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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2018
Throughout his life, Grainger claimed that he sought to put his music at the service of ‘the complicated facts & problems of modern life’, a task he thought required engaging his audience in a ‘pilgrimage to sorrow’. On the whole, however, audiences and critics alike have tended instead to associate Grainger with the works of his that sound anything but downbeat. Nevertheless, Grainger’s self assessment was genuine. He had a painfully ambivalent relationship to many of the emerging features of modernity, a state of mind for which he found a fellow-traveller in Rudyard Kipling. Both men found a means to express elements of this ambivalence via an unusually strong interest in both local and foreign vernacular cultures. Grainger’s original text settings and folksong arrangements alike do not merely celebrate the global reach of the British world or try to preserve the dying folk music traditions of rural England and Scandinavia, but instead are an attempt to express what he considered to be particular fissures in the modern psyche, not least his own. He believed that any lasting accommodation with the emerging features of modern life required us to confront what we had lost along the way.
I wish to express my thanks to Jennifer Hill and Matthew Lorenzon for their help with the preparation of music examples for this article.
1 Percy Grainger, handwritten collection of autobiographical jottings c. 1949–1954 entitled ‘Grainger’s Anecdotes’, Grainger Archives, White Plains, NY; quoted in John Bird, revised ed., Percy Grainger (London: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70.
2 Schott Music Ltd catalogue description for Shepherd’s Hey, https://uk.schott-music.com/shop/shepherd-s-hey-12.html, accessed 15 August 2015.
3 Blacking, John, ‘A Commonsense view of all music’: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 102 Google Scholar.
4 Grainger, Percy, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life”?’, in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 174, 177 Google Scholar.
5 Mellers, Wilfrid, Oxford Studies of Composers: Percy Grainger (London: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
6 Collins, Sarah and Perry, Simon, ‘The “Beauty of Bravery”: Alternative Modernisms and De-Historicizing Grainger’, in Grainger the Modernist, ed. Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 17–32 Google Scholar.
7 Josephson, David S., ‘Percy Grainger: Country Gardens and Other Curses’, Current Musicology 15 (1973), 56 Google Scholar. To be sure the veneer of jollity we usually hear in Country Gardens is a trap; Grainger exploits the tune’s manic, even violent, physical energy, which – as any pianist who has tried to play the solo version knows – well describes the approach required to perform it successfully!
8 See, for instance: Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002); The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914–1961, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), reprinted in 2002; and Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
9 Fedorowich, Kent and Thompson, Andrew S., ‘Introduction: Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Identity and Migration’, in Empire, Migration and Identity in the British World, ed. Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 5 Google Scholar.
10 Amy J. Lloyds review of Canada and the British World: Culture, Migration and Identity, ed. Phillip Buckner(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), in The Historical Journal 51/4 (2008): 1127.
11 Dreyfus and Robinson, ‘Introduction’, in Grainger the Modernist, 10–11.
12 Grainger, letter to Olin Downs, 10 September 1942; quoted in Teresa Balough, ‘Grainger as Author: A Philosophical Expression’, Studies in Music 16 Percy Grainger Centennial Volume (1982).
13 Percy Grainger, letter to M. R. B. Steffens, 27 June 1957, quoted in, Kay Dreyfus, Percy Grainger’s Kipling Settings: A Study of the Manuscript Sources (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1980), 37.
14 Josephson, ‘Percy Grainger: Country Gardens and Other Curses’, 59–60. For an early study of the connection between the two men, see Balough, Teresa, ‘Kipling and Grainger’, Studies in Music 11 (1977), 74–108 Google Scholar.
15 Scott, Cyril, The Philosophy of Modernism–Its Connection with Music (London: The Waverley Book Company, 1917), 134 Google Scholar.
16 Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 131–2.
17 Bubb, Alexander, ‘The Provincial Cosmopolitan: Kipling, India and Globalization’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 49/4 (2013): 399 Google Scholar.
18 Bubb, ‘The Provincial Cosmopolitan’, 396.
19 Grainger, Percy, ‘The Impress of Personality on Unwritten Music’ (1915), The Musical Quarterly 75/4 (1991): 13 Google Scholar.
20 Percy Grainger, “‘The Inuit” at La Crosse, Wis[consin] (1923)’, in Self-Portrait, 184.
21 It is curious that Grainger never appears to have engaged substantially with that most influential of nineteenth-century composer-critics, Richard Wagner, with whom Grainger might otherwise seem to have shared more than a few philosophical and political ideas. But Grainger’s encounters with Wagner’s music occurred at the very end of the nineteenth century, at a time of growing British musical self-assertion. At the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt he was to become part of a self-conscious group of young British musicians who became known as the ‘Frankfurt Five’ (the other four were Roger Quilter, Cyril Scott, Balfour Gardiner, and Norman O’Neill). They sought to define themselves, in part, against what they considered to be the tyrannical aspects of the nineteenth-century German musical tradition. They shared, for instance, a ‘unanimous hatred of the music of Beethoven’. See John Bird, Percy Grainger, 39.
22 Grainger, Percy, Comrades in Art: The Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger 1957–61 (London: Toccata, 2010), 101 Google Scholar; Quoted in Van der Linden, Bob, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Percy’s father sent the composer a parcel of Kipling books while the latter was studying at the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt, in order to ‘tickle up the British Lion in him’; quoted in Grainger, The All-Round Man, 275. Whitman’s poetry and own example of ‘athletic manliness’ was also a principal influence on Grainger, but Grainger was not to set Whitman’s poetry, although his Marching Song of Democracy was dedicated to ‘my darling mother, united with her in loving adoration of Walt Whitman’.
24 See Kipling, Rudyard, ‘Something of Myself’ (1935), in Something of Myself and other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.
25 Cyril Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 27.
26 Cyril Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 17–18.
27 Grainger, Percy, ‘John H. Grainger (1956)’, in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17 Google Scholar. See also Bob van der Lind, Music and Empire in Britain and India, 68.
28 Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Percy Grainger and American Nordicism’, in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124 Google Scholar.
29 Stephen Layton, CD liner note to Grainger: Jungle Book, Polyphony, Hyperion CDH55433 (1996).
30 Lohman, W.J., The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 221 Google Scholar.
31 Van der Linden, Music and empire in Britain and India, 55.
32 Percy Grainger, programme note to The Widow’s Party (1939), quoted in Van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India, 65.
33 Bird noted that if Grainger ‘misbehaved or if he neglected his piano practice his mother would beat him severely. This form of corporal punishment continued until he was fifteen or sixteen’. He later concluded that these experiences ‘of cruelty, harsh discipline and punishment in both physical and metal forms were also part of his childhood and these served as the main direction pointers for the eventual channeling of his sexual urges’; John Bird, Percy Grainger, 13, 48. Kipling wrote extensively about his own boyhood experiences, including in fictional works, the most notable being the novel Stalky & Co. (1899). For a broader discussion of this topic in relation to Kipling, see: Kucich, John, ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group: Kipling’s Middle-Class Imperialism’, Victorian Studies 46/1 (2003), 33–68 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 See John Bird, Percy Grainger, 213. For a comprehensive source study of Grainger’s Kipling settings, see Kay Dreyfus, Percy Grainger’s Kipling Settings: A Study of the Manuscript Sources.
35 John Bird, Percy Grainger, 88.
36 The two poets were closely associated in Grainger’s own mind because of their shared interest in vernacular expression and their choice of subject matter. He later declared that ‘it is only Kipling’s & Swinburne’s sad poems that have any special value for me’. Percy Grainger, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, 175, 177.
37 Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 59.
38 ‘The Brides Tragedy’ was a text that Oscar Wilde described as having a ‘fierce intensity of passion’. See Oscar Wilde, ‘Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads’, in Criticisms and Review (London: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1923), p. 455. In addition, Wilde singled out Swinburne’s ‘Reiver’s Neck Verse’, which Grainger also set. Swinburne shared Kipling’s and Grainger’s interest in dialect, as well a particular interest in Northumberland, and Grainger later recalled ‘my father telling me that Percy was linked up with the Earl Percy of Northumberland & that the name meant “Pierce-Eye”, one of the Northumbrian earls having had someone’s eyes struck out’. Percy Grainger, ‘John H. Grainger’ (1956) and ‘[George Percy]’ (1933), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 15, 125.
39 The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914–1961, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 29.
40 Benjamin, Jessica, ‘The Bonds of Love: Rational Violence and Erotic Domination’, Feminist Studies 6/1 (1980): 167 Google Scholar.
41 Kucich, John, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy, and Social Class (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
42 See Percy Grainger, Autobiographical Manuscript, ‘Aldridge-Grainger-Strom Saga’ (1933–34), quoted in David Pear, ‘Percy Grainger and Manliness’, Journal of Australian Studies 22 (1998), 109.
43 As his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry notes, among other personality traits documented by his ‘enormous correspondence’ is ‘his private absorption with what he called his “cruelty instincts” – which were tempered in reality by an intense and tender approach to human relationships’. Kay Dreyfus, ‘Grainger, George Percy (1882–1961)’ in Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1983), vol. 9, 71.
44 Lohman, The Culture Shocks of Rudyard Kipling, 173.
45 Percy Grainger, typescript introduction to ‘My Wretched Tone-life’, Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 206–7.
46 After hearing the work performed by the Goldman Band at Carnegie Hall in 1948, Grainger declared ‘I loathed every note. I hated its commonplace chords, its oily wellsoundingness, its meaningless tonelines. My tonery has been growing more and more commonplace ever since I was about 20 or 22’. Quoted in Mellers, Percy Grainger, 43.
47 Grainger, foreword to the conductor’s full score of the ‘final scoring’ of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart for wind band, string orchestra and organ (1943), Grainger Musuem, Melbourne, MG7/20-1.
48 Michael Floyd, James. ‘An Interview with Percy Grainger, 15 May 1946’, Tempo 61/239 (2007): 18–26 Google Scholar.
49 Mellers, Percy Grainger, 44.
50 Warner, Marina, Monsters of Our Own Making: The Peculiar Pleasures of Fear (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 200 Google Scholar. See also Lorca, Federico García, ‘Las Nanas infantiles’, in Obras Completas, ed. Arturo del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1977), 1073–1091 Google Scholar.
51 Grainger, unpublished typescript attached to an autograph score of ‘Irish Tune from County Derry’, University of Melbourne, Grainger Collection, SL1 Wg7/6:2.
52 Percy Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality on Unwritten Music’, 17.
53 Grainger, letter to Nathaniel Dett, 6 March 1925; quoted in Balough, ‘Grainger as Author’, 92.
54 Typescript of radio broadcast on WEVD (New York), 20 June 1933, Grainger Museum, Melbourne; reprinted in Grainger on Music, 250.
55 Grainger, Percy, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, 175, 177 Google Scholar.
56 Grainger, introduction to the published score of the Danish Folk-Music Suite (New York: Schirmer, c. 1950).
57 Grainger, introduction to the published score of the Danish Folk-Music Suite
58 See Grainger, Percy, ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society 12 (1908): 147–242 Google Scholar.
59 The tune has been used as the theme music for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) children’s programme The Friendly Giant (1958–1985) and was also the character Frank Spencer’s choice of song in the BBC situation comedy Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em (1973–78).
60 Mellers, Percy Grainger, 5.
61 Mellers, Percy Grainger, 5.
62 Nietzsche, Friedrich, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 60 Google Scholar.
63 Chase, Malcolm and Shaw, Christopher, ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’, in The Imagined Past, ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 13–14 Google Scholar.
64 Percy Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality on Unwritten Music’, 4.
65 Hughes, Charles W., ‘Percy Grainger, Cosmopolitan Composer’, The Musical Quarterly 23/2 (1937): 127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 Wayne Howell, interview with Percy Grainger, ‘Favorites of the Famous’, NBC Radio, 1952. The recording is held by the Australian Music Centre; quoted in Collins and Perry, ‘The “Beauty of Bravery”’, 19. See ‘“Music is the Art of Agony”: And Percy Grainger Gives Palm to Saxophone’, Sunday Mail (Brisbane, Australia), 8 April 1934.
67 Percy Grainger, ‘What is Behind my Music’ (1954) in Grainger, Self-portrait of Percy Grainger, 169.
68 Percy Grainger, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, 177.
69 Spivey, Nigel, Enduring Creation: Art, Pain and Fortitude (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
70 Charles W. Hughes, ‘Percy Grainger, Cosmopolitan Composer’, 127. I have argued elsewhere, however, that Grainger’s music might indeed be considered ‘ironic’ in at least one respect. I agree with Mellers that the ‘over-arranged’ quality of his folk-song arrangements produces a ‘distancing effect’ that reminds us of our own distance from the historical and social context from where the folk song came. See ‘Giving Voice to “The Painfulness of Human Life”: Grainger’s Folk Song Settings and Musical Irony’, in Grainger the Modernist, 93–105.
71 Van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India, 78.
72 Meyer, Leonard B., Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 39 Google Scholar. Earlier in this book he writes: ‘Only through our encounters with the world, through what we suffer, do we achieve self-realization as particular men and women’ (35).