Percy Grainger

Percy Aldridge Grainger (8 July 1882 – 20 February, 1961) was an Australian-born pianist, composer, and champion of the saxophone and the Concert band. Grainger remains controversial on two accounts. Firstly, Grainger was an enthusiastic sado-masochist. Secondly, he was a cheerful believer in the racial superiority of blond-haired and blue-eyed northern Europeans. These overtones of xenophobia and anti-Semitism were, however, inconsistently and eccentrically applied. He was friends with and an admirer of Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. Also, Grainger eagerly collected folk music tunes, forms, and instruments from around the world, from Ireland to Bali, and incorporated them into his own works.

Percy Grainger, 1915

File:Grainger museum university of melbourne.jpg

Grainger Museum. University of Melbourne Parkville Campus.

Biography

He was born in Brighton, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. His father was an architect who emigrated from London, England, and his mother, Rose, was the daughter of hoteliers from Adelaide, South Australia, also of English immigrant stock. His father was an alcoholic. When Grainger was age 11, his parents separated after his mother contracted syphilis from his father, who then returned to London. Grainger's mother was domineering and possessive, although cultured; she recognised his musical abilities, and took him to Europe in 1895 to study at Dr. Hoch's conservatory in Frankfurt. There he displayed his talents as a musical experimenter, using irregular and unusual meters.

From 1901 to 1914 Grainger lived in London, where he befriended and was influenced by composer Edvard Grieg. Grieg had a longstanding interest in the folk songs of his native Norway, and Grainger developed a particular interest in recording the folk songs of rural England. During this period, Grainger also wrote and performed piano compositions that presaged the forthcoming popularization of the tone cluster by Leo Ornstein and Henry Cowell.

Percy Grainger moved to the United States at the outbreak of World War I in 1914. His 1916 piano composition In a Nutshell is the first by a classical music professional in the Western tradition to require direct, non-keyed sounding of the strings—in this case, with a mallet—which would come to be known as a "string piano" technique. When the United States entered the war in 1917, he enlisted into a United States Army band playing the oboe and soprano saxophone, and spent the duration of the war giving dozens of concerts in aid of War Bonds and Liberty Loans. In 1918, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Philosophically, Grainger believe that music should reflect the irregularities of the natural world, hence his music often contains asymmetrical rhythms and highly innovative harmonic progressions. Writing on this subject he stated, "The big object of the modern composer is to bring music more and more into line with the irregularities and complexities of nature and away from the straight lines and simplifications imposed by man. We should follow nature and allow ourselves very possible freedom of expression."

In spite of his highly original harmonic syntax, Grainger's music remains rooted in traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Writing in Musical Quarterly, Cyril Scott wrote of Grainger's unique, folk-influenced style, "Even when he keeps the folk songs within their original dimensions he has a way of dealing with them which is entirely new, yet at the same time never lacking in taste."

His Music

His piano solo Country Gardens became a smash hit, securing his reputation, although Grainger grew to detest the piece. With his newfound wealth, Grainger and his mother settled in the suburb of White Plains, New York after the war. Rose Grainger's health, however, both mental and physical, was in decline. She committed suicide in 1922 by jumping from the building where her son's manager, Antonia Sawyer, had her office . This did serve to free Grainger from an over-intimate relationship which many had incorrectly assumed to be incestuous, although his mother's memory remained dear to him for the rest of his life.

In the same year, he traveled to Denmark, his first folk-music collecting trip to Scandinavia (although he had visited Grieg there in 1906), and the orchestration of the music of the region would shape much of his finest output.

In November 1926 Grainger met the Swedish artist and poet Ella Viola Ström and, freed from his mother's domination, fell in love at first sight. Their wedding was one of the most remarkable on record. It took place on 9 August 1928 on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl, following a concert before an audience of 20,000, with an orchestra of 126 musicians and an a cappella choir, which sang his new composition, To a Nordic Princess, dedicated to Ella.

In December, 1929 Grainger established himself as a musical innovator with a style of orchestration or arranging that he called "Elastic Scoring." He outlined his concept in an essay that he called, "To Conductors, and those forming, or in charge of, Amateur Orchestras, High School, College and Music School Orchestras and Chamber-Music Bodies."

In 1932 he became Dean of Music at New York University, and underscored his reputation as an experimenter by putting jazz on the syllabus and inviting Duke Ellington as a guest lecturer, although he found academic life difficult and soon abandoned it forever.

In 1940, the Graingers moved to Springfield, Missouri, from which base Grainger again toured to give a series of army concerts during the Second World War. However, after the war, poor health, declining ability as a pianist and the gradual decline in popularity of classical music hit his spirits hard.

In his last years, working in collaboration with Burnett Cross, Grainger invented the "Free Music Machine" which was the forerunner of the electric synthesizer.

Percy Grainger died in White Plains, New York and he was buried in Adelaide, Australia. His personal files and records have been preserved at The Grainger Museum in the grounds of the University of Melbourne, the design and construction of which he oversaw. Many of his instruments and scores are located at the Grainger house in White Plains, New York, now the headquarters of the International Percy Grainger Society.

Controversy

His music aside, he remains controversial on two accounts. Firstly, Grainger was an enthusiastic sado-masochist. Secondly, he was a cheerful believer in the racial superiority of blond-haired and blue-eyed northern Europeans. This led to attempts, in his letters and musical manuscripts, to use only what he called "blue-eyed English" (akin to Anglish and the 'Pure English' of Dorset poet William Barnes) which expunged all foreign (i.e. non-Germanic) influences. Thus many Grainger scores use words such as "louden," "soften," and "holding back" in place of standard Italian musical terms such as "crescendo," "diminuendo," and "meno mosso."

This racial thinking (with its concomitant overtones of xenophobia and antisemitism) was, however, inconsistently and eccentrically applied: he was friends with and an admirer of Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. He eagerly collected folk music tunes, forms, and instruments from around the world, from Ireland to Bali, and incorporated them into his own works. Furthermore, alongside his love for Scandinavia was a deep distaste for German academic music theory; he almost always shunned such standard (and ubiquitous) musical structures as sonata form, calling them "German" impositions. He was ready to extend his admiration for the wild, free life of the ancient Vikings to other groups around the world which in his view shared their way of life, such as the ancient Greece of the Homeric epics.

Notable works

American Folk Music Settings

• Spoon River

British Folk Music Settings

• Bold William Taylor
• British Waterside (The Jolly Sailor)
• Country Gardens
• Creepin' Jane
• The Duke of Marlborough Fanfare
• Early One Morning
• Green Bushes (Passacaglia on an English Folksong)
• Hard-Hearted Barb'ra
• I'm Seventeen Come Sunday
• His Mother
• Irish Tune from County Derry
• Lincolnshire Posy
  • 1. Dublin Bay (Lisbon) (Sailor's Song)
  • 2. Harkstow Grange (The Miser and His Man: A Local Tragedy)
  • 3. Rufford Park Poachers (Poaching Song)
  • 4. The Brisk Young Sailor (Who Returned to Wed His True Love)
  • 5. Lord Melbourne (War Song)
  • 6. The Lost Lady Found (Dance Song)
• The Merry King
• Molly on the Shore
• The Pretty Maid Milkin' Her Cow
• Scotch Strathspey and Reel
• Shepherd's Hey
• Sir Eglamore
• Six Dukes Went A-Fishin'
• The Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol
• Ye Banks and Braes O' Bonnie Doon

Danish Folk Music Settings

• Danish Folk Song Suite
  • The Power of Love
  • Lord Peter's Stable Boy
  • The Nightingale and The Two Sisters
  • Jutish Melody

Faroe Island

• Faroe Island Dance (Let's Dance Gay in Green Meadow)
• The Merry Wedding

Kipling Settings

• Fisher's Boarding House
• Lukannon
• The Men of the Sea
• Merciful Town
• Northern Ballad
• Ride with an Idle Whip
• The Sea-Wife

Room-music Tit-bits

• Children's March 'Over The Hills And Far Away'
• Handel in the Strand (Clog Dance) (after Handel's "The Harmonious Blacksmith")
• Mock Morris
• Walking Tune
• Zanzibar Boat Song

Sentimentals

• Colonial Song

Sea-Chanty Settings

• Shallow Brown

Settings of Songs and Tunes from William Chappell's Old English Poplular Music

• My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone
• Willow, Willow

YT

• Sailor's Chanty
• The Secret of the Sea
• Soldier, Soldier
• There Were Three Friends
• We Were Dreamers"

Others

• Beautiful Fresh Flower (after traditional Chinese music)
• Blithe Bells (ramble on Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze")
• Chorale No. 2 (after César Franck's Chorale No. 2)
• Colleen Dhas (The Valley Lay Smiling)
• Dreamery
• English Dance
• Harvest Hymn
• Hill Song No. 1
• Hill Song No. 2
• The Immovable "Do" (or The Cyphering "C")
• The Lads of Wamphray March (from the ballad The Lads of Wamphray)
• March (from Bach's Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach)
• Marching Song Of Democracy
• O Mensch, Bewein' Dein' Sunde Gross (after the Bach prelude)
• The Power Of Rome And The Christian Heart
• Songs of the North
  • Leezie Lindsay
  • Bonnie George Campbell
  • Drowned
  • Willie's Gane To Melville Castle
• Suite "In a Nutshell"
  • I. Arrival Platform Humlet
  • II. Gay But Wistful
  • III. Pastoral
  • IV. The `Gum Suckers' March
• Tuscan Serenade (after Fauré's Op. 3, No. 2)
• The Warriors (Music to an Imaginary Ballet)
• Youthful Rapture
• Youthful Suite
  • 1. Northern March
  • 2. Rustic March
  • 3. Norse Dirge
  • 4. Eastern Intermezzo
  • 5. English Waltz

Notes and references

• Bird, John, Percy Grainger, London: P. Elek, 1976. ISBN 0-236-40004-5
• Ewen, David, American Composers: A Biographical Dictionary, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1982. ISBN 0-399-12626-0
• Gillies, Malcolm; Pear, David, Portrait of Percy Grainger, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. ISBN 1-580-46087-9
• Mellers, Wilfrid Howard, Percy Grainger, Oxford; NY: Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-198-16269-3

External links

• The International Percy Grainger Society Retrieved June 23, 2007.
• The Percy Grainger Society Retrieved June 23, 2007.
• The Grainger Ensemble Retrieved June 23, 2007.
• The Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, Australia Retrieved June 23, 2007.

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