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Percy Grainger: How American was He?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

Malcolm Gillies
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Abstract

The national affiliation of composer-pianist Percy Grainger (1882–1961) is a complex matter. While often claimed today to have been Australian or American, he was a ‘naturally born British subject’ for the first 36 years of his life. Thereafter, he was a naturalized American. Drawing on Grainger’s letters, essays, scores and memorabilia, this article investigates the reasons behind Grainger’s adoption of American citizenship during the final months of the First World War, and the subsequent national traits within his manner of living as well as his social attitudes, musical approach and style. His contributions to instrumentation, scoring and texture, as well as to music education, are seen from this analysis to have strong American traits, and subsequent influence, while his compositional style remained essentially English, although built upon a technical base established while a teenage student in Germany.

In later life, Grainger was ambivalent about remaining an American citizen and resident, not just because of an implied disloyalty to his ‘native land’, Australia, but also because of his lack of empathy with evolving American values. To a Yale University audience in 1921, he confessed to being ‘a cosmopolitan from first to last’. This article analyses Grainger’s thinking about cosmopolitanism, nationalism and universalism in the following decades, against the backdrop of his growing commitment to the racialist, later racist, cause of Nordicism. It focuses particularly upon Grainger’s series of articles about ‘Grieg: Nationalist and Cosmopolitan’ from 1943, before investigating the relationship between racial and national thinking in Grainger’s final years. This culminates in his last statement of musical ‘creed’, published in a Norwegian magazine in 1955: musically to support the ‘unity’ of the Nordic race, and to bring ‘honor and fame’ to his native land, Australia. Yet, Grainger died, in 1961, in America, and still an American citizen.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 9 - 26
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© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Acknowledgements: Quotations from published Grainger writings in this article accord with ‘common use’ scholarly provisions; for quotations from unpublished materials I am indebted to the University of Melbourne, the custodian of the Grainger Museum.

Lifespan problems arise, for instance, when birth or death date, or location, are unknown, as with many medieval figures, or alternative calendars were once in operation, such as with the Russians before 1918.

2 Letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 7 October 1911, in The Farthest North of Humanness, ed. Kay Dreyfus (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985), 428.

3 Consisting of 48 states when he arrived in 1914, and 50 states (with the addition of Alaska and Hawai’i, in 1959) by the time he died in 1961.

4 For a broad survey of the multiple paradoxes of Britishness, as against Englishness, in Grainger’s earlier years, see Searle, G.R., A New England? Peace and War, 1886–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Searle notes that ‘Immigration and emigration were also important in raising puzzling questions as to whether nationality was conferred by ethnicity, geographical location, or culture’. (p. 42)

5 This article gained its impetus from a recent review for a publisher of a new selection of Grainger’s letters. The reviewer had expected that, being from Grainger’s American years, the selection would be most revealing of his Americanness. ‘That he still considered himself Australian, even in the late 1940s and beyond, is a key revelation’ wrote the reviewer about the collection, prompting this article about the valencies of the various identities attributed to Grainger.

6 The redrawing of the boundaries and creation of new nation-states in Europe during the mid-nineteenth century (Germany, Italy) and then, again, in central and eastern Europe following World War One provide particular challenges for encyclopaedists, including major cities that consequently changed name and purpose, as well as national placement. Pozsony, in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, was by 1920 Bratislava, a major city in the new Czechoslovakia, but is now, under that same name, the capital city of Slovakia. Throughout, however, the neighbouring Viennese persisted in calling it by its German name, Pressburg.

7 ‘Declaration of Intention’ form of the US Department of Labor, dated 7 July 1915, and lodged in the Supreme Court of New York. This form included the declaration that ‘it is my bona fide intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, and particularly to George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject’. (Grainger Museum, Melbourne; hereafter, GMM.)

8 ‘United States Certificate of Naturalization’, in the name of George Percy Grainger, dated 3 June 1918, GMM; for a study of changing US citizenship requirements at this time, see Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 US Army ‘Detachment Order’, dated 10 May 1918, GMM.

10 ‘Honorable Discharge from the Army of the United States’, dated 6 January 1919, GMM; a later ‘Certificate in Lieu of Lost or Destroyed Discharge’ form, dated 26 April 1960, gives a discharge date of 7 January 1919, GMM.

11 Most notably, by the London critic, Robin Legge. See Dorum, Eileen, Percy Grainger: The Man Behind the Music (Melbourne: IC & EE Dorum, 1986), 108–110 Google Scholar. Later, Grainger was also fiercely criticized in the United States. See, for instance, Constance Drexel, ‘Percy Grainger Holds Life Too Dear to Lose in Battle’, Public Ledger (Philadelphia), 31 January 1917.

12 Robin Legge, writing in May 1917, had warned Grainger: ‘England is no place for you after the war I fear. The feeling here is very strong against those who pitted a paltry £.s.d. against the blood of their contemporaries’. Dorum, Percy Grainger, 109.

13 See, for instance, telegram of Lord Richard Nevill, Comptroller of the Governor-General’s Household in Ottawa, to Grainger, 6 June 1917: ‘I am afraid I cant advise you and you must take your chance like other people but your knowledge of language might obtain promotion for you later on’, GMM.

14 Grainger underscored his choice later in the year, writing to his mother about having just heard ‘a rotten brass & reed band’ from Canada. Letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 28 September 1917, GMM.

15 Letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 17 June 1917, GMM; according to the 1960 copy of his ‘Honorable Discharge’, he had formally enlisted on 12 June 1917, GMM.

16 See, for instance, his essays ‘The Unique Value of Natalie Curtis’ Notations of American Negro Folksongs’ (completed on 26 November 1917) and ‘Let Us Sit in Wait No Longer for the Advent of Great American Composers – They are with Us Already’ (1919), reproduced in Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 95–98 and 106–112, respectively.

17 Grainger had first read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in early adolescence, and he remained in thrall to its rugged masculinity. This led Grainger, in 1917, to complete his Marching Song of Democracy, with dedication ‘in loving adoration of Walt Whitman’. A newer discovery was the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters, whom Grainger described as ‘a real first class genius, enthralling & cosmic’. Letter, Percy Grainger to Balfour Gardiner, 16 June 1916, GMM. Inspired by Masters, Grainger completed his American Folk-Music Setting No. 1, Spoon River, during 1919–22.

18 Letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 19 January 1921, GMM.

19 Section 51, xix and xxvii, respectively, of the Act to Constitute the Commonwealth of Australia, passed by the British Parliament in 1900, leading, for instance, to Australia’s Naturalization Act of 1903.

20 A meeting of Heads of Government of the Commonwealth of Nations in London in 1948 adopted the Canadian model of 1946 for the rest of that Commonwealth.

21 See note 38.

22 Now, of course, dual citizenships are possible between any of these three countries, although with different obligations.

23 See, for instance, letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 17 June 1917, GMM.

24 From reminiscence in ‘Sketches for My Book “The Life of My Mother & Her Son”’, (1926), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 213.

25 Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 214. In a letter to his mother of 14 May 1921, GMM. Grainger stated that ‘I truly believe the Swedish is the lov[e]liest of all the races [sic]’.

26 Full-page advertisement in Metropolitan Opera House programme booklet (1920s), GMM. The painting was by Everett Henry.

27 See the recollection of Grainger’s manager, Antonia Sawyer, reproduced in Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, Portrait of Percy Grainger (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 99–103 Google Scholar.

28 Letter, Percy Grainger to his long-term agent, Antonia Morse, 8 October 1946, GMM.

29 John Bird reports that Grainger destroyed ‘several hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters to and from his mother and himself’. Percy Grainger, 3rd edition (Sydney: Currency, 1999), 208. Actually, Grainger appears to have destroyed more of his other correspondences and preserved a good percentage of the correspondence between his mother and himself. The over-90 letters he wrote to his mother between 1915 and 1922 are now one of the few consistent sources of information about his life for his early American period. A contemporaneous note made by Grainger’s mother, and kept with a new will that Grainger made on 28 February 1922, advises: ‘Burn all things in attic that are private before leaving house’, GMM.

30 (Frankfurt, 1923).

31 Letter, Percy Grainger to Antonia Morse, 8 October 1946, GMM. By the late 1920s Grainger’s compositional royalties were also considerable, especially from his ‘hit’ of 1919, Country Gardens.

32 Percy Grainger, ‘Stanford Wanted to Take Me to the Norfolk, Conn. Festival’, in ‘Grainger’s Anecdotes’ (c. 1949), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 228. In a Nutshell was premiered at the Norfolk Festival in 1916, and The Warriors in 1917.

33 Grainger’s growing nostalgia is most systematically tracked in his private autobiographical writings from the mid-1920s onwards, from which the selection of Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger is drawn.

34 In one letter, Percy Grainger to Robert Bristow, 18 January 1955 (GMM), Grainger even questioned whether he had ever experienced ‘real friends’ anywhere, in terms of ‘finding happiness & satisfaction’ in their company. He felt his need to earn a living as a pianist had obliged him to adopt an open-mindedness that even his closest musical colleagues all lacked.

35 Letter, Percy Grainger to Henry Balfour Gardiner, 16 June 1916, GMM.

36 Letter, Percy Grainger to the British composer, Josef Holbrooke, 30 May 1951, GMM.

37 Letter, Percy Grainger to Kaare Nygaard, 18 July 1953 (GMM), shortly before going to Denmark to undertake an unsuccessful cancer operation. All his subsequent treatments would be undertaken in American hospitals.

38 Letter, Percy Grainger to Robert Bristow, 25 January 1948, GMM. Six years later in his protracted whinge, ‘The Things I Dislike’ (1954), Grainger confessed (somewhat rewriting his own history), ‘I am bitterly ashamed of having had to change my nationality [to American]’. Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 157.

39 In older age the Graingers were cash, rather than asset, poor. The gross value of Percy Grainger’s estate was $208,293.48. ‘Appraisal of the Estate of George Percy Grainger’, dated 17 May 1963, GMM.

40 PD/1 Grainger Programmes 1948, GMM. The ‘close of the season’ meant the start of summer 1948.

41 PD/1 Grainger Programmes 1949, GMM.

42 PD/1 Grainger Programmes 1960, GMM.

43 Letter, Percy Grainger to Elsie Bristow, 29 October 1955, GMM. Even as early as his 1926 trip to Australia, Grainger had expressed concern that he had ‘lived away from Australia too long to be able to understand them [Australians], their needs, their aims – or what they felt to be their needs, their aims’. ‘The Love-Life of Helen and Paris’ (1927–1928), in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 108.

44 See Nelson, Kathleen, ‘Grainger and the Australian Broadcasting Commission after 1935: Memories, Hopes and Frustrations’, Australasian Music Review 5 (2000): 123–124 Google Scholar.

45 This proliferation of nation-states is tracked in Wimmer, Andreas and Feinstein, Yuval, ‘The Rise of the Nation-State across the World: 1816 to 2001’, American Sociological Review 75/5 (2010): 764–790 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 See, for instance, Barber, Brendan, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

47 According to Grainger’s Australian relatives, Gordon and Evie Aldridge in Melbourne, ‘He had a lovely English accent, and he lived in America. We couldn’t understand it’. In Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, Portrait of Percy Grainger (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2002, 144–145)Google Scholar.

48 See, variously, The Farthest North of Humanness, xviii–xix; Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, xxvii–xxx; The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914–1961, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 10–11.

49 Letter, Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger, 12 November 1944, in The All-Round Man, 196.

50 This is not to overlook Scottish influences, for instance in his two early Hill-Songs, or his many Irish settings, for instance Irish Tune from County Derry.

51 Letter, Percy Grainger to Thomas Armstrong, 17–18 October 1958, in The All-Round Man, 272–78. In a following article Armstrong repeats this emphasis on ‘the chord’, and sees ‘a derivative from the major common chord on the flattened mediant, or the major triad on the submediant of a major key, which had been freely used in romantic music, but was now given fresh pungency by the addition of its sevenths, ninths, and their appoggiaturas’ as being ‘the basis of this new style’, indeed also one of Schoenberg’s starting points towards atonality. Thomas Armstrong, ‘The Frankfort Group’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 85 (1958–1959), 6–7.

52 Armstrong, ‘The Frankfort Group’, 14–15.

53 Marching Song of Democracy (1901–17), Hill-Song No. 1 (1901–02), Hill-Song No. 2 (1901–07), English Dance (1901–09), Kipling ‘Jungle-Book’ Cycle (1898–1945), British Folk-Music Settings (1898–1950), in Questionnaire (1955), in Grainger on Music, 374 (with Grainger’s own given datings). His British Folk-Music Settings included over 40 works, ranging from Molly on the Shore (No. 1), through Shepherd’s Hey (No. 16), and Country Gardens (No. 22), to Bold William Taylor (No. 43).

54 Sketch for ‘Sea-Song’ (1907) and The Bride’s Tragedy (1908–13), in Grainger on Music, 374 (with Grainger’s own datings).

55 ‘My Musical Outlook’ (1902–04), in Grainger on Music, 13–28, contains extensive selections from Grainger’s extended letter.

56 Letters, Percy Grainger to Basil Cameron, 20 March 1952 and 2 May 1957, GMM.

57 Grainger is particularly thinking of Stravinsky’s move in the inter-war years towards neo-classicism.

58 Letter, Percy Grainger to Basil Cameron, 20 March 1952, GMM.

59 Letter, Percy Grainger to Henry Balfour Gardiner, 25 December 1933, GMM.

60 Letter, Percy Grainger to E.C. Hands (New Zealand Broadcasting Board), 1 December 1935, GMM.

61 These works include: his ‘cakewalk smasher’, In Dahomey (1903–1909); his ‘windlass chanty’, ‘Shenandoah’ (1907); ‘Tribute to Foster’, based upon Foster’s Camptown Races (1913–31), and the related ‘room-music titbit’, The Lonely Desert Man Sees the Tents of the Happy Tribes (1913–49).

62 See American entries in Barry Peter Ould Google Scholar, ‘Catalogue of Works: Arrangements by Grainger’, in The New Percy Grainger Companion, ed. Penelope Thwaites (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2010), 282–92.

63 Letter, Percy Grainger to E. Raymond Bossange, 31 May 1933, GMM.

64 Letter, Percy Grainger to D.C. Parker, 28 August 1916, in The All-Round Man, 32. Grainger’s visit had prompted his prediction that ‘it is only a matter of patience, & waiting a few years, to get an absolutely perfect medium in the percussion field’ (letter, Percy Grainger to Rose Grainger, 5 March 1915, GMM).

65 See Grainger on Music, 165–8.

66 A major source for Grainger’s new knowledge was Clappé’s The Wind Band and its Instruments (New York: Henry Holt, 1911).

67 ‘Possibilities of the Concert Wind Band from the Standpoint of a Modern Composer’ (1918), Grainger on Music, 99–105. This essay originally appeared in Metronome Orchestra Monthly 45/11 (1918): 22–3.

68 Goldman, Richard Franko, The Wind Band: Its Literature and Technique (Westport, NY: Greenwood, 1974 Google Scholar, originally published Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1961), 228–9.

69 ‘Democracy in Music’ (1931), in Grainger on Music, 217–22.

70 See ‘The Orchestra for Australia’ (1927), in Grainger on Music, 173–8.

71 See Grainger, Percy, ‘To Conductors’ (1930), in A Musical Genius from Australia: Selected Writings by and about Percy Grainger, ed. Teresa Balough (Perth: University of Western Australia, 1982), 125–131 Google Scholar.

72 ‘Democracy in Music’ (1931), in Grainger on Music, 218.

73 Grainger on Music, 375.

74 Scott, Cyril, The Philosophy of Modernism: In its Connection with Music (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1917), 125–126 Google Scholar.

75 Hughes, Charles W., ‘Percy Grainger, Cosmopolitan Composer’, The Musical Quarterly 23/2 (1937), 127–136 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Grainger on Music, 318–37.

77 See, further, Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Grieg and Grainger: Great Expectations’, Musical Times 148 (2007): 7–26 Google Scholar.

78 Over the last two centuries, ‘cosmopolitan’ has often been presented alongside its apparent opposites, for example, nationalist, bigoted, isolationist, rural or orthodox. In the literature about late twentieth-century and twenty-first century cities, the cosmopolitan city is generally depicted as progressive while ‘dead heart’ cities of urban decay become social voids. In the post-communist world, since 1989, ‘cosmopolitan’ has often been treated synonymously with ‘global citizen’. See Bowden, Brett, ‘The Perils of Global Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies 7/3 (2003): 349–362 Google Scholar, and his ‘Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Irreconcilable Differences or Possible Bedfellows?’, National Identities 3/3 (2003): 235–49. See also a study of cosmopolitan origins, especially as applied to music, in Magaldi, Cristina, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Music in the Nineteenth Century’, in Oxford Handbooks Online (New York: Oxford University Press, February 2016), 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935321.013.62Google Scholar.

79 Grainger on Music, 318–21.

80 Grainger on Music, 323–4.

81 To illustrate the point of this ‘dual personality’ of Grieg leading to the ‘richness and many-sidedness of his artistic output’, Grainger quotes from Kipling’s ‘The Two-Sided Man’ (1901).

82 Grainger on Music, 337.

83 Grainger on Music, 337.

84 ‘Music Heard in England’ (1949), in Grainger on Music, 354.

85 Today’s ‘multicultural’ also falls into this same category of unlimited terms. It does not say anything about cultural priority or limit, or the consequential effect upon a state’s identity; hence, its current lack of favour with the political right.

86 Letter, Grainger to his mother Rose, 8 June 1919, GMM: ‘Negro’ because of the black American inspirations for some of his early compositions (see note 60, above), and his continuing fascination with black American music (such as the music of Nathaniel Dett, and arranging the transcriptions of Natalie Curtis-Burlin); ‘Polynesian’ because of his affinity, since 1909, with the music, language and culture of the South Sea Islanders. On first hearing Polynesian chorus singing, he described it as ‘a treat no less than the best Wagner’, and into the 1950s harboured hopes of completing his annotations of recordings of that singing that he had started in 1909 (The Farthest North of Humanness, 263–4).

87 Grainger on Music, 246.

88 Grainger on Music, 250.

89 Grainger on Music, 224.

90 See David Pear, ‘Percy Grainger as “Educator-at-Large”: the Formation, Expression and Propagation of his Manliness’ (PhD dissertation, University of Queensland, 1998), chapter 5, ‘Grainger as Thinker about Race and Nation’, for an exposition of the evolution of Grainger’s racial thinking; revised as ‘Grainger on Race and Nation’, Australasian Music Review 5 (2000): 25–49.

91 In particular, Grant, Madison, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916)Google Scholar, and (Theodore) Stoddard, Lothrop, The Rising Tide of Colour against White World-Supremacy (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1920)Google Scholar.

92 Madison Grant was a keen naturalist, who played a major role in the founding of the New York Zoological Society and the Yellowstone National Park.

93 Grant influenced the United States’s Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

94 Grainger on Music, 139.

95 See Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Percy Grainger and American Nordicism’, in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–124 Google Scholar, ‘Grainger’s Response’, 120–23.

96 See, for instance, Grainger’s juxtaposition of cosmopolitanism and Nordic musical superiority in the summary of his lecture for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, ‘The Superiority of Nordic Music’, in Blacking, John, ‘A Commonsense View of all Music’: Reflections on Percy Grainger’s Contribution to Ethnomusicology and Music Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 172–173 Google Scholar.

97 Gillies and Pear, ‘Percy Grainger and American Nordicism’, 123–4. See, also, sections from his ‘The Aldridge-Grainger-Ström Saga’ (1933) in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 132–43.

98 Round Letter, Percy Grainger, 15–17 February 1942 (GMM), written in his Blue-Eyed (Nordic) English, with more familiar synonyms provided by Grainger in double parentheses.

99 How Grainger deduced this state of the Nordic world in early 1942 is hard to fathom. His self-identified Nordic lands were taking leading roles on both sides in the War, and one, Sweden, was remaining neutral.

100 Grainger on Music, 375–6. An early expression of Grainger’s view about the limitations of cosmopolitanism, and the growing importance of race is found in a private letter to Wellington Gustin, 15 March 1927, GMM: ‘For me the personal side of music is sunk in the racial side. Music I feel to be cosmopolitan, international only on the appreciative side, not, however, as regards its origins’.