Notions of the Universal and Spiritual in Percy Grainger’s Early British Folk-Song Settings

Between 1905 and 1908 Percy Grainger made a major contribution to the corpus of British folk-song, collecting melodies and words of ballads, shanties and work songs, and devoting himself not just to the faithful capture of pitch and rhythm, but also the nuances of performance, with his pioneering use of the phonograph. These folk-songs became for Grainger a wellspring of compositional inspiration to which he returned time and time again. Yet while he was still a student in Frankfurt, Grainger had been making settings of British traditional tunes sourced from published collections. This article contends that these early arrangements hold the key to a deeper understanding of his later persistence in folk-song arranging and collecting, and that they prefigure the recurrent textual themes in the songs he later chose to arrange. It is argued that Grainger’s attraction to folk-song was textual and musical, tied to notions of purity, freedom and an unorthodox spirituality inspired by nature and shaped by the writings of Whitman, whereby Grainger perceived folk-song as a universal utterance. For Grainger, British folk-song was not simply a source of profound melody for appropriation; the window into a nation’s soul became a door into the souls of all humanity.

In Search of Hybridity: Grainger, MacDowell and their Cosmopolitan Imagination

While their names are not frequently juxtaposed in existing scholarship, Percy Grainger and Edward MacDowell both maintained that cosmopolitanism was not merely a return to eighteenth-century idealism, but also a practical solution to mediating the anxieties of their epoch. I argue that, as members of a transatlantic network of artists, their overlapping system of referents and mutual fascination with Nordic cultures was integral to the development of mutable definitions of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the deliberate consciousness of difference that permitted for the simultaneous expansion and contraction of identities also contributed to the rise of conflicting imperatives. In the case of Grainger, certain tensions remain unresolved, including the propensity to circulate racial hierarchies under the moniker of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Therefore, in this article, I offer a methodology for appraising the common foundations of their affiliations, advance new analytical tools for evaluating the practice of ‘cosmopolitanizing’ local sources, and problematize the purported universality of their resultant discourse. By focusing upon the particular aspect of harmonic contextuality, I find that a distinct mode of hybridity emerged as they sought to distance themselves from European artistic models while in living America – one that ironically brought properties of time and space into closer proximity. This study thereby illustrates that the consequences of their cultural dialogue led to the end of anachronisms in the service of a ‘continual and restless spirit of change’.

Percy Grainger: How American was He?

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.

The Piano Music of Percy Grainger: A Pianist's Perspective on Pedalling

Eminent pianist and composer Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882–1961) filled his original music and folksong arrangements with detailed, though idiosyncratic instructions to performers. The extent to which his own meticulous pedal technique is mirrored in careful directions to pianists is both unusual and revelatory. Grainger's scores are examined here from the standpoint of the damper, sostenuto and una corda pedals. Numerous musical examples serve two purposes: 1) they give information concerning the complexity of Grainger's pedal technique and 2) they exhibit the array of notational methods the composer employed, at various stages in his career, to enable performers to replicate as nearly as possible his own scrupulous pedalling. As well, by examining in detail this one aspect of Grainger's rich artistry, light is shed on the relationship between composer and performer, and notation and interpretation, that Grainger sought to understand and articulate ever more clearly throughout his career.