Percy Grainger

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Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger, and pianist who lived in the United States from 1914 to 1918 and became a citizen in 1918.

He was instrumental in the revival of British folk music in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Although much of his creation was experimental and rare, the piece with which he is most closely associated is his piano version of the folk-dance song "Country Gardens." Grainger went to Frankfurt University at the age of 13 to study the Hoch Conservatory.

He was based in London between 1901 and 1914, where he first began as a society pianist and then as a concert performer, composer, and collector of original folk melodies.

As his fame grew, he worked with many of Europe's most influential figures, including Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg, forging close friendships.

He became a promoter of Nordic music and culture, expressing his ardent support in private letters, though in some instances in vaguely racial or anti-Semitic terms. Although Grainger travelled extensively in Europe and Australia in 1914, he retired to the United States, where he lived for the remainder of his life.

He served as a bandman in the United States Army from 1917-1918 and then gained American citizenship in 1918.

Since his mother's death in 1922, he became more involved in educational activities.

He also experimented with music machines, which he hopes would supersede human interpretation.

He founded the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and work as well as a future research archive.

As he got older, he began to perform, revise, and rearrange his own works, while writing little new music.

Ill health had lowered his levels of fitness after the Second World War.

He regarded his work as a failure.

He appeared at his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.

Early life

Grainger was born in Brighton, south-east of Melbourne, Australia, on July 8th. His father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who immigrated to Australia in 1877, received a prize for his work on the Princes Bridge in Melbourne; his mother, Rose Annie Aldridge, was the niece of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge.

John Grainger was a prolific artist with broad cultural aspirations and a large circle of friends. These included David Mitchell, whose daughter Helen later became famous as an operatic soprano under the name Nellie Melba. Although John's assertions of having "discovered" her are unfounded, he may have aided her in his search. John was a heavy drinker and a womaniser who, Rose discovered after the marriage, had fathered a child in England before heading to Australia. His promiscuity placed the relationship in jeopardy. Rose discovered a syphilis form from her husband shortly after Percy's birth. Despite this, the Graggers remained together until 1890, when John went to England for medical care. They lived apart after he returned to Australia. Rose took over Percy's raising Percy's duties, while John continued his career as the head architect to the Western Australian Department of Public Works. He did some private work, including designing Coombe Cottage at Coldstream, Nellie Melba's house.

Percy was educated at home, except for three months' formal education as a 12-year-old boy, where he was mocked and mocked by his peers. Rose, an autodidact with a dominating presence, oversaw his music and literature studies and recruited additional tutors for languages, art, and drama. Percy's fascination with Nordic history began in childhood, and he wrote late in life that the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strongest had "the most profound single artistic influence on my life." He received substantial early awards as an artist, but not in the sense that his tutors believed his destiny would be in art rather than music. He started studying piano under Louis Pabst, a German immigrant who was then considered Melbourne's top piano teacher, at the age of ten. "A Birthday Gift to Mother," Grainger's first known composition, is dated 1893. Pabst arranged Grainger's first public concert appearances at Melbourne's Masonic Hall in July and September 1894. In the Melbourne press, the boy performed works by Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and Scarlatti, and was lauded.

Adelaide Burkitt, Grainger's new piano tutor, arranged for his appearances at a number of concerts in October 1894 at Melbourne's Royal Exhibition Building after Pabst returned to Europe in the fall of 1894. The size of this massive venue terrified the young pianist; however, his appearance as a "flân-haired phenomenon that performs like a master" thrilled Melbourne observers. Rose was encouraged by William Laver, director of piano studies at Melbourne's Conservatorium of music, that this public recognition led him to the conclusion that her son should continue his studies at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, Germany. After which her mother and son left Australia for Europe on 29 May 1895, financial assistance was obtained through a fund-raising benefit concert in Melbourne and a final recital in Adelaide. Despite the fact that Grainger never returned to Australia permanently, he maintained strong patriotic attachments for his homeland and was proud of his Australian roots.

Rose established herself as a teacher of English in Frankfurt, Germany; John Grainger, who had settled in Perth, increased her earnings. Clara Schumann's tenure as head of piano studies had boosted the Hoch Conservatory's reputation for piano instruction from 1892 to 1892. James Kwast, Grainger's piano tutor, honed his young pupil's abilities to the point that, within a year, Grainger was being praised as a hero. Grainger's friendship with his original composition instructor, Iwan Knorr, was tense; he moved from Knorr's classes to study composition privately with Karl Klimsch, an amateur composer and folk-music enthusiast who would later be honoured as "my only composition instructor."

Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner, Cyril Scott, and Norman O'Neill, all of whom became his classmates, helped establish the Frankfurt Group. Their long-term aim was to save British and Scandinavian music from central European music's negative influences. Grainger, who was encouraged by Klimsch, moved away from writing classical pastiches reminiscent of Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, and toward a personal compositional style, the originality and maturity of which impressed and astonished his colleagues. "No poet and composer have been so suitably wedded since Heine and Schumann," Grainger discovered Rudyard Kipling's poetry and began setting it to music.

Rose, who had been poor on her son's tour in the summer of 1900, had a nervous breakdown and couldn't do more work. Grainger began teaching piano lessons and public performances in Frankfurt on December 6, 1900, to replace lost income. In the meantime, he continued his studies with Kwast and expanded his repertoire until he was certain he could help himself and his mother as a concert pianist. Grainger, who had chosen London as his future home base in May 1901, resigned from his studies. He left Frankfurt for the United Kingdom with Rose.

Grainger had fallen in love with Kwast's daughter Mimi before leaving Frankfurt. He claims he was "already sex-crazy" at the time, when he was 19 years old, in an autobiographical essay dated 1947. Grainger's biographer, John Bird, reports that during his Frankfurt years, he began to experience sexual appetites that were "completely abnormal"; by the age of 16, he had begun to experiment with flagellation and other sado-masochistic behaviors, which he continued to pursue for the majority of his adult life. The ferocious discipline to which Rose had subjected Grainger as a youth, according to the bird.

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Career maturity

Grainger performed Delius' piano concerto for the first time in April 1914 at a music festival in Torquay. "Percy was fine in the forte passages but made much too much noise in the quieter areas," Thomas Beecham, one of the festival's guest conductors, told Delius. Grainger's reputation as a composer was growing; leading musicians and orchestras were increasingly incorporating his works into their repertoires. He left England for America in early September 1914, shortly after the First World War's outbreak, tarnished his image among his patriotically minded British friends. Grainger wrote that the reason for her abrupt departure was to "give mother a break" – she had been sick for years. Grainger had often stated that leaving London was because "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth," and that being dead would have made his dream unattainable." Robin Legge, a music critic for the Daily Telegraph, accused him of cowardice and advised him not to expect a welcome in England following the war, words that have deeply wounded Grainger.

Grainger's first American tour began in 1915 with a performance at Aeolian Hall in New York. With two of his own compositions: "Colonial Song" and "Mock Morris," he performed works by Bach, Brahms, Handel, and Chopin. Grainger officially announced his intention to apply for American citizenship in July 1915. Melba's appearances in Boston and Pittsburgh over the next two years were followed by a command appearance before President Woodrow Wilson. Grainger obtained a deal with Duo-Art for making pianola rolls as a result of his concerts, as well as a a Columbia Records recording contract.

In April 1917, Grainger learned of his father's death in Perth. He enlisted in the US Army in Fort Hamilton on June 9, 1917, after America's entry into the war, as a bandman in the 15th Coast Artillery. He had joined as a saxophonist but now he's learning the oboe: "I long for the day when I can blow my oboe well enough to play in the band." Grainger made frequent appearances as a pianist at Red Cross and Liberty bond concerts in his 18 months of service. He began playing "Country Gardens" on piano as a regular guest. The piece was quickly popular; sheet music sales beat many publishing records in a snap. The task was supposed to become synonymous with Grainger's name for the remainder of his life, but he came in time to protest it. On June 3, 1918, he became a naturalized American citizen.

Grainger turned down an invitation to conduct the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra as a concert pianist after leaving the army in January 1919. He was soon performing around 120 concerts a year, mainly to high critical acclaim, and in April 1921, he attracted a larger audience by appearing in a cinema in New York's Capitol Theatre. Grainger said that the huge audiences at these cinema performances often expressed greater appreciation for his playing than those at more traditional theater venues, such as Carnegie Hall and the Aeolian. He taught piano technique at Chicago Musical College in 1919, the first of many such academic duties he would undertake in later years.

Grainger's Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away, as well as his teaching duties, found time to recore many of his creations (an activity he continued with) and also create new works: the orchestral version of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart were all born in this period. He began to develop elastic scoring, a method of flexible orchestration that allowed works to be performed by various numbers of participants and instrument types, ranging from small chamber groups to full orchestral strength.

Grainger and his mother went to a large house in White Plains, New York, in what is now known as the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. For the remainder of his life, this was his home. Rose's health deteriorated rapidly from the start of 1922; she was suffering from delusions and nightmares, and she became worried that her illness would jeopardize her son's future. There had long been rumors that their friendship was incestuous because of their closeness; in April 1922, Rose was specifically chastised about this matter by her friend Lotta Hough. From her last letter to Grainger, the 29th generation of the Aeolian Building in New York City, it seems that this war has unbalanced Rose; on the 30th floor of the Aeolian Building in New York City, she jumped to her death from an office window. Grainger asked if he's ever heard of "improper love" in the letter, which began, "I am out of my mind and cannot think clearly." "You poor insane mother" was the subject of the letter.

Grainger found solace in returning to work after Rose's funeral. He went to Europe in 1922 for a yearlong visit, where he collected and recorded Danish folk songs before heading to Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and England. He stayed with Delius at the latter's summer home in Norway. Delius was nearly blind, and Grainger fulfilled his friend's wish to see a Norwegian sunset by carrying him (with some assistance) to the top of a nearby mountain peak. In August 1923, he returned to White Plains.

Although Grainger was still a popular performer despite being less devoted to a year-round schedule of concerts. According to reports, he converted auditoriums in a gym kit and then leaping over the piano to create a grand entrance. Although Grainger became a vegetarian in 1924, he disliked vegetables; his diet consisted primarily of dairy, pastry, fruit, and nuts.

Although he continued to revise and re-score his compositions, he began to concentrate on arrangements of music by other composers, particularly Bach, Brahms, Fauré, and Delius. Grainger's preoccupation with Nordic history led him to develop a version of English that reflected the language's history before the Norman conquest. The words of Norman or Latin origins were replaced by allegedly Nordic word-forms, such as "blend-band" (orchestra), "forthspeaker" (lecturer) and "writ-piece" (article). This "blue-eyed" English was pronounced by the author. Grainger's convictions of Nordic nepotism eventually led him to speak out in letters to colleagues; the music scholar David Pear characterized Grainger as "at root, a racial gianto of no small order."

Grainger continued to travel to Europe in 1925 and 1927, acquiring more Danish folk music with the support of the octogenarian ethnologist Evald Tang Kristensen; this work became the basis of the Suite on Danish Folksongs from 1928–30. In 1924 and then again in 1926, he travelled to Australia and New Zealand. Ella Ström, a Swedish-born artist with whom he had a close friendship, met him in November 1926 while returning to America. On arrival in America, the two were divorced, but they were reunited in England the following fall after Grainger's last folk-song tour to Denmark. The couple married in October 1927. Ella had a daughter, Elsie, who had been born out of wedlock in 1909. Grainger always regarded her as a family friend and had a nurturing personal relationship with her.

Ella, according to a letter dated 23 April 1928 (four months before the wedding), "British blows [with the whip] are the most exciting on breasts, bottom, inner thighs, and sexparts," Bird says of her marriage. "I will thoroly [sic] understand if you do not have a way to tell me if you cannot see a way to go back to this torque of mine," the narrator says later. The couple were married on August 9, 1928 at the Hollywood Bowl, at the end of a concert that included the first performance of Grainger's "To a Nordic Princess" in honor of the bride.

Grainger began assisting with teaching and colleges in the late 1920s and 1930s, and in late 1931 he accepted a year of teaching at New York University (NYU). He gave a series of lectures titled "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music," which introduced his students to a variety of ancient and modern works. Grainger admired Ellington's music on October 25, 1932, seeing harmonic echoes of Delius, on October 25th. Grainger, on the whole, did not enjoy his time at NYU; he disliked the formality; and found the university generally unresponsive to his theories. Despite several offers, he never accepted another academic position and refused all offers of honorary degrees. His New York lectures inspired a series of radio interviews for the Australian Broadcasting Commission between 1934 and 1935; these were later summarised and released as Music: A Commonsense View of All Types. Grainger began a life with the Interlochen National Music Camp in 1937 and taught regularly in its summer camps until 1944.

In 1932, the idea of establishing a Grainger Museum in Australia first occurred to Grainger. He started collecting and restoring letters from friends' letters and artifacts, as well as those highlighting the more personal aspects of his life, such as whips, bloodstained shirts, and publishing photographs. He and Ella went to Australia in September 1933 to start supervising the building work. Grainger embarked on a series of concerts and broadcasts in which he exposed his followers to a wide variety of styles of music in accordance with his "universalist" philosophy. He argued for the contributions of Nordic composers over traditionally recognized masters like Mozart and Beethoven.

Grainger's so-called "free-music" theories were among a number of recent developments. He said that complying with the existing standards of set scales, rhythms, and harmonic procedures amounted to "absurd goose-stepping," according to which music should be set free. He performed two experimental pieces of free music, first by a string quartet and then by the use of electronic theremins. He believed that free music should come as a result of non-human activity, and he spent a large part of his later life designing machines to realize this dream.

Although the museum's construction began, the Graingers toured England for several months in 1936, when Grainger made his first BBC broadcast. In this collection, he conducted "Love Verses from Solomon," in which the tenor soloist was then unknown Peter Pears. Grainger returned to Melbourne in 1938 for the official opening of the Museum after spending 1937 in America; his old piano teacher Adelaide Burkitt was among those attending the event. During Grainger's lifetime, the museum was not open to the general public, but scholars could study.

Grainger spent a long time in the 1930s arranging his performances in wind bands' settings. He wrote Lincolnshire Poet in 1937 at the American Band Masters' Association in Milwaukee, and in 1939, on his last trip to England before the Second World War, he wrote "The Duke of Marlborough's Fanfare," giving it the title "British War Mood Grows."

Later career

Grainger's overseas travel was interrupted by the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939. He and Ella were in Springfield, Missouri, west of the continent in the fall of 1940, fearing that the war might result in an invasion of the United States eastern seaboard. From 1940 to 1941, Grainger performed regularly in charity concerts, most of whom were in Army and Air Force camps. The Jungle Book cycle's 1942 collection of his Kipling settings was performed in eight towns by the Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, Minnesota.

Grainger spent much of 1946 in Europe, exhausting from his wartime concerts routine. He was struggling with career loss; when rejecting the Chair of Music at Adelaide University in 1947, he wrote, "I am sure I would have taken this opportunity." He wrote The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart, a first collection of his wind band setting, for the Goldman Band in January 1948 to honor the founding's 70th birthday. Later, Grainger denigrated his own music as "common ground" while celebrating Darius Milhaud's Suite Française, which had not revealed the program.

Grainger appeared in his Suite on Danish Folksongs with the London Symphony Orchestra under Basil Cameron on August 10, 1948. He attended the Last Night of the Proms on September 18th, being in the promenade section of Delius' Brigg Fair's Promenade section. Several people over the next few years: Gardiner, quilter, and Karen Holten in 1953. Grainger was diagnosed with abdominal cancer in October 1953, and the battle against the disease would last for the remainder of his life. He continued to appear at concerts, more often in church halls and educational institutions than in large concert halls.

Grainger's long promotion of Grieg's music was recognised when he was given the St. Olav Medal of Norway by King Haakon of Norway in 1954, after his last Carnegie Hall appearance. In a letter to Danish composer Herman Sandby, a lifelong friend, he regretted the steady rise of "German style" in music and claimed that "I have been a leader without followers" throughout his compositional life.

Grainger hardly stopped to compose after 1950. Burnett Cross, a young physics professor, was his most creative endeavour in the last decade of his life. The first of these was a simple device controlled by an adapted pianola. Thenned tone-tool," a massive harmonica that Grainger hopefully alerted his stepdaughter Elsie in April 1951, will be able to enjoy free music "in a few weeks." By 1952, a third machine, the "Cross-Grainger Kangaroo-pouch," was produced. Grainger and Cross were inspired by advances in transistor technology to start working on a fourth, largely electronic machine, which was incomplete when Grainger died.

Grainger spent nine months in Australia in September 1955, where he spent nine months arranging exhibits for the Grainger Museum. He refused to attend a "Grainger Festival" as suggested by the Australian Broadcasting Commission because he felt that his homeland had rejected him and his music. He deposited an essay and photographs related to his sex life in a bank before leaving Melbourne but it was not to be opened until ten years after his death.

Grainger's physical fitness had significantly decreased by 1957, as had his concentration skills. However, he continued to visit Britain; in May of that year, he made his first television appearance in a BBC "Concert Hour" show in which he appeared on "Handel in the Strand" on the piano. He returned from surgery in such a way as to perform a modest winter concert season. Benjamin Britten met him in England on his 1958 visit to England, the two having previously held a mutually beneficial relationship. In 1959, he planned to attend Aldeburgh Festival in Birmingham but was prevented by sickness. Sensing that death was near, he made a new will, bequeathing his skeleton "for preservation and future display in the Grainger Museum." This aspiration was not fulfilled.

Grainger continued to perform his own music throughout the winter, with some covering long distances by bus or train; he did not travel by land. He gave his last public concert at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, on April 29, 1960, but by now his illness was affecting his concentration. His morning recital was a success, but his afternoon was, in his own words, "a fiasco." He continued to revise his music and arrange the lives of others, and informed Elsie that he was working on an adaptation of one of Cyril Scott's oldest songs. "I have been trying to write score for several days," his last letters, written from hospital in December 1960 and January 1961, show a determination to work. However, I haven't succeeded."

Grainger died in the White Plains hospital on February 20, 1961, at the age of 78. His remains were buried in the West Terrace cemetery's vault, as well as Rose's ashes. Ella lived with him for 18 years; she married Stewart Manville, a young archivist. She died in White Plains on July 17, 1979.

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