In the 1930’s, Cana­dian com­poser Colin McPhee lived for the most part in Indone­sia, mainly on the islands of Bali and Java, where he stud­ied and tran­scribed game­lan music. Although obscure to the gen­eral pub­lic and even to much of the clas­si­cal world, his stud­ies and the ways in which he incor­po­rated the tra­di­tional music into his own work have had an impor­tant and last­ing effect on con­tem­po­rary clas­si­cal music. His book, “Music in Bali ‚” and his 1940’s record­ings of his tran­scrip­tions in piano duet with Ben­jamin Brit­ten paved the way for the music of such com­posers as Lou Har­ri­son and Ingram Mar­shall. As a com­poser and eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gist, he was in the sweet spot of his­tory, after the volup­tuous Ori­en­tal­ism of the Impres­sion­ists and before the emer­gence of the idea among sup­pos­edly right-thinking peo­ple that cul­ture, espe­cially non-white, non-Western cul­ture, was a commodity.

McPhee is indi­rectly respon­si­ble for the work of Evan Ziporyn, who is not only an excel­lent clar­inetist and mem­ber of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, but a fine com­poser and the leader of his own game­lan, Game­lan Galak Tika. So who bet­ter to cre­ate an opera about McPhee, specif­i­cally taken from another of the composer’s books, his mem­oir “A House In Bali,” which BAM pre­sented last week as part of this year’s Next Wave fes­ti­val. It’s a dense and ambi­tious work that tries to cover a broad range of con­cepts in the space of ninety min­utes, and that range, while often daz­zling, ulti­mately leaves the work unsat­is­fac­to­rily adrift and even unguided.

Ziporyn and libret­tist Paul Schick intro­duce us to McPhee as the com­poser wan­ders Paris and longs for Bali. He returns to the island, full of plans, runs afoul of native cul­ture, longs for a young boy and ulti­mately departs. Ziporyn’s music fre­quently cap­tures how this works out, in a series of jux­ta­po­si­tions, con­flicts and occa­sional comity between con­tem­po­rary, almost rock, writ­ing for the All-Stars as well as music per­formed by Bali’s Game­lan Salukat. It works in spite of the libretto, which, though it has nicely crafted indi­vid­ual lines, does lit­tle to define most of the char­ac­ters or to tell us what Ziporyn and Schick think is really going on. From moment to moment the words and music are mostly fine, but the jour­ney from start to fin­ish of the piece ends up mak­ing only a lit­tle sense and hav­ing a dis­ap­point­ing effect.

Ziporyn delib­er­ately keeps the musics, West­ern and game­lan, sep­a­rate for most of the work. All the musi­cians are onstage, joined by the singers who inter­act with the game­lan musi­cians, who them­selves leave their sta­tions and become part of the action, con­vey­ing the idea of the com­mu­nity in which McPhee (Peter Tantsits) is liv­ing. Game­lan Salukat is joined by other Indone­sian per­form­ers, Kadek Dewi Aryani, Desak Madé Suarti Laksmi and Nyoman Catra, who each play mul­ti­ple roles and dance, and Nyoman Triyana Usadhi who plays Sampih, the object of the com­posers desire. McPhee’s friends Wal­ter Spies and Mar­garet Mead are played by Timur Bek­bo­sunov and Anne Harley. That the West­ern per­form­ers play indi­vid­u­als and the Indone­sian ones ful­fill many roles is per­haps unin­ten­tion­ally reveal­ing of the fun­da­men­tal con­flicts in the drama and the fun­da­men­tal prob­lems in the opera’s story.

McPhee is both dis­sat­is­fied with West­ern music after his first taste of Bali and unable to adapt to vil­lage life. He tries to have a house built and not only picks an inaus­pi­cious site but expects the work to be done on a Euro­pean timetable, he offends the vil­lage and must make amends in a tra­di­tional, not con­trac­tual man­ner, he falls in love with a young boy, a mat­ter of fac­tual record that in the con­text of this work seems the ulti­mate non­cha­lant, con­de­scend­ing insult of an igno­rant West­erner. Spies is sup­posed to have gone native in some more suc­cess­ful man­ner, though this is asserted rather than demon­strated, while Mead wan­ders blithely through the set, com­ment­ing on what she sees but offer­ing us no insight. The stag­ing, by Jay Scheib, is imag­i­na­tive. There is a smaller box on the stage that rep­re­sents the inte­rior of McPhee’s home and out of which images are pro­jected on a screen hang­ing over the stage. At the back is another screen, with video that gives us the land­scape of place — a house and gar­den, mem­bers of the com­mu­nity, streams and forests. A great deal of the music is rep­re­sented through dance, mainly from Kadek Dewi Aryani and Desak Madé Suarti Laksmi, who are riv­et­ing per­form­ers, and their danc­ing is the most beau­ti­ful and involv­ing aspect of the opera.

What hap­pens with the char­ac­ters is more prob­lem­atic. McPhee demands the atten­tion imme­di­ately, psy­cho­log­i­cally on edge and accom­pa­nied by effec­tively brit­tle triple-meter music from the All-Stars. As he sings, the mem­bers of the game­lan wan­der onto stage, as if out of his mem­ory, and this begin­ning is deeply aus­pi­cious. The sense of McPhee as stranger in a strange land is effec­tively con­veyed by his inabil­ity to suc­cess­fully inter­act with the vil­lagers. But once he finds a way to have his house built in scene three, the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of both him and his friends is aban­doned by the libretto. They sing, but their words tell us noth­ing more about them. Spies is sup­posed to be impor­tant, but he is less than a cipher, and his ulti­mate arrest just hap­pens and we’re sup­posed to know why if we read the syn­op­sis but can’t pos­si­bly tell why by watch­ing the opera. When McPhee sets eyes on Sampih, Ziporyn gives him a lovely, almost pop bal­lad which is very effec­tive musi­cally and in terms of char­ac­ter, but again the libretto wan­ders away inco­her­ently. The cli­max is musi­cally effec­tive, the ten­sion build­ing, but on stage what is clearly meant to be an emo­tional high­point of McPhee real­iz­ing the futil­ity of his pur­suit and Spies arrest is just con­fused, not by the direc­tion but by the lack of the char­ac­ters hav­ing much to say about what is hap­pen­ing to them. This is opera, we need to hear from them. The con­clu­sion is dom­i­nated by a solil­o­quy from Mead and sym­bolic action from the dancers; the lat­ter is mys­te­ri­ous and involv­ing, the for­mer is irri­tat­ing — she has been a minor fig­ure, more of a set dec­o­ra­tion than a char­ac­ter, and her pres­ence in front of the score makes no sense.

It is the abstract parts of A House in Bali that work, that are focussed, clear and attrac­tive. Ziporyn switches back and forth between lyri­cal Post-Minimalism and game­lan, and the music itself is a char­ac­ter. The two musics mis­con­nect and mis­un­der­stand each other for long stretches, and this is the point. The game­lan music tends to dom­i­nate both in dura­tion and inter­est, although this may be a sub­tle effect of that music being strange to us, and cer­tainly the nar­ra­tive danc­ing is fas­ci­nat­ing and mar­velous, telling us what is hap­pen­ing more force­fully than the char­ac­ters them­selves. There is also an inter­est­ing com­par­i­son of musi­cal val­ues at work, with the West­ern music set in a com­mon hier­ar­chy of the act­ing singers play­ing a role on stage with musi­cal accom­pa­ni­ment, and the game­lan ensem­ble, which is implic­itly social, the musi­cians inter­ac­tion on stage, along with the coor­di­nated phys­i­cal beauty of the play­ing itself, where the grace­ful ges­ture of how each instru­ment is approached is as impor­tant as play­ing the notes together in time. The one fault, as with the direc­tion, is that at times the activ­ity is too dense. It’s often hard to keep track of one thing on stage because so many things are hap­pen­ing, and at times the music becomes a mass of undif­fer­en­ti­ated sound, espe­cially in a trio for the main char­ac­ters. As Ziporyn piles on instru­ments, the voices get com­pletely lost in the mix. The instru­ments and singers were miked, which was prob­a­bly nec­es­sary, but the PA at the Howard Gilman Opera House is not good, and the singers’ head­sets sieved out the most col­or­ful par­tials from their voices, leav­ing their tim­bres flat, metal­lic and bland, an unfor­tu­nate reflec­tion of the qual­ity that Schick gave them.