Colin McPhee was a gay Canadian composer and musicologist. He is primarily know for being the first European to make a ethnomusicological study of Bali, and for the quality of that groundbreaking work. He also composed music influenced by that of Bali and Java decades before any other similar world music influenced compositions.

He studied with the pronounced modernist Edgard Varese before marrying Jane Belo, who had studied with Margaret Mead, in 1931. The two moved to Bali together for Belo's anthropological work, once there McPhee became so interested in the local music he studied, built, and wrote extensively of the gamelans.

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