REPORT ON THE STATUS OF THE MCPHEE COLLECTION
Prepared by Andrew Toth: June 20, 1975 (reprinted March 1995)
The collection of the memorabilia of the late composer and musicologist Colin McPhee (1900-1964), previously a member of the faculty of the Department of Music at UCLA (1960-1964), has been donated by Mrs. Shirley Hawkins, executrix of McPhee's estate. The material has been divided into two parts: all manuscripts and materials relating to his own compositions are housed in the closed stacks of the Music Library, and the portion relating to his work in Balinese music is housed in the Ethnomusicology Archive. Previously received material from the latter has already been incorporated into the Archive's holdings, consisting of transparencies (duplicated from lantern slides) and old 78 rpm recordings of Balinese music. The remaining portion of the collection, more recently acquired, presented rather formidable problems of sorting and organizing a large number of boxes of jumbled papers, photographs, and books. The books in the collection have been sorted and are now housed in the Archive. The papers and manuscripts have been sorted and placed in folders, a list of which is appended to this report. Further work with this material should concentrate on further organization of the published writings, articles, and reviews about McPhee. The field notes pertaining to McPhee's stay in Bali during the 1930s have been left as they were, in journal form (chronological order), as information about a particular genre of music is found to be distributed throughout his notes.
Aside from the initial sorting, the greatest amount of time has been spent with the photographs. There are 565 negatives, almost all of the 2-1/4" sq. in format; however, only 70 of them deal specifically with music. There are two groups of black and white photographs made from these, and others missing, negatives: the majority are 2-1/4" format (probably contact prints), and assorted larger sizes comprise the rest.
Because of the unique value of these photographs made over forty years ago, and McPhee's remarkable skill as a photographer, it was decided to preserve the curled prints as effectively as possible for future use in research and teaching. The negatives were placed in non-acidic glassine envelopes, and the most important prints -- pertaining to Balinese music, dance and art -- were dry mounted on non-acidic, four-ply museum board. All of the photographs and negatives were sorted, a classification system using a Dewey decimal index formulated for the collection, and each negative and photo given in accession number.
For the index appended to this report, it can be seen that 1744 small photographs and 647 large photographs have been mounted so far. The several thousand remaining photographs, pertaining to Balinese portraits and scenery, as well as other places visited by McPhee (Java, Sumatra, Cambodia, Thailand, Mexico), are all ordered according to the classification system. They have not yet been assigned accession numbers, however, in the event that they also may be mounted in the future.
A successful display using materials drawn from the collection, entitled Colin McPhee: A Composer in Bali, was on exhibit in the Music Library during the month of January.