edited by Philip Reed, Mervyn Cooke and Donald Mitchell) Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, Volume IV, 1952–1957 The Boydell Press, 633pp
• Britten, Benjamin (edited by John Evans) Journeying Boy: the Diaries of the Young Benjamin Britten, 1928–1938 (London: Faber and Faber), 2009)
• Humphrey Carpenter, Benjamin Britten: a biography (London: Faber and Faber, 1992) ISBN 0-571-14324-5
• Peter Evans. The Music of Benjamin Britten (London: J. M. Dent, 1979) ISBN 0-460-04350-1
• Michael Kennedy, 1981. Britten (London: J. M. Dent, 1983) ISBN 0-460-02201-6
• Donald Mitchell, "Britten, (Edward) Benjamin, Baron Britten (1913–1976)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Accessed 18 October 2004: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30853
• Michael Oliver. Benjamin Britten (London: Phaidon Press, 1996) ISBN 0-7148-3277-4

External links[link]

• Britten-Pears Foundation: biographies of Britten and Pears, timelines, work lists and descriptions, performance schedules.
• Boosey & Hawkes (Britten's publishers up to 1963): biographies, work lists and descriptions, recordings, performance schedules
• Faber Music (Publishers set up by Britten for his works after 1963): biography, work lists, recordings, performance schedules

Biographies and profiles[link]

• MusicWeb International. Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), by Rob Barnett
• Gresham College. 'Britten and Bridge', lecture and performance investigating the relation between the two composers, 5 February 2008 (available for download as text, audio or video file).
• On An Overgrown Path (blog). Photo essay on Britten's childhood home, November 2008.
• BBC. Audio (.ram files) of 1957 and 1963 interviews

Portraits[link]

• National Portrait Gallery. Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten (1913–1976), 109 portraits.

Worklists and performances[link]

• Scott Eric Smith. An extensive list of Benjamin Britten's works (archived / current)
• Britten-Pears Foundation/AHRC. A thematic catalogue of Britten's works (under development)
• Operabase. Recent and future performances of Britten operas.

Interpretations[link]

• Britten: A Ceremony of Carols (op. 28). Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge/ Harp: Frances Kelly/ Conductor: Richard Marlow (1997)
• Britten: On This Island, Kishani Jayasinghe
• Britten: Cello Symphony performed by cellist Julian Lloyd Webber and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner
• University of Iowa. Audio recording of Lachrymae, Viola: Christine Rutledge, piano: Darlene Lawrence. Clapp Recital Hall (1998).