It used to be said that we study history for the lessons we can learn for the present: ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’. But now that the music of the past occupies the centre-stage—with contemporary work getting the walk-on parts—perhaps we should reverse this, and ask how far the past can be illuminated by what happens today.

Walter Zimmermann (b. 1949) is one of the most interesting figures in German music today, interesting not only because of his own music but also because of his enthusiastic advocacy of a wide range of other musics. In Cologne, where Zimmermann was based from his student days until his recent move to West Berlin, he founded the Beginner Studio where he promoted a concert series that embraced everything from improvisation to minimalism, from the avantgarde to ethnic musics. In particular he used the Beginner Studio as a venue to introduce many of the more ‘experimental’ American composers whose music he had encountered in preparing his book of interviews, Desert Plants.

In his prefatory ‘Note’ to the full score of Tabuh-Tabuhan (eventually published by AMP Inc. 1960), McPhee wrote:

Tabuh-Tabuhan was composed in Mexico in 1936 and first performed by Carlos Chavez and the National Orchestra of Mexico City. It was written after I had spent four years in Bali engaged in musical research, and is largely inspired, especially in its orchestration, by the various methods I had learned of Balinese gamelan technique. The title of the work derives from the Balinese word tabuh, originally meaning the mallet used for striking a percussion instrument, but extended to mean strike or beat… Tabuh-Tabuhan is thus a Balinese collective noun, meaning different drum rhythms, metric forms, gong punctuations, gamelans, and music essentially percussive. In a subtitle I call the work Toccata for Orchestra and two pianos.