Percy Grainger: Australian Visionary
Percy Grainger in 1919. Click to enlarge.
For those whose only exposure to the music of Percy Grainger might be the ubiquitous renderings of his jaunty “Country Gardens” on countless student piano recitals, it may come as a surprise to see the name “Grainger” listed among our “visionaries” for the season. But in fact, Percy Grainger was a unique musical personality with a pioneering spirit who brought forth, within the framework of his tonal, folk song inspired musical idiom, a number of surprising innovations and inventions.
Though Grainger was born in Australia in 1882, he spent his formative years in Europe studying piano. Over time he established his reputation as a concert performer and composer and met many of the significant figures in European music, including Edvard Grieg and Frederick Delius.
In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. He continued to travel intermittently, both to Europe and Australia, and in the 1930s set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.
Mark N. Grant at the entrance to the Grainger House in White Plains, NY. Click to enlarge.
For the newcomer looking to explore the terrain of Grainger, the best place to begin is at the Percy Grainger House in White Plains, NY, an organization dedicated to preserving the life and lore of Grainger (in much the same way as our own Marcella Sembrich Memorial Association guards the legacy of Madame Sembrich): https://www.percygraingeramerica.org/
We’re pleased to welcome Mark N. Grant, Vice President of the International Percy Grainger Society. Mark, who had been scheduled to give our season-opening studio talk, graciously has agreed to join us here, online.
But first, let’s introduce the man himself, Percy Grainger, performing one of his own compositions in this astounding film that somehow manages to combine the separately recorded audio and video tracks into a convincing whole!:
Film and audio of Percy Grainger playing his folk song arrangements, Maguire's Kick & Shepherd's Hey (silent film of Percy Grainger from the 1920s, synchronized with the composer's audio recordings of 16 May 1908 and 4 July 1914)
The Grainger House music room. Click to enlarge.
Richard Wargo: Welcome, Mark! Are there any specific comments you’d like to share on that amazing piece of footage?
Mark N. Grant: Around 1920, the New York music publisher Schirmer commissioned three very short silent promotional films of Percy playing the piano and conducting… In the 1980s at the Grainger House in White Plains we discovered a metal canister containing 16mm celluloid film of these Schirmer films. At that point nobody knew what pieces Percy was playing at the piano in the films. I visually deciphered that in the first film he was playing the March-Jig, the first of the Charles Villiers Stanford “Four Irish Dances” familiarly known as “Maguire’s Kick” which Percy had recorded in 1908, and in the second his own “Shepherd’s Hey.” It required some time in a professional film/recording studio to adjust the speed of the film to the pitch of the 1908 recording to create the illusion of a synced-up performance. With “Shepherd’s Hey,” our film had too many frames missing for realization of a credibly synchronized performance with any of Grainger’s recordings of “Shepherd’s Hey.” A portion of our synchronization of “Maguire’s Kick” made its way into the Peter Rosen documentary film The Art of the Piano. The link you’ve posted here is a recent upload on YouTube by the British pianist Jack Gibbons. Mr. Gibbons seems to have created this version out of a different source film that he had access to, a better version without any missing film frames. We’ve written to him to ask how he acquired it and have not received a response as of this writing.
The Grainger House living room with an 1897 Steinway A2, just completely rebuilt and restored.
RW: Let’s begin by considering Grainger as a visionary, in particular, his innovations for piano.
Bronze bust of Percy Grainger by Maurice Lucien Loriaux.
MNG: Percy Grainger actually wrote very little original music for the piano! What I mean is, the large body of works for the piano he created were his own idiomatic piano transcriptions of his prior compositions in other mediums, i.e. orchestral and chamber music. (One exception is his most famous piece, “Country Gardens,” which started as a solo piano piece before he then arranged it for other instrumental combinations.) As a result his piano writing translates the sonorities, doublings, and register changes that are endemic to orchestrated music but in a way that sounds pianistic to the ear. For example, he will translate the long notes bowed by string players to piano chord tremolandos, and translate long, sustained wind or string notes into pedal point octaves or chords held by the middle pedal of the piano which then re-sound when the same notes are re-struck by the pianist’s fingers through changing keyboard textures. He will also vary the placement of melodies in different registers of the piano or double the melody at different octaves, especially in his two-piano four-hand piano writing, for the sake of obtaining a different color when the melody is repeated, a common technique of orchestrated music. As a result, you get the unusually resourceful exploitation of the high treble range in Grainger’s piano music. In all of his piano music he also uses differential rather than block dynamics for chords. In other words, he will assign a different dynamic level to each note of a four or five note chord–sometimes giving the middle note of the chord the loudest dynamic– so as to simulate the different colors of the orchestra. Another technique singular to Grainger’s piano writing was his complex use of difficult arpeggiation not for embellishment but to prolong both harmonies and melodies. Grainger’s word for this was “harping” chords, and in his own recordings of his own works, you can hear how he actually did make these chords sound like the proverbial Aeolian harp.
RW: This might be a fitting place to link to an example.
Percy Grainger (1882-1961) One More Day, My John (1915) with score Penelope Thwaites (piano)
RW: Are there any particular comments you’d like to share on that lovely piece? I’m taken with the meticulous detail in the notation----for instance, a technique that you mentioned earlier, a three note chord with three different dynamic markings, a different one for each finger!
MNG: In concert Grainger would play “One Day My John” as a “preliminary canter,” a piece that would adapt the ears of the audience to the tonality of the next piece on the program. In Grainger’s era, many great pianists (notably Josef Hofmann) improvised a few pianissimo bars between pieces on the program to accomplish the same purpose.
RW: I think anyone following a Grainger score for the first time might be struck by the absence of conventional Italian expression marks with instructions provided in English instead. This might be a good place to bring up one of a number of controversies surrounding the composer: Grainger’s espousal of “blue-eyed English.” Let’s take up the topic with a video from the Grainger House archive so that our members have a chance to see you, Mark:
From a conversation with Mark Grant, Robert Sherman and Neely Bruce about Percy Grainger at the Grainger House Museum in White Plains, New York on 12 May 2017.
Percy Grainger’s “Free Music Gin.”
RW: Beyond innovations for piano there are actual musical inventions, such as the Free Music Machine, created by Grainger. Can you detail some of those?
MNG: After the Second World War ended and Grainger was resituated in his White Plains home (Percy and his wife Ella had moved temporarily to Springfield, Missouri), Grainger began to devote more time to his lifelong dream of creating “Free Music” – music without discrete pitch or rhythm– which he had earlier attempted to realize by writing for string quartet and massed theremins. He met a young physics teacher, Burnett Cross, who ended up collaborating with him on the design and carpentry of homemade jerry-rigged contraptions that could produce variable pitch sounds–glissandos, in the technical term– that Grainger evidently felt were more natural than those of the theremin or violin. These “free music gins” as Percy referred to them were built out of discarded woodworking remnants and household implements with great ingenuity. Percy gave them imaginative names like “the reed-box tone tool.” The vestiges of one of them still reposes in the Grainger House in White Plains while others are in the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia. I got to know Burnett Cross in later years (he passed in 1996); he was tirelessly interested in explaining to one and all the whole fifteen year history of the free music gins.
RW: Then of course there are the eccentricities of Grainger’s personality---a vegetarian who disliked vegetables, a world traveler fearful of cars. He even willed his skeleton to the Grainger Museum in Melbourne!
Portrait by the composer's wife, Swedish artist Ella Ström entitled "The Laird of Art." The painting depicts Grainger in a colorful handmade outfit made from towels, of the type that Percy and Ella would regularly fashion during the summer months in order to stay cool. Click to view full image.
MNG: We have to remember that Percy Grainger did not attend school and was not conventionally educated. Except for three brief months, he was entirely home schooled by his mother Rose until he was sent to Frankfurt, Germany to enroll in the conservatory there in his teenaged years in the late 1890s. So he learned to think “out of the box” from a very early age, and as a result some of his enthusiasms and his ways of expressing them appeared peculiar or eccentric to people educated by societal norms. The other side of these “peculiarities” is that he deliberately puffed them up for the effect it would have on the public: Kaare Nygaard, Grainger’s physician and friend, personally told me that he learned not to take Grainger’s many apparently outrageous statements so seriously because “he was a performer, and he was performing.” Grainger expressed many of his ideas freely and unstintingly in his lifelong journals and they have survived him and given understandable pause to many: his racial ideas, his sexual habits with flagellation, etc. It has to be pointed out that the bulk of his correspondence reveals more of a regular, down-to-earth guy than his flights of wild fancy. We all have a fantasy life; he acted on his more than most. In most of his letters Grainger emerges as an unusually kindly, modest artist, and as a dutiful and doting stepfather to his stepdaughter Elsie. He was also a very down-to-earth businessman when it came to his career. He earned a lot of money as a musician by dint of his shrewd promotion of himself and management of his finances.
Fifty Shades of Grainger: The composer left to the Grainger Museum in Australia a trunk related to his private sexual proclivities, including a collection of whips. He attached a note on the trunk instructing that the contents remain sealed until ten years after his death. Grainger believed that his creativity was tied to his sexual drive and that flagellation triggered them both.
RW: Another unconventional aspect of Grainger is the fact that he didn’t make a living on commissions or through teaching on the faculty of a university. Let’s view another clip from the Grainger House archive:
From a conversation with Mark N. Grant, Robert Sherman and Neely Bruce about Percy Grainger at the Grainger House Museum in White Plains, New York on 12 May 2017.
Though Percy Grainger and Marcella Sembrich travelled in largely separate circles, they did share at least one point of intersection: their associations with the Flonzaley Quartet.
The Flonzaley Quartet was founded in 1903 by Edward de Coppet, a close personal friend of Marcella Sembrich and her husband Guillaume Stengel. De Coppet’s daughter Juliette went on to marry Sembrich’s son Wilhelm in 1927 and to establish the Marcella Sembrich Memorial Studio in 1937.
An assembly of guests in the de Coppet music room in New York City, 1916. From The Sembrich Collection.
The Flonzaley Quartet assesses their own recording of “Molly on the Shore.”
Here is a wonderful photo from the Sembrich Collection, above, dated 1916 featuring an assembly of guests in the de Coppet music room in New York City including members of the Flonzaley along with Marcella Sembrich (center) and Percy Grainger (back row, third from the left). Also, a photo of the Flonzaley players assessing their recording of “Molly on the Shore.”
Listen now to Percy Grainger’s “Molly on the Shore” recorded by the Flonzaley Quartet on May 9, 1918. (Longtime Sembrich members may recall the performance of this work by the Hyperion Quartet during our 2011 season).
What a thrill to view the shelves of original scores and parts at the Grainger House, carefully stacked and labelled in the composer's own hand.
A replica of an Edison standard phonograph with horn on display in the Grainger House. Click to enlarge.
We couldn’t close out our chapter on Percy Grainger without mention of the composer’s enormous contribution to the wind ensemble repertoire. The basis for much of his music for band can be traced to the years between 1905 and 1909. During this time, Grainger travelled to different regions of England and collected around 350 folk songs, preserving authentic performances on an Edison wax cylinder machine. This collection of English folk songs served as a new source of inspiration for the composer and resulted in many future works. After moving to America in 1914, Grainger served as Assistant Instructor at the Army Band School on Governor's Island during World War I. His earliest published band works date from these years and include numerous folk song settings and original compositions. His most famous work for band, the six-movement Lincolnshire Posy, was commissioned by the American Bandmasters Association in 1937 and first performed by the Milwaukee Symphonic Band. Each movement of the work was inspired by a specific singer and an individual folksong collected in the field: "These folk-singers were the kings and queens of song!" he declared. "No concert singer I ever heard, dull dogs that they are, approached these rural warblers in variety of tone quality, range of dynamics, rhythmic resourcefulness and individuality of style."
A stuffed kookaburra, a souvenir of Percy Grainger's homeland, sits perched on a table in the Grainger House.
A Photo-multigraph of Percy Grainger, 1933, Silver Gelatin Print. Click to enlarge.
Though Grainger spent most of his life away from his native Australia, he strived to write music “in the hopes of bringing honor and fame to my native land.” Grainger’s deep affection for his homeland can be heard unmistakably in his heartfelt composition, “Colonial Song,” which probably ranks as my favorite work by Grainger.
RW: Before we close, all of us at The Sembrich want to express our sincere thanks to Mark Grant and to his associates at the Grainger House for their generosity and cooperation in preparing this virtual program. We look forward to opportunities to collaborate together again in the future.
MNG: Thank you! I’m sorry that the coronavirus postponed my visit to the Sembrich studio---but I’m honored to serve as the first guest of your virtual series.
RW: Thank you, Mark! Here now, “Colonial Song” performed by the Dallas Wind Symphony:
Until next time,
Richard Wargo
Artistic Director