A House in Bali: an opera by Evan Ziporyn

Review: 'House in Bali' creative yet distant
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Cal Performances presented the U.S. premiere of "A House in Bali," Evan Ziporyn's opera about Canadian composer Colin McPhee's stay in Bali.

Photo: Christine Southworth

East and West went through their age-old dance of fascination and mutual incomprehension in Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall on Saturday night, as Cal Performances presented the U.S. premiere of "A House in Bali," a lustrous and inventive - though oddly impersonal - opera by Evan Ziporyn.

Marked by an ingenious and often beautiful fusion of contemporary classical strains and Balinese gamelan, "A House in Bali" tells the story of Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer whose stay on the island in the 1930s did more than anything to spark the interest of Westerners in this rich artistic tradition.

Ziporyn, a composer and performer based at MIT (and, by way of full disclosure, someone I've known for years), is one of the Westerners in question. Much of his music has been shaped by his involvement with gamelan music, and this two-act opera, with a libretto by Paul Schick drawn largely from McPhee's memoir, is only the latest in a long series of works in which European and Balinese traditions intersect.

"A House in Bali" is at its most vibrant, in fact, when drawing big stylistic connections and contrasts. The score shifts its attention between surging post-minimalist textures, played by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and the clangorous, brightly colored explosions of Gamelan Salukat, a Balinese ensemble led by Dewa Ketut Alit.

Often the two co-exist, as in the vivid first scene, in which McPhee suffers through the Parisian new-music scene while haunted by his memories of Bali. Here Ziporyn crafts a hard-driving, jazzy ostinato in which gamelan rhythms lurk beneath the surface.

The two languages stand further apart in later scenes, including several intricate gamelan episodes and an ineffably sweet rhapsody - close to a pop ballad - when McPhee first glimpses the nubile Balinese boy Sampih (played by the gifted 13-year-old dancer Nyoman Triyana Usadhi).

In the opera's finest and most wrenching sequence, McPhee persuades Sampih's parents to let the boy live with him. As in "Lolita," artistic brilliance - in this case a deft, close-knit alternation between the gamelan and Western ensemble - seduces the audience into identifying with a sordid undertaking.

Yet what's missing amid the flow of large musical structures is a sense of the man at the center of the maelstrom. Even in a powerful and beautifully sung performance by tenor Marc Molomot, McPhee emerges here as something of a cipher.

He comes to Bali, suffers cultural misunderstandings and erotic longing, and leaves again without ever projecting much character or even unfurrowing his brow. This passive onlooker is hard to reconcile with the historical figure who worked so hard on behalf of traditional Balinese culture.

Ironically, his Western companions stand out much more tellingly, even as they flirt with caricature. Margaret Mead (the muscular soprano Anne Harley) is an officious presence, taking notes and photographs and urging everyone to read her book for further enlightenment. The German painter Walter Spies, sung with silky luxuriance by tenor Timur Bekbosunov, is a sybaritic delight.

In scenes mixing Balinese dance and theatrical traditions with Western naturalism, the villagers were splendidly played by Kadek Dewi Aryani, Desak Madé Suarti Laksmi and I Nyoman Catra. Director Jay Scheib's overstuffed production, including an ugly and intrusive video screen, needlessly amped up an already dense creation.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/29/DDBC19TL6H.DTL

This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

September 24, 2009

Opera pays tribute to Balinese gamelan music
Joshua Kosman, Chronicle Music Critic

The music of the Indonesian gamelan, with its clangorous sonorities and intricate, smoothly interlocking rhythms, has exerted its allure on countless composers and listeners over the past century.

One - perhaps the most influential - was the American composer Colin McPhee, who did more than anyone to introduce gamelan music to Westerners. Another is Evan Ziporyn, whose dance-opera about McPhee, "A House in Bali," has its U.S. premiere at UC Berkeley this weekend.

Ziporyn, 49, who teaches composition at MIT and is a founding member of the Bang On A Can All-Stars, has been intimately involved in Balinese music since 1980 (which was soon after we got to know one another as fellow undergraduates). In addition to many works for conventional Western forces, he has composed extensively for Gamelan Galak Tika, the ensemble he founded and leads at MIT.

Q: Why an opera about McPhee, of all people?

A: The idea came from my mother. She called me up about five or six years ago and said "I just had this dream that I was going to the premiere of your opera about Colin McPhee." And I immediately went into the default of "Yeah, Ma, thanks." But after I got off the phone I thought, "That's actually a really good idea."

Q: Who was McPhee, and why is he so important?

A: He was one of the first Westerners to go to Bali, in the 1930s, and he was really the guy who opened that door for everyone else. He's incredibly important not only to Westerners interested in Balinese music, but to the Balinese themselves, because he was the first person to make them aware that their culture was of interest to anyone else.

But it came at a great personal cost to him. He never recovered from his time in Bali, and never figured out how to balance his interest in that music with other stuff.

Q: What had he been doing before Bali?

A: He was a standard sort of neo-Classical composer in the William Schuman or Roy Harris mold, who studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. But after Bali, his career never got back on track. He wrote some pieces where he tried to reconcile these musics, and also some arrangements of Balinese music that sound like Lou Harrison 20 years ahead of when Lou Harrison did it.

But there was no tradition or support for this in America, and in his circles everyone was saying, "OK, when he is going to give this up and get serious about composing again?" For me, he's the great role model, but also the "there but for the grace of God go I" guy.

Q: The main source for your opera is "A House in Bali," McPhee's memoir of his visit. That book is both personal and musical, right?

A: The book is almost Nabokovian in its omissions. He went to Bali with his wife, and she's not in the book. Instead, you have these loving portraits of the boys and young men he encountered there. There's no sex at all, but clearly this is a self-portrait of a gay man on a voyage. In his telling, he's kind of alone there in Bali.

Q: Yet you and the librettist Paul Schick have added two other Westerners to the opera - the anthropologist Margaret Mead and the German painter Walter Spies. What are they doing there?

A: In fact they were both there with him, moving in the same circles, although Mead isn't mentioned in the book at all and Spies just barely. But the opera needed to have some contrasting figures.

In Freudian terms, you could say that Spies is the id - he went and painted and had numerous open affairs with Balinese men - while Mead as the superego stands above it all, pronouncing and analyzing and explaining. And McPhee is in the middle, trying to understand the music but also in love with this world.

Q: How did you get involved with Balinese music yourself?

A: My discovery was parallel to McPhee's, hearing a record at random in a record store and thinking "What the - ? What did I just hear?" It seemed to have just what I heard in Stravinsky and Bartók and fusion jazz, and had been trying to do in my own music - something syncopated but cool. It had energy, but also a dispassionate quality that allowed it to do amazing rhythmic things in this precise but offhand way.

So I went to Bali for a summer, and then came out to Berkeley and played with Gamelan Sekar Jaya, which had just been formed. My first gamelan pieces were written here - unlike McPhee, I was lucky enough to have an outlet and a community.

Q: After nearly 30 years, do you retain some feeling of the outsider in reference to this music?

A: Not really. Doing this opera has really squared the circle for me - I feel I've said what I wanted to say about the encounter between the two traditions. Not that there won't be "A House in Bali 2," but for now I think I've worked this issue through.

"A House in Bali": The opera is at 8 p.m. Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley. Tickets: $32-$68. Call (510) 642-9988 or go to www.calperformances.org.

E-mail Joshua Kosman at jkosman@sfchronicle.com.

June 11, 2009
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Jakarta Post - `Tragic love story' between Bali and the West
by Rucina Ballinger , Contributor , Ubud

(top) Evan Ziporyn, Dewa Ketut Alit, and Gamelan Salukat rehearsing in Ubud, Bali (bottom) Evan Ziporyn with Cok Wah, Prince of Ubud

Photos by Christine Southworth

The Ubud Palace, where the cultural exchange between Balinese and Western artists first began in the 1930s, has turned host for a new opera that deals with that very subject - the world premiere of Evan Ziporyn's cross-cultural opera A House in Bali.

This new work, which combines Western music with the gamelan and opera singers with arja (Balinese traditional opera) artists, and which features some of the finest singers and musicians from Bali and around the world, brings together Balinese and Western cultures in a way never imagined by the characters it portrays: composer Colin McPhee, artist Walter Spies and kebyar dancer I Sampih. The two free performances will take place at 8 p.m. on June 26 and 27, in the very location where Walter Spies first stayed in Bali, the Puri Saraswati in central Ubud. There, surrounded by lotuses on the enchanting Cokorda Ngurah Suyadnya (Cok Wah) stage, the story told in McPhee's famous memoir A House in Bali will be played out in artistic terms.

The international cast includes three acclaimed opera singers: tenor Marc Molomot as McPhee, Kazakh native Timur Bekbosunov as Walter Spies and Anne Harley as famed researcher Margaret Mead. Their Balinese counterparts - Nyoman Kal*r, the dancer Camplung and the parents of I Sampih - will be played by distinguished Balinese artists I Nyoman Catra, Desak Mad* Suarti Laksmi and Kadek Dewi Aryani. Sampih himself will be portrayed by Catra's son Nyoman Triyana Usadhi.

The singers will be accompanied by two of the most innovative ensembles in the avant-garde world: New York's famous Bang on a Can All-stars (directed by the composer) and Ubud's own Gamelan Salukat (directed by Dewa Ketut Alit).

Why an opera about Colin McPhee?

"Everyone involved in this project follows in the footsteps of McPhee, Spies and the Balinese artists who interacted with them," Ziporyn explains.

"There are now hundreds of American gamelans, and none would have been possible without McPhee's trailblazing work. Every painting you see on the streets of Ubud grows out of Spies' work with the young painters of the 1930s.

"Yet the Bali they loved was the old Bali, the Bali that would change so radically in subsequent years. Part of the motor for that change was the connection to the West, so in a sense they themselves contributed to the end of that era. Making this opera is a way to reflect on that encounter, a tragic love story between two cultures. Opera always has to have a tragic love story."

The resum*s of the Balinese artists underscore this. I Nyoman Catra and Desak Mad* Suarti Laksmi are experts in traditional Balinese performance but have also performed in plays and concerts worldwide. Dewi Kadek Aryani danced in Robert Wilson's I Galigo (featuring music by Rahayu Supanggah).

Dewa Ketut Alit is the co-founder of Gamelan Cudamani, and has composed many works for gamelan in the United States and Canada, some of which have been performed in New York's Carnegie Hall. They are all the "sons and daughters" of McPhee, Spies, Sampih and the rest.

For composer Ziporyn, the opera is the culmination of a 28-year involvement with Balinese gamelan, which began for him with a research trip to Bali in 1981. He studied legong drumming with I Made Lebah, who himself had been a good friend of McPhee.

Returning to America, Ziporyn joined Gamelan Sekar Jaya, traveling with them on their famous first Balinese tour in 1985. As a professor of music at MIT, he founded Gamelan Galak Tika, composing numerous cross-cultural works, including the memorial work for gamelan and orchestra, "Ngaben (for Sari Club)".

He also collaborated with dalang Wayan Wija on a full-length wayang kulit (shadow puppet) play with a Western accompaniment, Shadow Bang, which has been performed in New York, Boston and Amsterdam. And in 2005 he brought Galak Tika to Bali, performing at the Bali Arts Festival and across the island. At the same time, he has traveled the world with Bang on a Can, collaborating in the process with artists such as Paul Simon, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sonic Youth, Ornette Coleman and Philip Glass.

A House in Bali will bring the sounds of West and East together - electric guitars with reong and kendang; violins and cellos with suling and genggong, opera with arja and kidung. Will the mix be sweet or chaotic? Most likely it will be like the encounter between West and East itself: a combination of both.

Tickets are free but reservations are encouraged. For information please visit http://www.houseinbali.org or email southsea@kotekan.com