Percy Grainger Society News

Rediscovering Grainger’s Organ Music

Anne Ocone — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 17:25:30 GMT

by Dana Paul Perna, Emeritus Board Member, PGS
This note may not come as a surprise to many Society members, yet it seems a good moment to bring renewed attention to a publication that deserves to be better known. In a recent exchange I had with fellow emeritus member Barry Peter Ould, we found ourselves discussing the Schott edition of Organ Music by Percy Grainger—a handsome volume that, despite the quality of its contents, has not reached as wide an audience as it merits.

It appears that many organists are simply unaware of its existence.

While Grainger only wrote one work for the medium, which is included within this tome, his compositions as carefully arranged for the instrument on his behalf, showcases his characteristic blend of imagination, vigor, and sensitivity to color in a manner that would certainly have pleased him. Completed in this publication from his actual sketched layout, among the selections one shall find his expressive setting of “Sussex Mummers’ Christmas Carol,” a work especially suitable for holiday performances and seasonal recitals.

This collection offers a glimpse into a less-explored facet of Grainger’s creativity and provides rich material for organists seeking distinctive repertoire. For those who play—or for those who have an organist among their friends or family—this volume would be an inspiring and welcome discovery.

Further details about the publication can be found at the following links:
•Schott Music – Organ Album
•Hal Leonard – Organ Album

Dana Paul Perna, a longtime Recording Secretary of the Society and current member of the Emeritus group, continues to contribute generously to the life of the organization. The Emeritus designation recognizes former board members, including Barry Peter Ould and others, who have devoted many years of service to advancing the mission of the Percy Grainger Society.

Holiday Card Extravaganza

Anne Ocone — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 16:12:10 GMT

Correspondence was a high priority and a major undertaking for both Percy and Ella---keeping in touch with their family and friends and updating colleagues and business contacts. But the December holiday mailings must have been in a category by itself. They received hundreds of cards and notes as evidenced by the many saved bundles of cards, tied with twine or ribbon and organized by year. An entire wicker hamper was stuffed with some of these bundles dating from the 1940s and early 1950s.

The cards shown here date to 1959. A checkmark on the envelope or card confirmed that a reply was sent. Two checkmarks or a written note on the envelope indicated including an announcement of the new Grainger recording: Country Gardens and Other Favorites conducted by Frederick Fennell with the Eastman-Rochester “Pops” Orchestra.

Often striking and always engaging, the Christmas cards provide another window into the Grainger’s lives. Exemplifying imagery and graphic styles from an earlier time, they link us not only to the Grainger’s circle of friends and colleagues but also evoke a sense of that time period and help connect us to that era.

Resource Highlight: The Grainger Journal Archive

Anne Ocone — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:26:51 GMT

From 1978 through 2002, the UK-based Percy Grainger Society published and distributed The Grainger Journal, a softcover periodical focusing on the music and life of Percy Grainger. The journal contained a mixture of original articles, recollections, unpublished writings by Grainger, and reprints of out-of-print articles. Many of the pieces were written by individuals who were instrumental in establishing the field of Grainger scholarship, and who had a direct connection with Grainger through their association with Ella Grainger. Recognizing this wealth of information, the Percy Grainger Society digitized and added the publications to our website, creating a noteworthy and distinctive resource freely available to all.

Edited by Dr. David Tall and Barry Peter Ould, the journal enjoyed support and contributions from the broad Grainger community including Stewart Manville, representing the Percy Grainger Library Society, Kay Dreyfus, representing the Grainger Museum, Grainger’s biographer, John Bird, Grainger’s friend and free music collaborator, Burnett Cross, the pianist and composer Ronald Stevenson and, of course, Ella Grainger. Reprints of Percy’s writings, presenting his life in his words, include “Crossing the Australian Desert on Foot” and “In the Land of Gaugin” (Vol.5 No.2, November 1983) or “Grainger on Grainger” (Vol.4 No.1, October 1981). While modest in size, the journals quickly established themselves as the primary source of current information about Grainger’s life and music and were distributed widely.

Click here to view The Grainger Journal Archive

In 2021, the Percy Grainger Society was delighted to be able to relaunch The Grainger Journal in a new and expanded format, published twice a year with issues distributed to members in print and/or digital format. One of our most popular members’ benefits, The Grainger Journal continues to be devoted to the study of the music, life and cultural contribution of Percy Grainger. Each edition of the journal includes a wide range of articles promoting Grainger scholarship, occasional reviews of books and recordings related to Grainger, and news items that keep members up to date with developments in the society and at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. Submissions to the journal are welcomed from established academics, new entrants to the field, and those who simply admire the works of Percy Grainger.

For more information on The Grainger Journal, or to order print or digital copies, click here.

Guidance notes for the preparation and presentation of submissions can be found here.

"Restless Corners" at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio

Anne Ocone — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:23:25 GMT

The video sculptures that make up the installation were constructed using found objects, wood, paper and cardboard, string and tape, elements of drawing and photography. These simple and everyday materials of production reflect the homemade qualities found in the house. Percy Grainger was not only a composer, but a designer, maker, and repairer. Joel Sherry

This April, the Percy Grainger Home and Studio was alive with motion, video, and music, together with the many visitors who arrived at the house to experience the temporary installation, Restless Corners by artist Joel Sherry. Overlapping sounds filtered through house from 10 original sculptural video objects installed throughout the 1^st and 2^nd floors.

A temporary installation, Restless Corners is a series of movement-based objects exploring memory, time and space. Inspired by both the building and the Graingers’ lives, the works incorporate performance, sound, photography, drawing, found objects and Percy Grainger’s own musical compositions. Excerpts from Ella Grainger’s poetry were used as titles of the artworks.

I have used movement in my work as a choreographer, dancer and designer. Movement for me is a way to record space and time within the body, muscles and bones. Joel Sherry

Joel Sherry worked with performance artists Cynthis Bueschel Svigals and Michelle Kelly Wurf, spending time in the house and responding to the spaces, environment, and history. The performance videos they created were incorporated into the objects created for those spaces, displayed on monitors within the pieces or through projection. The objects were set within the existing display of objects and furnishings in the house.

Installation Video: Click here to see a walk-through of the installation!

To document the exhibition, the artist created a short video-- a walk-through of the installation. The video, approximately 7 minutes long, gives a brief look at each of the 10 pieces as a walk-through of the Grainger house.

Restless Corners was made posssible through a generous ArtsAlive Independent Artist Grant with ArtsWestchester. Additionally, the Percy Grainger Society is grateful to Joel Sherry, Cynthis Bueschel Svigals, Michelle Kelly Wurf and Stewart Lee, for their time and dedication.

Percy's Sketchbook

Anne Ocone — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 19:19:38 GMT

Percy’s childhood sketchbook is a highlight among the many treasures in the collection at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. With multiple pages of his pencil drawings and watercolor images, it is evidence of Percy’s remarkable drawing ability from a young age. Additionally, the sketchbook is reflective of interests that continued through Grainger’s life. Images include trains, boats, mythologic scenes, and even musical notations such as notes and staff.

Items in personal collections are often not dated and/or the provenance may be muddled. Looking at similar drawings by Percy, also in the collection at the house, we can confidently date the images in the sketchbook to about 1887-88, when Percy was 5 and 6 years old. However, when opening the cover, an inscription reads: To Darling Percy/With loving thoughts always/From Autie May/20 Aug 1924. It seems that this book had been saved in Australia with Auntie May and was sent to Percy in 1924, when he lived in White Plains, NY.

Percy sketched and painted in watercolor throughout his life. He designed the graphics for many of his published scores, creating the lettering and decorative borders, choosing colors, and planning the layouts. He also painted landscapes, copied folk patterns of embroidery and beadwork, and created detailed watercolor diagrams of his Free Music machines. The Percy Grainger Home and Studio is a showcase of the creative output of both Percy and his wife Ella. Additional information and images can be found on the PGS website under Highlights from the Collection. And, follow us on Instagram @percygraingersociety for a variety of images featuring the house, collections and events.

Meeting Percy Grainger

Anne Ocone — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 21:48:07 GMT

Percy Grainger touched many lives through his music and performances. Additionally, there are many stories of personal connections, developed as he traveled and performed, and forged through his friendships and mentoring of other musicians and composers. Richard and John Contiguglia were only 12 years old in March of 1950 when they first met Grainger in their hometown of Auburn NY. This unexpected encounter profoundly influenced their musical journey.

The twin boys, both child prodigy pianists, were set to perform in Auburn with the child prodigy conductor Ferruccio Burco. For reasons unknown, Burco could not appear and was replaced unexpectedly by Percy Grainger.

Grainger traveled to Auburn by train, arriving before 6 am during a particularly heavy snowfall. After being recognized at the train station, he requested to be brought to the Contiguglia home, where he enjoyed a simple breakfast with his hosts. John and Richard had been roused out of bed to shovel the path from the street to their front door.

Their day together included visits to the concert hall, rehearsals, and other preparations as well as discussions on music and composition. In voicing their desire for more music set for two pianos, Grainger encouraged them to develop their own music arrangements and provided guidance. Follow this link to read the full account of Grainger’s visit that developed into to a lifelong friendship and noteworthy mentorship.

Little Treasures

Anne Ocone — Thu, 26 Sep 2024 17:54:19 GMT

The Percy Grainger Home and Studio is full of treasures—objects and items that help provide a window into the lives of Percy Grainger, his wife Ella, and his mother Rose. Recently, in a chest in the large basement fireproof room (the room where Percy stored his files, manuscripts and scores), a small envelope was uncovered and a story emerged.

The envelope was folded in half, labeled and dated, with a small coin purse still enclosed. Inside the purse was a one of Percy’s notes, signed and dated, and 3 coins.

This purse was used by Ella Viola Ström when she wore my army clothes at Pevensey Oct 30 1927. She left the purse in the knickers and I found them there on S. S Republic, Nov. 1, 1927. Percy Grainger

Percy and Ella first met in 1926 on the S.S. Aorangi while traveling from Australia to Vancouver, Canada. Later, in the fall of 1927, Percy traveled to England to spend time with Ella at her seaside cottage at Pevensey Bay on the southern coast. Photos in the collection show Ella wearing men’s clothing and Percy even bought her a pair of men’s army boots made of yellow calfskin. It is no surprise that Ella could have mistakenly left her purse in the pants, and such a treat to find it saved together with Percy’s note identifying the “purse of darling Ella’s”. A more complete picture of this time period can be found in Ella’s and Percy’s separate accounts of their courtship, recently published in The Grainger Journal , Volume 20, Number 1.

Percy Grainger was detailed and meticulous, making notes and providing dates and information on so many of the projects and events in his life. He kept day books with brief entries on the accomplishments and events of his day, or even just listed what he ate at the restaurant and how much it cost. His manuscripts often include the date and place where he worked on the composition and, if on a train, he included a little drawing of a train at the bottom. His notes are immensely helpful as we continue to organize and care for the objects, instruments, and archives in the collection of the Percy Grainger Society.

The Wider Implications of Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’

Anne Ocone — Fri, 31 May 2024 19:41:07 GMT

Interested in learning more about Percy Grainger and his concept of Free Music? For those unable to have attended our exhibition or the related tours and events, many resources have been archived and are available through the Percy Grainger Society website.

This past March, Teresa Balough’s engaging and in-depth presentation explored the concepts and wider implications of Grainger's Free Music. Speaking from the first floor of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio and expanding on the (now closed) Free Music exhibition, Balough discussed the origin and Grainger’s concept of Free Music, his compositional work, his collaboration with his wife Ella and the scientist Burnett Cross, and how he used the house in White Plains to work on his Free Music machines.

As a young man Grainger gained the courage to risk his reputation as a pianist and popular composer to write daring harmonies with complex irregular rhythms. In middle age he took up the cause of lesser-known composers and encouraged the appreciation of music from other cultures and eras. And as the years advanced, he devoted himself more and more to the development of his ‘Free Music’ ideals and their implementation in the physical world through the development of the Cross-Grainger Free Music Machines.

Teresa' Balough's presentation, The Wider Implications of Percy Grainger’s ‘Free Music’, was recorded and is now available through this link.

Grainger scholar Teresa Balough has been studying the life and work of Percy Grainger for many years. She is the author of The Life and Work of Percy Aldridge Grainger: Till Life Become Fire (2023), co-editor of Distant Dreams: the Free Music Correspondence of Burnett Cross and Percy Grainger 1944–1960 (2020) and has published other books, essays, articles and monographs on Grainger.

A Timeline for Free Music

Anne Ocone — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:51:46 GMT

Did you know that in 1897, the American inventor Thadeus Cahill patented an electronic instrument designed to transmit music around New York via telegraph wires? His Mkll Telharmonium weighed 200 tons and broadcast concerts from the Telharmonic Hall in New York City between 1906 and 1910. Between 1902-1904, Grainger worked on plans for a Beatless-Notation Machine and Beatless Music Typer, devises designed to capture the performance of non-metrical rhythms and translate them to graphic notation.

Explore the Free Music Timeline to discover other key moments in the history of electronic music in relation to Percy Grainger’s work as a composer and inventor of Free Music machines.

Our exhibition, Tone Rhythm Pitch: Exploring Percy Grainger’s Free Music, closed last month, but information on Grainger’s work in experimental music continues to be available on our website. Explore past blog posts on Free Music and 7 Crowell as a Workshop, the GLOSS website, or our the digital exhibition brochure.

7 Cromwell as a Workshop

Anne Ocone — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 22:16:54 GMT

One focus of our current exhibit, Tone, Rhythm, Pitch: Exploring Percy Grainger’s Free Music, was to show how the Grainger’s home in White Plains was very much a studio and workshop, a space continuously changed to accommodate their creativity. Multiple areas of the house were given over to projects and experiments. Period photographs show Ella using the living room as a painting studio and Percy seated working on compositions, the front porch with Burnett Cross and Percy testing and adjusting an experiment, and Percy using the kitchen floor as a large flat space to draw, cut and glue large templates. Free Music Machines spanned floor to ceiling in the living room. Tools and supplies were stored nearby in the butler’s pantry.

Free Music machines and experiments were all over the house, including the second floor. Shown here are a few of the images documenting the period in the 1950s when Percy Grainger, along with Ella Grainger and Burnett Cross, worked together to design and build machines to produce free music.

Holiday Greetings: Cards from the Collection

Anne Ocone — Fri, 15 Dec 2023 14:51:07 GMT

Among the many items Percy and Ella saved are letters, cards, and other correspondence. Bundles of holiday cards, wrapped up by year and placed in a white whicker hamper, were stored on the upper floor of their home in White Plains, NY. The greeting cards came from friends, musicians and organizations. Following is a selection of cards dating from 1936 to 1949.

Grainger and Choral Music

Anne Ocone — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 15:23:39 GMT

For Percy Grainger communal singing was the most direct and expressive form of musical expression. Grainger composed startlingly original choral music throughout his life, often based on his love of the literature of Kipling, Whitman, Swinburne, and others. His folk-song collecting activities in England and Denmark also informed his approach to choral composition, and form the basis of some of his best-known works for choirs. For the 2023 program year, the Percy Grainger Society organized two presentations: Grainger for Choirs, held on February 24, and Performing Grainger’s Choral Music which will take place on Friday June 30^th.

Grainger for Choirs, presented by Paul Jackson, was the first of two discussions in the series and included an overview of Grainger's music for choirs, beginning with his early large-scale experiments in the setting of irregular rhythms, through his many and varied folk-song settings, to his lifetime's work on the Jungle Book Cycle. Illustrated with sound clips of selected works, the presentation looked at the influence of language and dialect on Grainger's approach to both the composition and performance of choral music, together with the many ways in which his ideas of Free Music, music without pitch division or standard meter, also found their way into his choral writing.

Performing Grainger’s Choral Music, to be presented by Dr. Brent Wells, Associate Professor of Choral Conducting and Ensembles at Brigham Young University, will explore the reality of performing Grainger's complicated choral works from unaccompanied choruses, that fall into a more "standard" performance model, to those requiring more robust—and at times, unusual—performing forces. Grainger's concept of "elastic scoring" will be discussed as well as practical ways to perform an all-Grainger choral concert, or a set of Grainger pieces within a more typical concert program featuring several composers and styles. The presentation will focus particularly on Grainger's folk-based choral works and will conclude with an open Q&A and discussion.

Please register and join us on Friday June 30 at noon (US Eastern time)!

Performing Grainger’s Choral Music is free to members and $10 for all other guests.

“Third Sundays” allows visitors to explore Grainger History—one idea at a time

Anne Ocone — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 12:23:13 GMT

Percy Grainger Home & Studio’s new initiative, “Third Sundays”, offers tours that are part education, part interpretation, and a fun, informative alternative to the traditional historic house tour. While a room-by-room tour is included, the focus is on one idea, with the collection providing the backdrop to illustrate and explore that idea. Led by volunteers, the outreach initiative will continue on select Sundays throughout the year.

These themed tours offer a unique lens with which to “read” the Percy Grainger Home & Studio. Presenters, taking into account their own interests and knowledge, are given the freedom to explore new connections between items in the collection, the historic house and the Grainger’s lives. If you are looking for inspiration, awe, and a slice of Grainger’s views, be sure to register for an upcoming tour.

Historic houses are a living time capsule that provide a unique opportunity to learn about the past. They offer us insight into the lives of those who lived in them and the history of their time. From architecture and design to furniture, art and artifacts, these sites can tell us a lot about how people lived in different eras. By exploring historic homes, we can gain an understanding of our past and how it has shaped our present. Additionally, we can also learn valuable lessons looking at how people used to live, and applying that knowledge to our own lives today.

Upcoming Third Sunday tours include Grainger and Fennell, led by Rebecca Weissman and scheduled for Sunday July 16, and Percy Grainger’s Free Music Machines, to be presented by Dr. Paul Jackson on September 17. Please join us! Third Sunday tours are offered free of charge: registration is required. Visit our events page for more information.

The Record Collection in the Dining Room: My First Visit to the Percy Grainger House

Anne Ocone — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 14:16:48 GMT

By Maci Bianco. On Saturday, January 21 I attended a volunteer orientation at the Percy Grainger Home & Studio. Part of my introduction, as a new volunteer, was to tour the entire house. I was invited to walk through each room, with the other volunteers, and to choose several things in each room to learn more about. This would provide a focus in for my tours (thereby building my confidence) and I would be able to explain why certain objects were important to the Grainger’s in order to tell their story.

In the dining room, the first thing I noticed was the large cabinet filled with record albums. The record collection is extensive. I was told that Percy himself had set up the storage unit, covering it with the same wallpaper as in the room, to make it fit in. Since Grainger’s death in 1961, the collection in this cabinet has changed--additional albums have been added and others removed. I decided to choose a few samples and see what I could learn.

The recordings I was most curious about include: The Historic Percy Grainger Piano Roll (1919), Grieg: Concerto in A Minor with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra; Vaughn Williams’ A Pastoral Symphony in the Fen Country; and The Orchestral Works of Percy Grainger Vol. 1.

The Historic Percy Grainger Piano Roll (1919) Grieg: Concerto in A Minor with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra was the first album that caught my attention. It was released in 1978. The album is an interesting compilation of Grainger’s compositions, as well as reproducing some of his piano rolls. The player piano reached its height around the 1920s. Grainger made recordings with the Aeolian Company: the US manufacturers of the Duo-Art reproducing pianos.

This album also features the recording of Grainger playing the Grieg “Piano Concerto in A Minor”. There is a photo of Grieg in the music room at 7 Cromwell, and it was fascinating to learn why the relationship was important to both men. When the Grainger visited Grieg at the composer's home at Troldhaugen, Norway (the visit captured in the photo), Grieg was impressed with Grainger’s musicianship and later stated:

"I had to become sixty-four years old to hear Norwegian piano music interpreted so understandingly and brilliantly. He breaks new ground for himself, for me, and for Norway. And then this enchanting, profound, serious, and childlike naturalness! What a joy to gain a young friend with such qualities!"

As a pianist, Percy Grainger gave hundreds of performances of a dozen of Grieg’s works, most notably the “Piano Concerto” which he performed regularly during the year of 1960. He made gramophone and piano-rolls of popular Grieg works such as “To the Spring”, “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” and “Norwegian Bridal Procession”, in addition to Grieg’s “Piano Concerto”. Grainger also recorded many of Grieg’s lesser-known piano pieces.

(griegsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Gillies-and-Pear-paper-2007.pdf)

My second choice from the cabinet was Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony in the Fen Country. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger were among the first to write for wind band in the twentieth century. There were also both folk song collectors.

Vaughan Williams’ initial inspiration to write this symphony came during World War I, after hearing a bugler practicing and accidentally playing an interval of a seventh instead of an octave. This ultimately led to the trumpet cadenza in the second movement. This piece has gained the reputation of being a subtly beautiful elegy for the dead of World War I and a meditation on the sounds of peace.

It is interesting to think of this piece in relationship to Grainger’s “The Warriors: Music to an Imaginary Ballet”. Composed between 1913 and 1916, and dedicated to Frederick Delius, the piece is considered a tribute to pacifism. “The Warriors” was first performed at the Hollywood Bowl, the same location where he and Ella married in 1928.

(https://www.ulethbridge.ca/lib/ematerials/handle/123456789/2632)

The Orchestral Works of Percy Grainger, Vol. I was my third choice. It was compiled by Richard Hickox, a British Conductor, and since it is volume one, I wondered how many additional CD volumes were produced. I am new to Grainger’s work and I thought that this particular recording would be a good introduction. I look forward to checking to see how many of Grainger’s orchestra works were compiled by Chandos.

As with learning any new subject, each bit of information leads to further questions. It is certainly this way with my first choice of albums from the cabinet. I will listen to each selection as I begin to learn about the life and music of Percy Grainger.

A Recent Donation, A New Story

Anne Ocone — Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:29:49 GMT

The Percy Grainger Society is often contacted by people with questions or requests for information such as where to find specific music scores. Additionally, individuals contact us offering to donate items such as signed photographs and scores. The objects often come with a story, a personal connection. They add insight to the interpretation of the Grainger’s’ lives and enriches the impact of the donation. Following is a little background on our most recent acquisition.

In May of 1949, Percy arrived in Portland, Maine prior to his performance with the Portland Symphony Orchestra. He came down with a cold and sinus infection, apparently bought on from his exposure to the pouring rain as he walked between the train station and music hall, and he was brought to see the specialist, Dr. John Colby Myer. They became fast friends. Dr. Myer was also a musician/composer who played double bass with the symphony. Percy sent him multiple scores, essays that he had published, and photographs. In return, Dr. Myer sent Percy his own compositions, which Percy would critique and send back. John Colby Myer held onto these items together with a scrapbook he created with relevant news clippings, images, and programs from Grainger performances.

The family of John Colby Myer has generously donated this collection to the Percy Grainger Society. We are excited to add these items to our collection and treasure the insight from the stories that come with it.

Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders: the Free Music Machine

Anne Ocone — Fri, 02 Dec 2022 14:41:05 GMT

With the conservation and installation of Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders, the Percy Grainger Society fabricated 2 information panels which are now on display together with the free music machine in the dining room of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. What follows here is the text of the second panel as written by Dr. Paul Jackson, PGS Board President.

The Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders machine was constructed in February 1950. It is the only Free Music machine that remains intact in the Percy Grainger Home and Studio, the others either dismantled, lost, or transferred by the composer to the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia. The only other complete machine in existence is the Kangaroo-Pouch machine, now in the collection of the Grainger Museum. As with many of the machines, the title on the original identification display cards was prefaced by the term ‘Cross-Grainger Experiments’ in recognition of the pivotal role that Burnett Cross played in the design of the machines.

‘It seems to me absurd to live in an age of flying and yet not be able to execute tonal glides and curves.’

In common with all of the Free Music machines, it incorporates a two-part design, a control mechanism and a sound producing element. Grainger drew on his early experiences as a recording artist with player pianos in the design of many of the machines, using paper rolls with slits and holes cut into them to play the various instruments. These comprised organ pipes, harmonium reeds, simple electronic oscillators, and, in the case of this machine, two recorders, and a slide, or swanee whistle. The recorders and whistle would have been connected to a vacuum cleaner or hair dryer by means of rubber tubes, which provided the necessary amount of air to produce a continuous sound. As the paper rolls passed over the holes of the recorders, emulating the fingers of a human player, different notes would have been produced. This made possible an approximation of a pitch glide as the recorders may have been tuned to realize fractional tones, smaller than the standard musical semitone. The slide whistle, the only part of the machine able to produce continuously gliding sounds, may have simply been controlled by hand by pulling and pushing the metal control lever.

‘Free Music demands a non-human performance. Like most true music, it is an emotional, not a cerebral, product and should pass direct from the imagination of the composer to the ear of the listener by way of delicately controlled musical machines.’

Prior to conservation, the machine was stowed away in the upper floors of the house, with many of the sound-producing elements removed. Through close examination of the three period photographs from the 1950s, and with clues drawn for Percy's day-books where he made short notes of his experiments, it was possible to identify the missing components. A rolling pin, visually matching the one in the period photograph, was found in the kitchen. The recorders were identified as those made by Arnold Dolmetsch, the noted English instrument maker with whom Grainger collaborated in the editing of a number of early music compositions in the 1930s and 1940s. The curious circular object at the side of the machine was also identified as a Blow-a-Tune, a child’s toy made by the American toy manufacturer Kenner in 1949. These instruments have been re-introduced into the machine to allow correct routing of the paper rolls and to complete the impression of how the machine may have operated.

It is unlikely that the Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders machine was particularly successful, as the tension required to ensure that the paper rolls stayed sufficiently close to the body of the recorders would have meant that the paper was liable to tearing and uneven flow, problems that Grainger experienced in many of the machines. But it remains a fascinating testament to Grainger’s dogged pursuit of his vision of Free Music, encapsulating his multi-faceted character as visionary composer, performer, artist, designer and inventor.

The conservation of Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders was supported through the NYSCA/GHHN Conservation Treatment Grant Program administered by Greater Hudson Heritage Network. This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Percy Grainger and Free Music

Anne Ocone — Thu, 20 Oct 2022 14:11:04 GMT

With the conservation and installation of Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders, the Percy Grainger Society fabricated 2 information panels which are now on display together with the free music machine in the dining room of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio. What follows here is the text of the first panel, "Percy Grainger and Free Music", as written by Dr. Paul Jackson, PGS Board President.

For Percy Grainger, Free Music drew its inspiration from the sounds of nature and was music free from the constraints of conventional rhythm and individual pitch. From an early age, he imagined music that would glide continuously across the pitch spectrum, without the need for metrical rhythms and, ultimately, without the need for a performer; the composers’ ideas would be translated directly into sound.

‘I have heard free music in my head since I was a boy of eleven or twelve … it is my only important contribution to music.’

Elements of Free Music can be found in much of Grainger’s instrumental and vocal compositions, where the use of sliding notes and irregular rhythms often feature. Between 1935 and 1937, Grainger wrote three short pieces – Free Music No. 1, Free Music No. 2 and Beatless Music – which further demonstrated his ideas in practice. Following a meeting with the Russian inventor Leon Theremin in 1932, Grainger composed the pieces for theremins, instruments able to produce continuously gliding tones without direct contact from the player. The works also called for a new method of musical notation, Grainger devising a system that used graph paper to indicate pitch contours and changes in volume. These pieces are among the earliest examples of pitchless music.

Grainger regarded all of his music up to this point as merely a stepping-stone to the full development of Free Music, and he was to increasingly devote his time to this from the late 1940s onwards as his activities as a concert pianist began to decline. Using his White Plains home as a studio, he worked alongside his wife, Ella, and in close collaboration with a young physicist, William Burnett Cross. Together they designed and built machines that were able to produce Free Music without the involvement of a human performer. Grainger and Cross made audio recordings of their experiments and documented their work with a number of evocative photographs. Grainger, a talented artist, also produced color drawings of several of the machines, including explanations of their working methods.

‘Free Music … is the goal that all music is clearly heading for now and has been heading for through the centuries. It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age.’

Most of the machines, which were given typically Graingeresque names such as the Hills & Dales Air-Blown Tone-Tools, the Side-Ridge Clothes-Line-&-Scotch-Tape-Tin Oscillator-Player, and the Kangaroo-Pouch Method of Synchronising & Playing 8 Oscillators, were constructed from wood, paper, cardboard, string, and other found objects scavenged from the house, local hardware stores and the immediate locale. The machines were in a constant state of flux and were often dismantled or repurposed as soon as sounds were recorded. The final machine, the Electric Eye, remained unfinished at the time of Grainger’s death, but was the most sophisticated and was able to produce seamless electronic pitch glides by ‘reading’ graphic notation painted on clear film. It is this machine that places Grainger’s experiments in electronic music squarely alongside other composers whose work in these areas has historically gained more attention.

Roundtable Rambles

Anne Ocone — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 19:18:25 GMT

“Can you talk about the significance of Lincolnshire Posy?” began Professor Laura Rexroth. She was addressing panelist David Waybright, Tom Leslie, and Myron Welch, each past presidents of American Bandmasters Association and each having many, various answers to such a question. Tom Leslie began by noting that he had conducted the work many times, as had his fellow panelist, but he learned the most by teaching it to his student conductors over the years—which he always did. Myron Welch noted that he considered it one of the top works for band and is important for its scoring, as well as harmonies, mixed meters, and, of course, use of saxophones. Dave Waybright added that the work was so important that it advanced the medium of band altogether and it was difficult to underestimate the importance of such a seminal work.

So began the first of three discussion panels addressing the band work Lincolnshire Posy. Considered by many to be Grainger’s masterpiece. The 16-minute-long work has six movements, each adapted from folk songs that Grainger collected on a 1905–1906 trip to Lincolnshire, England. The work first debuted on March 7, 1937, making 2022 the 85^th anniversary of the composition.

Prof. Rexroth led the discussion by inquiring: Do you feel that the knowledge of the lyrics for the works affects your interpretations? And, as a conductor, how do your approach the score? As you review the score, do you have surprises? Each panelist answered thoughtfully, reflecting on their many performances, conducting students they had taught, and how much they learned—and continue to learn--along the way.

Join us for the second and third roundtable discussions on Lincolnshire Posy. On Thursday September 15, ‘Rufford Park Poachers’ and ‘The Brisk Young Sailor’ will be discussed. On Friday October 14, ‘Lord Melbourne’ and ‘The Lost Lady Found’ will be the final two movements to be discussed. Information and registration can be found on our event page.

Roundtable Rambles will conclude the Grainger’s Society’s Celebration of Lincolnshire Posy. The year began with a presentation of Col Jason Fettig and the performances of the President’ Own Band. Midyear, Grainger Society President Emeritus Barry Ould addressed Granger’s method of collecting the folk songs.

The panel discussions can be found in the Members Only area of the Percy Grainger Society’s website. Additionally, recording of rehearsals by Fredrick Fennel and Col Jason Fettig can be viewed here:

Frederick Fennell rehearses Lincolnshire Posy with the U.S. Navy Band - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mNMCX93jGA&t=18s

Digital Rehearsal Hall: GRAINGER "Lincolnshire Posy" (episode 1) - United States Marine Band – Movements 1 &2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUfm6Adsbh0&t=1s

Digital Rehearsal Hall: GRAINGER "Lincolnshire Posy" (episode 2) - United States Marine Band – Movements 3&4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcJjYhFXYYM&t=1s

Digital Rehearsal Hall: GRAINGER "Lincolnshire Posy" (episode 3) - United States Marine Band – Movements 5&6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WltbrbnwusM&t=1s

Field recordings of songs from Lincolnshire Posy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbwtc1Frhng

Roundtable Rambles is a cooperative project between the Percy Grainger Society and the American Bandmasters Association.

Re-stringing the Paper: Conservation of Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders

Anne Ocone — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 16:57:42 GMT

Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders, the free music machine in the collection at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio, was created by Percy Grainger with Burnett Cross in February of 1950. Few of Grainger’s experimental music machines exist; the Percy Grainger Society is fortunate that the object was saved.

Kept for many years in a storage room on the third floor, Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders was dusty and incomplete with pieces of wood and parts stored on the table top. When pulled out of the storage room, it was obvious that the existing paper roll was not strung through the machine correctly. Additionally, two paper rolls must have been removed at some point.

The conservation treatment addressed both stability and aesthetic issues, so that Gliding Tones on Whistle, Notes on Recorders could be safely displayed as close to the original appearance as possible. Placing the cut paper rolls back through the machine was just one element in a complex project.

Thankfully, there are period photographs of the object detailing the path of the 3 paper rolls through the machine, under the rolling pins and over the slide whistle and recorders. The additional paper rolls had been rolled up and stored with the object. One of the challenges of the conservation project, after cleaning and repairs to the paper, was to re-string the cut paper rolls through the machine. Following below are a few images documenting the process as each paper roll is placed back through the machine as per period documentation.

The conservation of the free music machine was supported through the NYSCA/GHHN Conservation Treatment Grant Program administered by GHHN (Greater Hudson Heritage Network). This program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Conservation at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio

Anne Ocone — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 21:35:05 GMT

“One of the things I love about being a conservator is that every piece is a puzzle to solve” says Kerith Koss Schrager. “The free music machine wasn’t intended for people to appreciate it 100 years from now. It was created for a moment in time. My challenge here is to recreate and preserve Grainger’s vision at that point in time—a point in time I really don’t have all the evidence for.”

Ms. Schrager is the object conservator working on the conservation of our free music machine, “Gliding Tones on Whistle” created in February 1950. An objects conservator works toward the long-term preservation of three-dimensional works including stabilization, structural repairs and cleaning.

Over the years, the Grainger Home and Studio has had several visits by different type of conservators. In September 2015, Kathleen Craughwell-Varda, a museum conservator sent through the Greater Hudson Heritage Network’s C2CNY Circuit Rider Program, visited and urged the board to consider the house and collection in light of our mission, her report noted:

The role of the collections (furnishings, clothes, decorative arts, fine arts, musical instruments, etc.) should be considered once PGS (then, IPGS) has a board-approved mission statement. What role do they play in illustrating the life and career of Percy Grainger? What connection, if any, does the personal property and artworks of his wife Ella have to the new mission statement? Is the care and maintenance of a historic house and its furnishings key to the mission of PGS?

Great Hudson Heritage Network then arranged a visit by Donia Conn, a book and paper conservator, to review and focus on preservation of the letters and books in the basement. Again, the recommendation was to have a serious discussion about the role of the collection in the Society’s mission.

The PGS board listened. The house and collection are now a major focus of the latest mission statement. Volunteers and staff have sorted, inventoried, and organized many of the rooms and much of the collection. While the process is slow, often item-by-item, each small project is part of the stewardship of the entire collection and gives a greater understanding of the the unique genius of the Grainger family. Some items, like the free music machine, warrant special attention.

In 2021, PGS again submitted a grant proposal, this time to the NYSCA/GHHN Conservation Treatment Program. The grant proposal noted:

Conservation of “Cross-Grainger Experiment–February 1950” fits squarely into our mission to preserve the legacy, home and artifacts of Percy Grainger during his life in America. A significant and unique object in our collection, the Free Music machine model is currently in storage and cannot be displayed. Elements are misaligned and/or broken and there are tears in the aged paper rolls. Unattached components rest on the surface of the table. Heavy surface dirt and dust throughout magnify the risk of further deterioration. Conservation is essential for display and preservation.

The review committee of GHHN agreed. A grant of $5220 was awarded and the conservation work has recently begun.

“The free music machine played such an important role in Grainger’s life, and we are so glad it has been moved back to the dining room, the space where Grainger actually worked on many of his experimental machines. Restoring it and placing it on the first floor will go along way to making the house an even more interesting tour for house visitors,” says Susan Colson, long-time PGS board member and frequent docent. “We have told the story in various ways (for example, our YouTube video), but having the machine itself in place is central to its living history.”

Grainger and Irregular Meters

Anne Ocone — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 19:25:58 GMT

by William Garlette

Our upcoming celebration of the 85^th Anniversary of the premier of Lincolnshire Posy has generated several excellent queries. The one question I’d like to address in this blog is Grainger’s method of writing irregular or, what we call now, asymmetrical/composite meters and why he chose the notation he used. The question we get is why did Grainger write 2 ^1/2/4 and not 5/8? And then why does he use a mixture of both methods?

To Bandleaders

“Bandleaders need not be afraid of the two types of irregular rhythms met with in the “Lincolnshire Posy”; those conveyed by changing time-signatures in “Rufford Park Poachers,” and those (marked “Free Time”) left to the band leader’s volition in “Lord Melbourne.” Both these types lie well within the powers of any normal high school band. The only players that are likely to balk at those rhythms are seasoned professional bandsmen, who think more of their beer than of their music.” ^{^[1]}

In a short piece titled “The Specialist and the All-Round Man” written in 1943, Grainger commented on the dissimilar experiences he had had working with amateur and professional musicians:

“A few years ago, I was asked to prepare a band composition for a bandmasters’ convention in Milwaukee. I never like to ‘sell a pig in a poke’; so I tried out the work on several student bands (among others, the superb student band of the Ernest Williams School of Music in Brooklyn) and on high school bands in Texas, New York state, and elsewhere. Two of the movements, in my work, presented unusual rhythmic problems, but none of the non-professional bands had any problem with them. But the professional bandsmen in Milwaukee could not solve these problems at all, and the two movements had to be left out.” ^{^[2]}

This composition was realized towards the end of Grainger’s compositional life. What he used in Lincolnshire Posy was a compilation of all he developed prior to 1937. Grainger’s use of these “irregular” meter signatures began in the late 1890s. The works he held most dear were Hill-Song No. 1 and No. 2. Both works were started between 1901 and 1907 and both have these types of meter signatures.

In studying writings on Grainger, I’ve found many writers look at and question or write from the perspective of a 20^th or 21^st century commentator or observer. Too often a question is asked based on what we currently know without realizing the historical perspective. What was the state of music or society at the time of Grainger’s endeavors? What existed? What was acceptable or ‘the norm’?

Prior to 1899, the use of irregular or asymmetrical/composite meters was not employed. With no historical precedent to follow, Grainger devised a metrical method that conformed to his rhythmic needs.

“IRREGULAR RHYTHMS. Studies in the rhythms of prose speech that I undertook in 1899 led to such irregular barrings as those in bars 69-74 of Love Verses from ‘The Song of Solomon’, composed 1899-1900, which (as far as I know) was the first use of irregular rhythms in modern times, though of course Claude Le Jeune (1528-1602), in his ‘non-metrical’ pieces, used rhythms quite as irregular.” ^{^[3]}

This quote speaks to another aspect that is not acknowledged enough: Grainger was a philologist. “A philologist is someone who studies the history of languages, especially by looking closely at literature. If you're fascinated with the way English has changed over time, from Beowulf to Beloved, you might want to become a philologist. Linguistics is the study of language, and a philologist is a type of linguist.” ^{^[4]}

He was fluent in many languages and, along with each language, he studied dialects of several of these languages. This study led him to understand the rhythms of speech, both prose and poetry, and then incorporate this awareness into his musical form. The ‘rhythm’ of prose is not symmetrical. Language is not always what is referred to as ‘sing-song’ - verse with marked and regular rhythm and rhyme. Language and prose are irregular and Grainger, as he did throughout his life, invented a way to translate life into music.

Paul Jackson, President of the Percy Grainger Society (PGS), writes, “I imagine Percy used them because 2 1/2 over 4 is different to 5/8, in the same way that 1 1/2 over 4 is different to 3/8. The latter time signatures imply a certain stress pattern that the former doesn’t necessarily mean to. That is, 3/8 might be thought of a single rhythmic unit (1-2-3), whereas 1 1/2 is definitely one beat plus half a beat, and 2 1/2 is two beats plus a half beat. This would arise from Percy’s concept of irregular rhythms (again, 1 1/2 is irregular, whereas 3/8 is not). Of course, in practice, and to the listener, these distinctions may not be apparent. Also, I suspect publishers encouraged Percy to abandon this way of notating in favour of more standard versions (although he certainly wasn’t the only composer of that period to use irregular fractions, Carlos Chavez also used these signatures in his third Iano sonata of 1928).” ^{^[5]}

Another PGS Board member and Grainger scholar, Chalon Ragsdale, notes, “Grainger’s use of both (2 ^1/2/4 and 5/8) were at least partly suggestions as to conducting gestures. 2.5 over 4 would be conducted as 2/4 with a long 2^nd beat. 3/8 would be conducted as 5 separate motions.” ^{^[6]}

So, the question remains one for discussion, but the uniqueness of Grainger’s music continues to be engaging and fascinating.

^{^[1]} Score note to Lincolnshire Posy, Percy Aldridge Grainger, August, 1939.

^{^[2]} Garofalo, Robert J., (ed.), Wind band/ensemble anthology folk songs & dances in wind band classics, vol. 4: Folk songs & dances in Lincolnshire Posy by Percy Grainger, Silver Spring MD: Whirlwind Music Publications,
2008. p. 11 (full historical performance account p. 1 – 26).

^{^[3]} Grainger, Percy. “Percy Grainger’s Remarks about His Hill-Song No. 1 by Percy Aldridge Grainger (5-page typescript dated September 1949) located in Number 4 – 1st Edition 1982 – 2nd Edition 1997 - A Musical Genius from Australia – Selected Writings by and about Percy Grainger – Compiled and with Commentary by Teresa Balough, p. 85.

^{^[4]} https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/philologist

^{^[5]} Email correspondence with the author December 28, 2021

^{^[6]} Email correspondence with the author December 30, 2021

A Chorus of Green

Anne Ocone — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 19:12:53 GMT

What are the first colors of spring you notice?

For me it is the chartreuse green of the weeping willow trees and the vivid green hues of moss that emerge as the snow finally melts away. Looking through images for this blog post I came across Percy Grainger's 1916 illustrated cover of Four Irish Dances, the obvious choice for this March edition. Grainger documented folk music arrangements preserving for posterity the legacy of these unique musical styles. Through Grainger’s music, letters, photographs, program notes, newspaper promotions, and reviews he leaves us ample documentation of his influence and legacy. With investigative work we can piece together a timeline, a progression. You can see the patterns of daily life over a lifetime and begin to contextualize his contributions. Seeing how one note led to the next.

Here at the Percy Grainger House and Studio I am helping to preserve the environment in which he created this work. As a graduate student working towards a master's in museum studies, I began an internship here last summer. My weekly visits to 7 Cromwell Place have been a delight in assisting with the work of uncovering, documenting, and cataloging the objects in the house. There is an intimate feeling here, like one of the Graingers might simply walk in the front door at any moment. I am learning how Percy and Ella lived and worked in the house over a span of forty plus years. This work is about peeling back the layers as much as it is about building an archive of information.

There are many stories to tell here, and one of them can be told through examining the physical house the Graingers lived in at 7 Cromwell Place, in downtown White Plains, New York from 1921-1979. One of the first things I noticed was that the color green is everywhere in the interior design and architecture of the home. Popular in industrial and decorative designs from the 1920s through the 1950s, the color green was ubiquitous with the modern era home. McCoy Pottery, Fiestaware, linoleum rugs, textiles, kitchen utensils, and appliances, were all readily available in shades of green.

In the home there are several stained-glass windows and delicate tiffany-style lamp shades that evoke the earlier era of the home's construction sometime in the early days of the 20th century. There is the green detail on the “modern” gas stove and the assortment of dishes on the kitchen table that sit as if waiting in anticipation for the arrival of an afternoon guest. There are lamps made of pressed metal, Bakelite, and ceramic in varying shades of green; indeed, there is a lamp style for every occasion. In the living room a decorative detail on a rattan armchair, the quirky English-style Knole sofa, and the linoleum rug in the pantry all hint at variations on the theme. There remains a linoleum rug in the upstairs bathroom, a rose bordered green runner.

So how did the Graingers live in this house? The home was both a retreat and a launching point, a creative hub for the Free-Music collaboration between Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross and the studio where Ella designed her tiles. As I have been cataloging photographs into the museum’s database or packing documents into archival storage boxes, I uncover images of the Graingers in their home. I look for clues, scanning the photos for a familiar lamp, a chair, or a window covering. We understand that the Graingers freely moved the furniture around the house to make way for creative endeavors such as the work on the Free Music machines or impromptu music concerts.

I recently helped Museum Coordinator Anne Ocone search the kitchen for a rolling pin, a replacement part needed for the Free Music machine slated to be restored this summer. In the cupboard we found a wooden rolling pin with green handles. Was this the one in the photographs? We assumed the handle was red, but with only a black and white photograph as evidence it was hard to tell. Was this one of the original rolling pins used? Maybe. Was it likely? Possibly. I can imagine Grainger walking around the house gathering materials for the Free Music machine.

There is an art and science to museum work. You rely on primary source materials: photographs, letters, documents, objects, and piece together the sequence of events to craft a narrative about the totality of a collection. Ella and Percy Grainger filled their home with many objects the color green. There is something to this. I can’t know what its meaning held for them, but only observe that it was so.

Sometimes here at the Grainger home the process of uncovering and documenting their life and work is as much about determining what things are not as to what they are. What is here and what is not. Most of their belongings were shipped off to the Percy Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia. I assume that this was Grainger’s attempt at curating his own narrative. Fitting these pieces that remain into the puzzle supports the vision and mission of the Percy Grainger Society of “promoting a deeper understanding of the cultural, social, and economic context of his life and work” helping “to preserve it and interpret it for future generations” (1). The house is full of evidence of their life here in White Plains. Letters, photographs, sheet music, books, toolboxes, artwork, clothing, suitcases, furniture, musical instruments, and mementos all help to tell the story of who the Graingers were, and helps to celebrate a richer understanding of their life.

Here at the Percy Grainger House and Studio, Green seemed the perfect musings for March as we await the outdoors to join in the chorus of green found inside 7 Cromwell Place. With the hope of brighter, lighter days ahead I look forward to the arrival of the yellow daffodils of April and the Spring Open House & Jazz concert here on April 10th.

Stewart Lee March 9, 2022

(1) .www.percygraingeramerica.org

Percy and Ella at Gustavus Adolphus College: Photos from the collection

Anne Ocone — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 14:51:41 GMT

The collection at the Percy Grainger Home and Studio has many treasures, and highlighted here are a few of the images from a box of photos dating to 1941 when Grainger traveled and performed with the Gustavus Adolphus College Band on their two-week tour in Minnesota.

Percy and Ella had developed a strong relationship with Gustavus Adolphus College and their band director Frederic Hilary. They visited the college multiple times in the early 1940s. Percy gave lectures, taught, and performed. Judging by the photographs, he spent a lot of time with the students including traveled together with the band on the bus during the tour.

Percy and Ella made friends wherever they traveled. During the tour in March of 1941, they stayed at the home of friends Mr. and Mrs. Roy Hendrickson, at 819 Ella Avenue, Wilmar Minnesota. Their son, Charles, age five at the time of the Grainger's visit, reported to the Percy Grainger Society in a September 2, 2001 letter: "Realizing that the lack of a piano did not present us as worthy for such a visit, my father ordered a Baldwin delivered to the house just in time for Percy to dedicated it. I still have the piano." The letter noted it was Fred Hilary, the then Gustavus Adolphus music director, that was responsible for bringing Percy to Minnesota for the tours. Charles Hendrickson (1935-2020) was the founder of the Hendrickson Organ Company.

Like the Percy Grainger Society, Gustavus Adolphus College has a collection of Grainger photos as well as many stories about Percy and his time at the college.

The Graingers in White Plains: a video

Anne Ocone — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 21:32:50 GMT

This eight-minute video photo montage was first shown at the November 14, 2021 concert of Percy Grainger’s music by the Westchester Symphonic Winds, with Curt Ebersole as Music Director and performed at the Tarrytown Music Hall in Tarrytown, New York. The photographs were selected from the collection of the Percy Grainger Home and Studio in White Plains, New York by Barry Peter Ould, Susan Edwards Colson, and Anne Ocone. The video was created by Matthew McGarrell. The soundtrack is taken from a 1929 78 rpm disc recording of Percy Grainger playing his piano arrangement of Jutish Medley.

Click here to watch the video

Matthew McGarrell

Percy Grainger: His Influence Extends Far and Wide

Susan Colson — Sat, 23 Oct 2021 15:00:30 GMT

By Dana Paul Perna

Editor's Note: With Ray Davies, longtime frontman for The Kinks, confessing to an enduring interest in Percy Grainger's work ("The warm gentleness of his My Robin Is To The Greenwood Gone is joyful to behold") in a recent album , we thank Dana Perna for further drawing our attention to Grainger's influence on musicians in surprising ways.

What an unexpected thrill in discovering that a new, thoughtfully conceived album has been devoted to music by four American composers you seldom encounter on orchestral programs anymore, if not ever. The new release of whence I write is by the Basque National Orchestra (Euskadiko Orkestra) under the baton of conductor Robert Trevino that appears on the ONDINE label, catalog number 1396-2. With the exception of one work, three of the titles have been recorded previously, yet each of them have been captured in truly glorious technicolor sonority, marking a most welcome inclusion to any record collection.

During their lifetimes, these four composers were performed, esteemed and acclaimed, yet, alas, have fallen into a degree of undeserved neglect since their passings. While it is uncommon enough to find these masters sharing the same album, the conductor Robert Trevino has taken his exploration still further, into the recesses of their repertory – complete with a Hanson piece, “Before the Dawn”, op. 17, that has had to wait a century for this, its premiere recording. Since all four of these composers knew Percy Grainger, and visa versa, it seems wholly appropriate to make mention of this release to Grainger enthusiasts specifically.

Based on a play by Maeterlinck, “La Mort de Tintagiles”, by the Alsatian-born Charles Martin Loeffler (1861–1935), opens this release. Completed during the summer of 1897, this impressive 25-minute orchestral work features a solo part for viola d’amore that is performed on this recording by Delphine Dupuy. “La Mort de Tintagiles” is a richly orchestrated treasure of an opus that Loeffler and Franz Kneisel premiered with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January 1898 - as originally scored for TWO viola d’amores and orchestra. Loeffler revised the work, prepared the featured parts for one viola d’amore, receiving its premiere in that final form in 1901; the version presented on this release. (For motion picture buffs, some of you may recognize the viola d’amore’s presence amidst the score for “On Dangerous Ground” by [Grainger’s student] Bernard Herrmann. One of Loeffler’s own viola d’amores [he owned 2] was gifted to Isabella Stewart Gardner on 14 August 1903, and is currently on display at the library named for her in Boston, but, I informatively digress). While he is often referred to as being an “American Impressionist,” that would not completely define Loeffler’s identity as a composer, nor to generate a picture as per the late-romantic richness, color, depth and dramatic nature that one shall comprehend upon encountering this major opus among his catalog. The sumptuousness of Loeffler’s orchestration, alone, is worth stating as remaining paramount to this unique work among the symphonic repertory; viola d’amore, orchestral, or otherwise.

Despite having completed only a little more than an hour’s worth of music over the course of his 95 years, Carl Ruggles (1876–1971) remains among the very greatest of America’s “maverick” composers. His “Evocations” exists both as versions for solo piano and orchestra, respectively, the orchestral version of which appearing on this release. In four relatively brief movements, his treatment of the symphonic idiom being a bit more forward-looking than the other works on this release demonstrates the Basque National Orchestra’s ability in performing a diversity of styles.

Howard Hanson (1896–1981) remains one of the major figures in American music. As well as being a composer and conductor of distinction, under Hanson’s leadership, he established the Eastman School of Music to world-renowned status. (His piano piece “Clog Dance” is dedicated to Percy Grainger). Prior to winning the Prix de Rome in 1921, Hanson had already written 20 compositions, including an orchestral work, “Before the Dawn, Op. 17”, that receives its premiere recording via this release. It remains a mystery as to why Hanson hid this orchestral work in his archives, although it is highly likely that, due to his schedule of multi-faceted activities, he may simply have forgotten about it, or, he may have dismissed it due to his consideration of it as having been a product of juvenilia. Imbued with a lavish orchestral palette, these Basque forces render Hanson’s richly melodic hidden gem with the proper panache it truly deserves.

The album concludes with “Variations for Orchestra” by Henry Cowell (1897–1965), of whom Jerome Moross (who “informally” studied with Grainger) stated to me that “America will never fully pay the debt it owes to Cowell for his contribution to its culture.” Is this a step in the right direction - by way of sunny Spain, no less? I certainly hope so, but, let me think for a moment. When the last time I encountered an orchestral composition of Cowell’s on a major US orchestra’s subscription program?……..…thinking…..…… still thinking……….thinking……..NOPE, not coming to me – let alone this nearly 20 minute winner from 1956. Being one of the more exceptional titles to have flowed from Henry’s brilliance, and vast output, it is a pleasure to note that it has finally received the representation it justifiably deserves in superior audio quality, coupled with a first-rate performance... and, of course, Grainger enthusiasts will well know about the long relationship Cowell had with Percy, and Percy’s wife, Ella.

With the exception of Hanson’s opus that will be new to any orchestra, period, I will bet that all of this music proved a “first” for this orchestra that is set to celebrate its 40th Anniversary in 2022, and probably marked their first presentations in Spain overall. Robert Trevino, who serves as their current music director, has made a compelling addition to the discography of these composers in, as previously mentioned, superb and vivid sonics, expertly played by the fine Basque National Orchestra. For those interested in this repertory, and it has been refreshing to encounter these pieces anew, this release is definitely the one for you.

Establishing a Home: The Graingers Move to White Plains

Anne Ocone — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 15:20:42 GMT

Following is an excerpt from “The Power of Place: The Percy Grainger Home and Studio” by Susan Edwards Colson, recently published in The Grainger Journal, Volume 17, Number 1. Print and digital copies of the journal are distributed free of charge to members of the Percy Grainger Society. Non-members may purchase individual print copies via our distributor, Lulu.com. Please consider joining as a member!

Percy Grainger made news in 1921 ^{^[1]}when bought he a house in White Plains. He, and his mother, Rose, had arrived at Boston harbor, via the ship Laconia, on September 14, 1914. They left London in haste, putting their furnishings in storage. After arriving they immediately traveled south by train to New York City, becoming residents of one New York City rental or the next for the seven more years. During this time, Percy first established himself as a pianist extraordinaire, followed with a brief tour as a bandsman in the US army. But they could not accommodate their London belongings, and truly settle in, until they had the space and permanency of a home.

After seven years, they certainly understood that the greater New York area offered an overwhelming choice of residences and lifestyles. There is the island of Manhattan itself, in the 1920’s as today, the hub of a thriving music and art scene, as well as four (huge) surrounding boroughs that comprise New York City proper. There was suburban Long Island to the east, suburban Westchester County to the north, and the entire state of New Jersey to the west; with Connecticut to the Northeast. What to do?

The Grainger’s chose White Plains, the county seat and near geographical center of Westchester County. White Plains offered quiet county living (including the physical space between houses to play piano twenty-four hours-per-day, if necessary, impossible in the city) punctuated with train service leading smoothly south to Manhattan in under thirty minutes. There were also easy train connections within a day to Cincinnati and Chicago. Dallas? Los Angeles? Calgary? A day or two more perhaps, but easily done.

Grainger’s manager, Antonia Sawyer, herself a Westchester (Scarsdale) resident, was influential in this choice. In 1931, Grainger was interviewed for a local newspaper column, “Our Famous Neighbors.” ^{^[2]} When asked why he chose White Plains as his home he explained:

When our musical instruments and furniture came over from London in 1921, White Plains was suggested to my mother by Antonia Sawyer (his manager) as a good place for the storage of musical instruments of which there are an endless array. For instance, two harmoniums, about ten guitars, two metal marimbas, one wooden marimba, one staff bells, and several oriental and African instruments.

Any suitable house had to be large, private, quiet, and well-located for travel. Then, the selected house at 7 Cromwell Place, had to be organized. The shipment came over in early summer 1921, and Rose and Percy set about arranging it. Rose sorted and labeled the keys. Percy set up the music room. Both of them enjoyed the large front porch, feeding the squirrels while having tea.

When asked why the smallest room in the eleven-room house was chosen as the music room, Grainger replied “I like my music loud and close.” ^{^[3]} As various house photos have shown over the years, this preference for “loud and close” was consistently observed in the music room, the first room to the left when a visitor arrives, with various pianos and an-ever-present harmonium showing up in photos over the years. The front bedrooms, with Rose in the larger, and Percy in the smaller, were selected and furnished in the style of the day. Again, plenty of storage was necessary, the Grainger’s rapidly filled drawer after drawer. The basement and the third floor were for overflow storage. There were filled, with more added over the years.

Early 20^th Century White Plains

During the 1920s the city of White Plains was quickly transitioning into a desirable satellite suburb of New York City. The New York, Westchester & Boston Railroad,^{^[4]} completed in the early years of the twentieth century, made New York City an easy commute from the leafy Westchester. Following WWI, a group of community-spirted women organized a house-by-house canvas ^{^[5]} to locate those who served in WWI (Percy Grainger had served as a bandsman). Each name was entered onto a card file, in the White Plains City Archives. WWI veterans were honored with a monument installed that features an artillery rifle, bearing a simple dedication to soldiers, sailors and marines on its north face.

White Plains is near the midpoint of Westchester County, both geographically and culturally. To the south, high rises and warehouses abound, resembling the Bronx. Heading north, the land spreads gently out into small towns and estates. Beyond White Plains, Westchester County was blossoming in the 1920s and 30s. D. W. Griffith built and operated a movie studio complex on Orienta Point in nearby Mamaroneck. ^{^[6]} Mary Pickford, as well as Lillian and Dorothy Gish, were filmed there. The Lawrence Family Theatre, a summer stock theater, opened on the Moses Taylor Estate in Mount Kisco. Tallulah Bankhead, Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullivan appeared in production there.

The Grainger House does not appear in 1900 Map of White Plains. By 1910, residents were Charles and Mable Prigge, along with their three children, Charles, Jr., Jean, and Alan. There was also a servant, Annie Pahockus. With four bedrooms on the second floor, and three (for servants and storage) on the third floor, this configuration would be perfect for a family of five, plus the servant(s) necessary to manage a 2,600 square foot house.

Cromwell Place/Chester Avenue, only one block long, had nine parcels. There were three buildings among the five parcels on the Cromwell side: A private residence at the corner of Cromwell/Boston-New York Post Road occupied the first three. Then, the Grainger home resided on on parcels 2 and 1A. Parcel 1 was the formerly the grounds for the annex to the Keeley Institutes for Inebriates^{^[7]}. The Institute was founded in 1879, with a branch in rural White Plains. Those seeking Dr. Leslie Keeley’s Gold Cure (a potion containing “a double chloride of gold containing old salts, alcohol, and morphine cannabis, suspended in colored water) included alcohol users plus “opium inebriates” and “morphine fiends.” Their original White Plains locations had overflowed capacity and so the institute added an annex on Cromwell Place. The annex was closing by the time Percy and Rose arrived, but the large parcel of land it included allowed Percy to purchase an additional side lot. The Grainger Home today has a large side yard resulting from this early parceling.

Home Sweet Home, 7 Cromwell Place, 1921-79

The house was Percy’s home base for more than half his life. While he performed in many concerts and made many trips, he always returned to 7 Cromwell Place. In 1930, Ella’s daughter, Elsie Fairfax, arrived at Percy’s urging^{^[8]}. In residence for many months in the early 1930’s, Elsie was a stenographer at Bush and Heartfield (an insurance agency) in White Plains. Her correspondence from that time remains in a suitcase in her room.

In the 1950s, as his health deteriorated, Percy began to stay closer to home. This allowed him to focus his considerable, but declining, energy on his free music machines. He was gone early in 1961, and Ella Grainger was a widow.

Ella Grainger has the distinction of residing at 7 Cromwell Place longer than anyone else. She arrived in 1928 and died in 1979, making a record of fifty-one years. During the 1960s, she was a member of the Victorian Society, and she hosted gathering of Society members. There were many private visitors, and a few concerts. One such visitor was Dorothy Payne, a former student of Percy’s from the Chicago Music School, and a long-time friend. After Ella’s death, the house slowly disintegrated into frightful condition. For nearly forty years, it was only the occasional, hearty visitor who ventured into the musty, overfilled rooms.

^{^[1]} The Daily Pantagraph, Bloomington, Indiana, June 9, 1921 edition, p 8

^{^[2]} Keir, Alissa, “Our Famous Neighbors: Percy Grainger of White Plains” The Port Chester Daily Item, February 26, 1931, p. 3

^{^[3]} Keir, “Our Famous Neighbors” p. 3

^{^[4]} Himmelfarb, Ben and Massena, Elaine, White Plains In the Twentieth Century, Arcadis Publishing, Charleston, South Carolina, 2019, p 32

^{^[5]} Himmelfarb, Ben and Massena, Elaine, White Plains, p 31

^{^[6]}Westchester County, New York, History 1920-1983: Westchester Comes of Age, 2021, www.westchestergov.com, 2021

^{^[7]} Larson, Erik, (2003). The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Crown Publishing Company, a division of Penguin Random House, New York, New York, 2003

^{^[8]} Grainger, Percy, Letter to Elsie Bristow, December 25, 1929. White Plains, New York. As reproduced in Simon, Robert, Percy Grainger, The Pictorial Biography, 1983, p. 71

How to Conduct and Perform the Music of Percy Grainger

Anne Ocone — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 13:23:56 GMT

By Bill Garlette

- The first thing to remember is that Grainger had no use for the standard formal style of the four musically predominate European countries at the time– Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. He felt that the hegemony that these countries imposed on the music world was unfair. This is part of the reason that he never wrote in symphonic or sonata form preferring to let his music unfold for itself and follow its creative path wherever it led. This then resulted in using what he called the Democracy of Music or a Democracy of Lines. The concept of theme and variation or development didn’t apply. The main ideas of a composition were not the exclusive domain of only the ‘first parts.’ This ‘Democracy’ resulted in the theme or tune being shared throughout the ensemble. All of this doesn’t mean there isn’t structure to his music or no ‘melodies’ are employed. Quite the contrary. Tunes are prevalent and embraced. They just don’t reside in the first parts.
  
  “Grainger (Dec. 2, 1929): "TO CONDUCTORS and to those forming, or in charge of, amateur orchestras, high school, college and music school orchestra and chamber-music bodies.
  
  "ELASTIC SCORING. My 'elastic scoring' grows naturally out of two roots:
  
  1. That my music tells its story mainly by means of intervals and the liveliness of the part-writing, rather than by means of tone-color, and is therefore well fitted to be played by almost any small, large or medium-sized combination of instruments, provided a proper balance of tone is kept.
  
  2. That I wish to play my part in the radical experimentation with orchestral and chamber-music blends that seems bound to happen as a result of the ever wider spreading democratization of all forms of music.
  
  "As long as a really satisfactory balance of tone is preserved (so that the voices that make up the musical texture are clearly heard, one against the other, in the intended proportions) I do not care whether one of my 'elastically scored' pieces is played by 4 or 40 or 400 players, or any number in between; whether trumpet parts are played on trumpets or soprano saxophones, French horn parts played on French horns or E flat altos or alto saxophones, trombone parts played on trombones or tenor saxophones or C Melody saxophones; whether string parts are played by the instruments prescribed or by mandolins, mandolas, ukeleles[sic],, guitars, banjos, balalakas[sic],, etc.; whether harmonium parts are played on harmoniums (reed-organs) or pipe-organs; whether wood-wind instruments take part or whether a harmonium (reed-organ) or 2nd piano part is substituted for them. I do not even care whether the players are skilful[sic], or unskilful[sic],, as long as they play well enough to sound the right intervals and keep the afore-said tonal balance--and as long as they play badly enough to still enjoy playing ('Where no pleasure is, there is no profit taken'--Shakespeare).”
  
  "This 'elastic scoring' is naturally fitted to musical conditions in small and out-of-the-way communities and to the needs of amateur orchestras and school, high school, college and music school orchestras everywhere, in that it can accommodate almost any combination of players on almost any instruments. It is intended to encourage music-lovers of all kinds to play together in groups, large or small, and to promote a more hospitable attitude towards inexperienced music-makers. It is intended to play its part in weaning music students away from too much useless[sic], goalless, soulless, selfish, inartistic soloistic technical study, intended to coax them into happier, richer musical fields--for music should be essentially an art of self-forgetful, soul- expanding communistic cooperation in harmony and many-voicedness.” 1)
  
  Elastic Scoring was a natural result of Grainger’s life-long philosophy of Democracy in Music (1931).
  
  “‘A chance for all to shine in a starry whole.’ Some such thought as this underlies, I suppose, our working conception of democracy. Democracy seems to our mind’s eye not merely a comfortable system of ensuring personal independence & safety to each man, but also an adventure in which the oneness & harmonious togetherness of all human souls is lovingly celebrated – for it is obvious that democracies are just as patriotic & humanitarian as they are freedom-loving.” 2)
  
  The next crucial item was Grainger’s strong belief of being completely clear as to what his intention was with each part, each line. This requires conductors and performers alike to attend to every performance directive, every dynamic indication, and all note markings to truly render his works the way he intended. It is imperative that the lower dynamics and decrescendo be strictly adhered to.
  
  Next item on the list refers to the first. Always look for who has the ‘tune’ and ensure that part is ‘to the fore.’ Next is to embrace that movement in music is life so look for the ‘faster notes’ and let them shine for their moment. After all, Grainger loved Bach and Bach lived during the age of ornamentation – bring out those quick notes.
  
  Now we come to what was very unconventional for his time but quite common in ours – mixed meters and composite meters. Grainger’s favorite works for wind ensemble were his Hill-Songs. Hill-Song No. 1 is rarely played because of its instrumentation and rhythmic complexity. Hill-Song No. 2 was a realization by Grainger that the instrumentation needed to be more in keeping with the wind ensemble or Small-Room music set-up of the time. Even in its reduction, Hill-Song No. 2 has 88 metrical changes in the span of a 5-minute work and employs meter markings such as 11/2/4. He had choice words for those who recoiled at these metrical time signatures or his approach to ‘Free Music’ as in the Fifth Movement, Lord Melbourne, of Lincolnshire Posy.
  
  To Bandleaders
  
  Bandleaders need not be afraid of the two types of irregular rhythm met with in the “Lincolnshire Posy”: those conveyed by changing time signatures in “Rufford Park Poachers,” and those (mark “Free Time”) left to the band leader’s volition in “Lord Melbourne”.” Both these types lie well within the powers of any normal high school band. The only players that are likely to balk at those rhythms are seasoned professional bandsmen, who think more of their beer than of their music.” 3)
  
  Then we have Grainger’s ‘Blue-eyed English.’ A cleansing of the Old English/Anglo-Saxon of Latin, Greek and other foreign languages that infected the original. 4)
  
  There are numerous methods of approaching and rehearsing Grainger’s music. Many articles discuss conducting techniques and how to accomplish balance, technically difficult passages, and metrical complexities but not the foundations of the Composer’s Intent. This is where we must look at Grainger’s music in totality and his remarkable insights into music, music performance, and social philosophies. This is where we unlock the real secrets of Percy Aldridge Grainger!
- 1) A Source Guide to the Music of Percy Grainger by Thomas P. Lewis, ISBN 10: 0912483563 ISBN 13: 9780912483566, Publisher: Pro Am Music Resources, 1990, APPENDIX 1: ADDITIONAL COMMENTS ON INSTRUMENTATION, ETC. p. 272-277 http://www.minervaclassics.com/grainger/progno11.htm
- 2) Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross, Grainger on Music, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 217.
- 3) To Bandleaders contained in Lincolnshire Posy score.
- 4) Percy Grainger Journal, Vol. 10 No. 2, Winter 1991, Author, Leroy Osmon, Percy Grainger’s Blue-Eyed English – A Catalogue of Terms, 10 – 26. http://anyflip.com/wkyv/btaq

Elastic Scoring – A Grainger Initiative

Anne Ocone — Fri, 21 May 2021 19:58:43 GMT

By Bill Garlette
The Global pandemic of 2019-2021 created a unique situation for musicians and music educators. Because of the highly contagious nature of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID 19, what is called ‘social distancing’ was enacted as one of the preventative measures. This, in essence, dictated that people should be separated by at least six feet (ten feet for performing musicians) from each other. Subsequently, rehearsal and performance space that had been adequate for 50, 60, 100 musicians were now reduced to half that number or less. No longer could instrument sections of 10-16 members be allowed. In some instances ensembles were reduced to one per section and many times mixed ensembles with some instrument types being absent altogether.
This led composers to start writing for what is now call ‘Flex-Bands’ or ‘Flex-Ensembles.’ The interesting thing is a prominent, 20^th century composer, Percy Grainger, had already employed this technique over 100 years ago – Elastic Scoring is what he called it. This was all part of Grainger’s philosophy of Democracy in Music. Providing music in such a manner that all different types of ensembles from a few players to 100s could perform the same work with success. What better way to tell the story than through Grainger’s own words:

My “elastic scoring” grows naturally out of two roots:

1. That my music tells its story mainly by means of intervals and the liveliness of the part-writing, rather than by means of tone-color, and is therefore well fitted to be played by almost any small, large or medium-sized combination of instruments, provided a proper balance of tone is kept.

2. That I wish to play my part in the radical experimentation with orchestral and chamber-music blends that seems bound to happen as a result of the ever wider spreading democratization of all forms of music.

As long as a really satisfactory balance of tone is preserved (so that the voices that make up the musical texture are clearly heard, one against the other, in the intended proportions) I do not care whether one of my “elastically scored” pieces is played by 4 or 40 or 400 players, or any number in between; whether trumpet parts are played on trumpets or soprano saxophones, French horn parts played on French horns or E flat altos or alto saxophones, trombone parts played on trombones or tenor saxophones or C Melody saxophones; whether string parts are played by the instrument prescribed or by mandolins, mandolas, ukuleles, guitars, banjos, balalaikas, etc.; whether harmonium parts are played on harmoniums (reed-organs) or pipe-organs; whether wood-wind instruments take part or whether a harmonium (reed-organ) or 2nd piano part is substituted for them. I do not even care whether the players are skillful or unskillful, as long as they play well enough to sound the right intervals and keep the afore-said tonal balance – and as long as they play badly enough to still enjoy playing (“Where no pleasure is, there is no profit taken” – Shakespeare).
This “elastic scoring” is naturally fitted to musical conditions in small and out-of-the-way communities and to the needs of amateur orchestras and school, high school, college and music school orchestras everywhere, in that it can accommodate almost any combination of players on almost any instruments. It is intended to encourage music-loves of all kinds to play together in groups, large or small, and to promote a more hospitable attitude towards inexperienced music-makers. It is intended to play its part in weaning music students away from too much useless, goalless, soulless, selfish, inartistic soloistic technical study, intended to coax them into happier, richer musical fields – for music should be essentially an art of self-forgetful, soul-expanding communistic cooperation in harmony and many-voicedness. (1)

Elastic Scoring was a natural result of Grainger’s life-long philosophy of Democracy in Music (1931)

“A chance for all to shine in a starry whole.’ Some such thought as this underlies, I suppose, our working conception of democracy. Democracy seems to our mind’s eye not merely a comfortable system of ensuring personal independence & safety to each man, but also an adventure in which the oneness & harmonious togetherness of all human souls is lovingly celebrated – for it is obvious that democracies are just as patriotic & humanitarian as they are freedom-loving.”

“Such a banner seems fair enough for any upward-yearning soul. And, in fact, this ideal, as applied to life, art & thought, has spurred on many a genius, such as Walt Whitman, Tennyson, Martin Luther, Bach, Grieg, Edgar Lee Masters, etc.”

“Yet, in spite of the master-minds that have championed democracy, & in spite of the fact that the measure of a country’s democraticness is almost exactly the measure of its prominence in freedom, science, power & prosperity, we hardly ever meet an individual (even in those lands most nearly democratic)who whole-heartedly believes in the practical wisdom of democracy; nearly always the individual is held back from a happy embrace of democratic doctrine by the sway exerted over his nature by old-time influences that make for superstition, personal greed, leisure-worship, celebrity-hunting, slavishness & lack of selfhood. As a result, so many of those who would give lip-service to democracy where the large issues of world affairs are at stake are unwilling to practice democracy in the small & immediate affairs of their everyday life. As a result of this weakness & blindness in so many individuals we may truly say that democracy (like Christianity, like socialism like many another noble idea) has never yet been given ‘a fair chance.’ Yet its cause goes marching on.”

“It is not the same as the cause of the best, the deepest, the grandest, the loveliest art music? Its cause, also, goes marching on with quiet but steady invincibility, although retarded by the blindness & smallmindedness of some many individuals – amongst whom, it always seems to me, there is too large a percentage of highly-trained professional musicians. These individuals seem to forget that art music is an essentially democratic art, an art that mingles souls while it mingles sounds, an art in its self-forgetful collectivism transcends individualism, an art of fusion and cooperation, an art that feeds on soul-ecstasy but starves on mere cerebral cleverness. In the highest forms of art music, as in democracy, ‘the starry whole’ (the radiant glory of art itself, of collective humanity itself) counts for at least as much as ‘the chance for all to shine.’ Technically, this means that the various melodic lines, that make up the harmonic texture, must enjoy, at various moments, equal opportunities to be independent, prominent & volitional; but that the splendor & beauty of the composite whole is the goal that none may lose from mind.” (2)

1. Percy Grainger, December 2, 1929 (from the Preface to Spoon River, AFMS2, 1930) Found in The New Percy Grainger Companion, ed. Penelope Thwaites (The Boydell Press, Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK), 2010, Appendix I.

2. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross, Grainger on Music, Oxford University Press, 1999, p 217 - 222.

Percy Grainger in Worcester: Two World-Premières

Anne Ocone — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 13:26:55 GMT

Photo of Grainger, Program booklet for the 1916 Worcester Music Festival.

Percy Grainger appeared eight times in Worcester, Massachusetts. His first performance, to great reviews and media attention, was as soloist in the Grieg Piano Concerto at the 59th Worcester Music Festival in 1916; he also performed four original solo arrangements as part of the formal program. He returned in 1917 (the 60th Festival) armed with a World Premiere. His appearance here in 1919 was outside the Festival on tour with the New York Philharmonic under Joseph Stransky in the Steinert concert series, but still at the acoustically remarkable Mechanics Hall; he played the Tchaikovsky Concerto.

On October 25, 1929, just days before the stock market crash, he played a solo recital at Clark University’s Clark Auditorium; he quickly returned in the Festivals of 1930 (71st,) 1931 (72nd,) and 1942 (83rd.) His eighth and final appearance was in a joint recital with violinist Leona Flood and her accompanist Pablo Miquel in Clark University’s Fine Arts concert series in 1945.

Two major Grainger works were given their world-premiere at the Festival: “Marching Song of Democracy” (60th Festival, 1917) and “Tribute to Foster” (72nd Festival, 1930.)

As the popularity of the Festival grew exponentially, Mechanics Hall’s 1,600 seats could not accommodate the crowds. Built in 1857 (the Worcester Chorus and the annual Festival were established in 1858) it was a popular and much-used jewel in the civic crown of a city that was a major economic powerhouse. Now on the National Register of Historic Places, it was and is acoustically favorable to speakers and musicians alike. It had also become a little care-worn over the years, mentioned in some of Grainger’s later press, and the Festival moved to the new War Memorial Auditorium in 1933, only returning to a beautifully restored and modernized Mechanics Hall after 1977.

I have included these early Worcester Daily Telegram articles to give a sense of the reception he was receiving as a fresh face on the concert scene, not only musically but personally. These took the form not only of concert reviews but Festival interviews and previews, “Women’s Interest” and “Entertainment News” articles, breathless information on arrivals and departures, hotels, extra-musical activities and what Grainger and his mother Rose wore at various events.

Not surprisingly tickets to the open morning rehearsals, where audience and performers were more casual, were as in demand as the concerts, especially among younger members of the audience, many of them aspiring musicians. The press saw the rehearsals as an opportunity for personal insight, as fascinating for review as the more formal events. The performers, of course, were in performance.

Please click here for the continuation of Percy Grainger in Worcester: Two World-Premières.

- Eric Culver

Photo of Mechanics Hall interior, early 20th c., from Raymond Morin, The Worcester Music Festival 1858-1976

Percy Grainger's Residence in Springfield, Missouri

Anne Ocone — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 14:30:44 GMT

By Marissa Kyser, May 2019

I. OVERVIEW

As a man who obsessed over the meticulous documentation of his life, it is strange that little is known about Percy Grainger during the time he spent living in Springfield, Missouri. Though it is acknowledged that the world-famous composer moved to this area around the time of World War II, there is a lack of compiled evidence that detail his whereabouts and residence. Many researchers have contributed to understanding Grainger’s life in New York, Europe, and Australia, but most fail to describe this brief period of his life in Springfield, let alone recognize that he lived there at all. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap in the timeline of Percy Grainger’s life.

Percy and Ella Grainger moved to Springfield, Missouri in November 1940 and returned to their home in White Plains, New York in October 1943. Percy sought after the safety of his wife and career with the relocation to Springfield out of precaution, rather than cowardice. To display his support during the war, he took part in countless events that would benefit the war effort, such as fundraisers for the Red Cross, War Bond Rallies, and other charity concerts.

Though Percy frequently spent his time traveling for his performances, the time spent at the Wilshire Apartments can be viewed as entirely positive. As a man entering his sixtieth year of life, Grainger was very keen on taking advantage of the quiet lifestyle that Springfield provided him in comparison to his residence in White Plains.

"House at Springfield", photo by Percy Grainger, 1943

II. THE WILSHIRE APARTMENTS

Percy and Ella arrived by train in Springfield in June 1940 and promptly checked into the famous Colonial Hotel, located on Jefferson Avenue.^{^[1]} This short trip was planned for them to find for a permanent residence, their preference being an apartment that was “high up” and not on the ground floor. Just a few blocks south from their hotel, they discovered the Wilshire Apartments.^{^[2]}

The Wilshire Apartments, located at 520 South Jefferson Avenue, were built in 1919 and placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2008. The terracotta-red brick building is three stories and contains six units available for rent. When submitted to the register through the National Park Service in 2008, significant detail was provided regarding the physical appearance and historical importance of the building:

The Wilshire embodies the characterizing features of this property type: a flat parapeted roof, rectangular form, symmetrical fenestration, central main entrance, and Classical Revival styling. The use of contrasting stone and terra cotta detailing, pilasters, arches, keystones, dentils, and ornamental brackets help to establish the Wilshire as a notable example of the Downtown Apartment Building property type.^{^[3]}

The building has undergone renovations since 1919; photos from the 2008 NPS application show the condition of the building prior to its most recent renovation completed in 2009. The photos from 2008 display the unit layout as it would have been in 1940. Recent photos taken ten years later (2018) depict the apartment’s layout post-renovation after being restored to reflect the “level of styling that would have been attractive to upper-middle class renters.” It was just a short walk to the public square and many local performance venues, such as the Landers Theatre, Gillioz Theater, Jewell Theater, and Electric Theater.

The Wilshire Apartments were owned by Mrs. Carrie Dell Shelpman and managed by her son, Mr. Edward J. Shelpman at this time. Edward Shelpman’s wife, Mattie, spoke with the Graingers when they initially inquired about available space in June 1940.^{^[4]}

An interview with Mattie Shelpman (recorded by Mary Jacqueline Blanton in 1977) revealed that she was hesitant to rent a room to Percy, whom she described as “odd and poorly dressed,” and presented himself wearing “work clothes, heavy work shoes, knapsack and bushy, long, reddish hair…accompanied by his plainly dressed wife.”^{^[5]} Mattie was skeptical the world-famous Percy Grainger was interested in living in Springfield, Missouri and would present himself in such strange attire. To politely mask her uncertainty, she asked the Graingers to return later that afternoon when her husband would be home to assist her. Percy and Ella agreed to the appointment and left. Meanwhile, Mattie contacted the Colonial Hotel, where the Graingers were staying for the short trip, to confirm Percy’s identity with the front desk.

Mr. and Mrs. Shelpman, reassured that they were not being deceived, met the Graingers for their afternoon appointment. Mattie recalled taking the couple up to the third floor to view Unit 6 where “they ran from room to room like excited children,” exclaiming, “We take it!”^{^[6]}

Grainger penned a handwritten note to personally record the rental agreement (See Figure 1.1):

Springfield, Missouri

June 27, 1940, signed contract with E.J. Shelpman, Wilshire Apartment, 520 South Jefferson Ave., Springfield, Mo. for 6 month lease of Apartment No 6, Wilshire Apartment, 520 South Jefferson Ave. Springfield, Mo. from July 1st, 1940., at $35.00 monthly. Contract is in safe (A check for $35.00 should be sent to Mr. Shelpman, as above, to reach him before the 1st of each month).

Figure 1.1
Percy Grainger Personal Note, Wilshire Apartments, June 27, 1940.
Grainger Museum Archives, Melbourne, Australia.

Though Grainger mentions a written contract, Mattie Shelpman stated that there was no record of a signed physical document from this agreement. The Graingers paid $35.00 a month in the 1940s to rent this two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 1400 square foot apartment. For reference, the current price in 2019 to rent Apartment 6 unit is $1,345.00 a month.^{^[7]} They would not move to Springfield and into the apartment until several months later in November.

The Wilshire Apartments
520 South Jefferson Street
Springfield, MO

Photo Taken: Marissa Kyser, 2019

III. THE GRAINGERS IN SPRINGFIELD

Whilst in Springfield, Percy composed and edited multiple works of significance including his Youthful Suite, The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart, settings from his Kipling Jungle Book cycle, The Immovable Do, and several others. He maintained his professional and personal connections via letter correspondence and continued to develop the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, Australia. His standard for performance and composition did not suffer during this time, but rather flourished.

The Springfield years yielded four formal concerts featuring Percy Grainger on June 1, 1941, January 13, September 13, and November 12, 1942. These concerts were of high interest to the public and had consistently high attendance. Performance venues included Southwest Missouri State Teachers College (now Missouri State University), Senior High School (now Central High School), and the Shrine Mosque Theater. He performed several times with the Springfield Civic Symphony under the direction of James Robertson.

In terms of leisure and entertainment, Percy was a frequent patron of the Springfield movie theaters. During weeks when he wasn’t away for a concert tour, he records attending multiple film showings in the same week. He would often partake in eateries located within walking distance of the apartment such as Davidson’s Cafeteria and Donovan’s Café.

Based on multiple instances observed in their correspondence records, it can be interpreted that Percy and Ella lived happily in Springfield and only moved back to White Plains for practical reasons. As a growing city located in the Midwest, Springfield maintained average temperatures and featured beautiful Ozarks scenery, which was plausibly attractive to an older couple. Percy makes references to Springfield in letters to Ella: “How I love Springfield & our Missouri home! It smells sweet of my angel. It is a rare love-&-art nest.” ^{^[8]}

In another letter, he writes:

What a lovely state this is! So full of half-wild, half-filled, well-bread, well-watered ample … land, & full of happy comfy farms & brawny farmers. It looked its best today. Yet I slept nearly all day. I must have been all worn out!^{^[9]}

IV. AFTER SPRINGFIELD

However, as all good things must come to an end, the Graingers decided to return to their home in White Plains near the end of 1943. On September 28, 1943, Percy sent a letter written in Swedish to Ella’s mother. A translated version of this letter, explaining their seemingly sudden departure, reads as follows:

28 Sept, 1943

Dear Mamma,

Ella and I have now lived in the state of Missouri (right in the middle of the United States) for 3 years. I thought that this would be safer for Ella, during the war, to live here in Springfield, Missouri, and that is why we moved here. But now we think an air attack on the American Coast is quite unlikely and that is why we, in a couple of days, move back to White Plains, where our address always is: Percy Grainger, 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, NY.

It really is unfortunate that we must move from here, as we have been so happy here. But for practical reasons it seems better for us to live in White Plains.

It is pleasant to look back over the last 3 years and on all the artistic work we have both produced during this time period. Ella has completed a bunch of beautiful portraits—one of herself, a wonderful picture, and also about 6 others of different others of different people. Ella has also (while we lived here in Springfield) finalized her second book of Poems (“A Wayward Girl”)–which has been printed here in Springfield itself—and this book as “won” itself quite a few friends.

The war is quite far from being over. But it seems like we can assume the end is closing in, and that makes us both so happy.

Soon comes the day when Ella and I will once again travel to Sweden and visit Mamma.

That happy event we long for.

We are always talking about Mamma and hope that Mamma is well and has it as well as can be under the circumstances. Both Ella and I have been wonderfully healthy this summer.

With the dearest of greetings.

Mamma’s respectfully,

Percy^{^[10]}

After Percy Grainger returned home to White Plains, he lived there until his battle with prostate cancer caused his death on February 20, 1961. He was buried in Adelaide in March 2, 1961. It was his wish that his skeleton be preserved in the Grainger Museum for display, but this wish was not granted. At the age of 83, Ella Grainger was remarried to a gentleman named Stewart Manville in 1972. She lived in their home at 7 Cromwell Place until her death on July 17, 1979.

Photo from Newspaper Article

Docia Karell, “Composer Grainger And Artist Wife Come to Make Home in Springfield,” Springfield News and Leader, (Springfield, Missouri), November 10, 1940, 16.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To read the complete contents of this research paper, please contact Marissa Kyser via email at mkbleu15@yahoo.com. Resources and documents used with permission from the Percy Grainger Museum, Melbourne, Australia.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES FOR THIS DOCUMENT

Blanton, Mary Jacqueline. Interviewed by Marissa Kyser. Personal Interview. Columbia, Missouri. May 1, 2019.

Blanton, Mary Jaqueline. Percy Grainger in Missouri. Thesis. University of Missouri-Columbia. 1978.

Emrie, Gail, and Debbie Shields. Wilshire Apartments. United States Department of the Interior National Park Service: National Register of Historic Places. 2007.

^{^[1]} Located at 205 South Jefferson Avenue, the Colonial Hotel was considered to be the grandest hotel in Southwest Missouri at the time. Built in 1907, this hotel had many notable occupants, including Elvis Presley, John F. Kennedy, and of course, Percy Grainger. The official ceremony naming Route 66 was also held at this famous hotel. The building was donated to Missouri State University in 1986 and sat vacant for several years until it was razed in 1997 due to extensive dilapidation that was too expensive to revert. Today, this plot of land is covered with a small university parking lot.

^{^[2]} Mary Jaqueline Blanton, Percy Grainger in Missouri, (University of Missouri-Columbia, 1978), 47.

^{^[3]} Emrie and Shields. Wilshire Apartments.

^{^[4]} Carrie Dell Shelpman (1806-1958) and Edward J. Shelpman (1868-1936) had two children. Their son, Edward J. Shelpman (1898-1999), married Mattie Lee (1902-1987) and their daughter, Isabel Shelpman (1899-1987) married Josiah Elijah Keet (1893-1973) in 1922. The family owned the Wilshire Apartments until 1970.

^{^[5]} Blanton, Missouri, 47.

^{^[6]} Ibid.

^{^[7]} The Wilshire Apartments, Web Page, Wilshire Apartments, accessed May 1, 2018.

^{^[8]} Percy Grainger, “Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger, Sept 13, 1941,” Letter, Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger Correspondence, 2016/10, Box 7, Accessed February 14, 2019.

^{^[9]} Percy Grainger, “Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger, July 3, 1941,” Letter, Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger Correspondence, 2016/10, Box 7, Accessed February 14, 2019.

^{^[10]} Percy Grainger, “Percy Grainger to Ella Grainger’s Mother, September 28, 1943,” Grainger File, Grainger Home, White Plains, New York, Accessed May 11, 2019.

The “Century of Percussion,” and Percy Grainger’s Place In It

Anne Ocone — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 21:08:47 GMT

“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.” – Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

By Chalon Ragsdale. Percy Grainger’s status as an innovative genius in the area of orchestration is reinforced for me practically with each score of his I have the good fortune to study. His knowledge of the instruments is an important factor, his search for new and unique combinations of instruments is an important factor, but perhaps the most important factor in the brilliance of his orchestration is his democratic respect for each instrument’s worth and ability to contribute positively to the total fabric (Grainger might say the “weft”) of the music. Though I am constantly amazed at Grainger’s use of all the instrumental and choral resources at his disposal at any one time, as a percussionist myself, I am most keenly struck by Grainger’s brilliant use of the mallet-played percussion; what he termed the “tuneful percussion.”

Grainger’s transformational energy found fruit in a new model of orchestration in the early years of the 20^th Century, as expressed most convincingly in his large orchestral works The Warriors and Suite: In a Nutshell. Grainger continued the work of Wagner and Mahler in completing the woodwind and brass families of the orchestra; but he also created a new family of instrumental color by combining the “tuneful” percussion with harp and the various keyboard actuated instruments (piano, celesta, dulcitone, etc.)

Thus, in The Warriors, Grainger provides a fourth complete family to add to the Woodwinds Brass and Strings. He used 3 players on the normal orchestral percussion - Side-drum, tambourine, cymbals, bass drum, gong, and the like. But he then added as many as eight players on Xylophone; Wooden Marimba (2 players); Glockenspiel; Steel marimba or bar-piano, or dulcitone; Staff Bells (an instrument of his own invention, consisting of up to 4 octaves of handbells strung in keyboard fashion on a wooden rack and played with various mallets); Tubular Bells; Celesta; Piano(s); and Harp.

Though The Warriors and Suite: In a Nutshell received mixed and negative reviews (many of which seem now frankly unenlightened), the appeal of Grainger’s use of orchestration was undeniable. Writing for Musical America in August 1917, Charles L. Buchanan said,

“… Grainger’s contribution to the sheerly instrumental side of his art is obviously far and away the most important development in contemporary symphonic music. An inborn knack, a ceaseless practical intimacy with the orchestra and a utilization of a whole new army of percussion instruments […] lend his orchestra an individual timbre of an exceeding richness of texture […] and a wealth of tone color that appears to mark a new high record in the contemporary concert hall.” (Bird, p. 193; emphasis added)

Before Grainger, composers had used percussion as “salt and pepper” in their orchestral palate. But Grainger was convinced percussion could be a satisfying “course,” combining on equal footing with the other sections of the orchestra, and Warriors and In a Nutshell proved him right.

But Grainger also believed that the tuneful percussion and their cousins (piano, harmonium, celesta, etc.) could constitute a complete meal. And he proved his hypothesis with his brilliant setting for tuneful percussion (and their cousins) of Debussy’s Pagodes. Grainger realized that Debussy’s Pagodes was an attempt to render by means of the piano the sounds and textures that Debussy had been exposed to at the Javanese exhibit at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle (International Exposition).

In 1934, Grainger published a series of twelve lectures under the collective title A Commonsense View of All Music. In the eleventh lecture, “Tuneful Percussion,” Grainger wrote,

“Of late years the bell-makers of Europe and America have adapted many Asiatic and other exotic tuneful percussion instruments to our European pitch and scale requirements, with the result that we are able to decipher Oriental music from gramophone records and perform then on the Europeanized Oriental instruments whenever we want to.

I have tried the experiment of orchestrating Debussy’s Pagodes for a complete tuneful percussion group - thus, as it were, turning back to its Oriental beginnings the Asiatic music Debussy transcribed for a Western instrument (the piano). In so doing I am merely giving it back to the sound-type from which it originally emerged.”

Most sources point to Edgar Varese’s Ionisation (1929-1931; first performed 1933) as the first percussion ensemble. Might not Grainger’s setting of Pagodes (1928) be worth considering, at least as “among the first?”

One of the earliest anthologies of writings by and about Grainger was A Musical Genius from Australia, published by the University of Western Australia Department of Music, compiled and with Commentary by Teresa Balough. The word “genius” has an elusive definition. Does “genius” describe a person? Or is it a quality all of us can possess in some measure? If it is a quality, perhaps it is the ability of a singular individual to look at what the rest of us are looking at, but see something different. If we accept that definition, then Percy Grainger certainly had a quality of genius, of seeing things the rest of us missed, and the “tuneful percussion,” and the world of percussion in general, are the beneficiaries of that genius.

Click here to view a sample of Grainger's manuscript score for his setting of Debussy’s Pagodes.

Click here to view printed full score of Grainger's setting of Debussy's Pagodes as published by Bardic Edition (score and performing material available on rental from Schott Music).

To hear a recording of Percy Grainger’s setting of Debussy’s Pagodes.

https://www.google.com/search?q=Pagodes+Rattle&rlz=1C5MACD_enUS545US546&oq=Pagodes+Rattle&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i160.2623j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

To see a performance of “Arrival Platform Humlet,” the opening movement of Suite: In a Nutshell, conducted and with commentary by Michael Tilson-Thomas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2gMjtlYthk

Ugo Marcelli’s 1916 caricature of Grainger’s suite In a Nutshell for tuneful percussion and orchestra, featuring (from left to right) Percy Grainger, Aldred Hertz (conductor of the San Francisco S.O.), Louis Persinger (concertmaster) and Redfern Mason, the music critic for the San Francisco Examiner.

Arthur A. Clappé: Early Influencer on American Wind Bands

Anne Ocone — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 17:04:05 GMT

By William Garlette, Major, US Army (Retired). As promised, this blog article is a follow-up on “Influences on Grainger’s Original Compositions for Wind Band.” Captain Arthur A. Clappé (born, July 22, 1850 – died, November 22, 1920) had a musical relationship with Percy Grainger prior to Grainger’s entrance into the US Army band in 1917 and after, when Grainger was transferred to his faculty at the Army Band Leaders Course, Military Music Department, Institute of Musical Art, Fort Jay, Governors Island, NY. Clappé’s philosophy on wind band instrumentation and approaches to composing for and teaching of wind band were comprehensive and innovative. Grainger strongly recommended to all who would be band conductors to read and follow Clappé’s sound advice.

Clappé wrote four books: “The Band Teacher’s Assistant or Complete and Progressive Band Instructor “(1888), “Musical Essays Pertaining Particularly to Military Bands” (1893), “The Wind-Band and its Instruments” (1911) his most well-known, and the posthumously released “The Principles of Wind-Band Transcription” (1921).

Major (Retd)) James R. Milne OMM CD, “Arthur A. Clappé”, a biography.

“My 'opus' on A.A. was published in The Journal of the International Military Music Society - 'Band International'. It was published in two parts: Volume 32 No. 1 - April 2010 and Volume 32 No. 2 - August 2010.” -Major (Retd) James R. Milne OMM CD

Please click below for the full article, Arthur A. Clappé: Early Influencer on American Wind Bands: a1.Arthur A. Clappe- Early Influencer on American Wind Bands .html

The author is indebted to Patricia Marshall and Robin Rodger, both descendants of A. A. Clappé's English family, for supplying valuable information.

Influences on Grainger’s Original Compositions for Wind Band

Anne Ocone — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 18:14:48 GMT

The 15th Band, Coast Artillery Corps, U.S. Army, Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn, 1917. Front row center, in civilian attire, is Arthur A. Clappé (faculty 1911-20), principal of the bandmaster training school on Governors Island. Rocco (Robert) Resta (Diploma ’13, Military Bandleaders Course), leader of the Fort Hamilton band, is second to the left of Clappé, holding a baton and his brother, Francis, who would later be the Bandmaster of the US Military Academy Band, is the clarinetist to the viewer’s far right. To Clappé's left is Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger, Army bandsman at Fort Hamilton, who enlisted in 1917 and was later transferred to Governors Island. (Photo by J.J. Fisher, New York. From the collection of the Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, Australia)

By William Garlette, Major, US Army (Retired). Most of Percy Grainger’s music for wind band was written or started between 1900 and 1940. During those years, there were three gentlemen who had a musical impact on him: Robert ‘Rocco’ Resta, Francis Resta, and Arthur A. Clappé. All three were members of the U.S. Army Band program and they all worked directly with Grainger.

Percy Grainger and his mother, Rose, came to the United States in 1914 in an effort to avoid military service during World War I. Additionally, the 1914-15 performance season had been cancelled in overseas due to the War. When the US entered the war in 1917, Grainger hoped to avoid ‘The Front’ by joining the 15^th Coast Artillery Corps US Army Band at Fort Totten/Fort Hamilton. Bandmaster Robert ‘Rocco’ Resta, a 1913 graduate of the Army Band Leaders Course, Military Band Department, Institute of Musical Art (the forerunner of modern-day Juilliard), was his first opportunity to work directly with a professional US military band conductor. During his time with the 15^th (1917-1918), he became close with Rocco and his younger brother, Francis, who was also a performing member of the band. These relationships would be life-long.

Grainger respected Rocco’s musicianship, writing to his mother, Rose, on June 12, 1917, “Resta is a good & graceful conductor, very Italian, full of fine contrasts.” (1)

Later, he would write in his Round Letter of May 21, 1947, “For I have passed a mile-stone in my tone-life: Francis Resta’s forth-playment of my Hillsong 1 at West Point on April 20. Rocco Resta (Francis Resta’s brother) was my band-leader in the army, at Fort Hamilton, 1917-1918 --& I was happy there with Rocco. Francis Resta (younger brother) came to Fort Hamilton before I left there to go & teach tone-art in the ARMY MUSIC TRAINING SCHOOL at Governors Island, & he soon came on to Gov. Isl. Himself having won an army scholarship. So we were at Gov. Island together for nearly a year.” (2)

The musical cooperation between Grainger and the Resta brothers, especially Francis, is well-documented. On many occasions after Francis Resta assumed the position of Teacher of Music/Bandmaster of the West Point Band (1934-1957), Resta performed, read through new works, and had Grainger as a soloist at the US Military Academy.

Grainger was reassigned to the Army Band Leaders Course, Military Band Department, Institute of Musical Art at Fort Jay, Governors Island, NY in 1918. This was mainly done because there was talk that the 15^th C.A.C. Band was going to France and ‘The Front.’ It was here that he began working with Captain Arthur A. Clappé. Captain Clappé was the Principal of the Army Band Leaders School of Music from its inception in 1911 until his death in 1920. Clappé (3), along with John Phillip Sousa (4), was instrumental in getting Grainger into the 15^th Coast Artillery Corps US Army Band in 1917 writing to senior Army commanders on his behalf.

Grainger was so impressed with Captain Clappé, he wrote in the publication, Metronome Orchestra Monthly (5), an essay entitled Possibilities of the Concert Wind Band from the Standpoint of a Modern Composer (6): “Those who are interested in exploring the full latent possibilities of the modern concert wind band should consult Arthur A. Clappé's The Wind Band and its Instruments, an epoch-making work which is to the band of today what Berlioz's Treatise on Instrumentation was to the orchestra of his time – a standard work that no composer, musician, bandmaster, or bandsman should fail to know and absorb.” (7)

He continues “…[Clappé] has furthermore demonstrated in practice the truth and practicability of his theories in the beautifully balanced ‘Institute of Musical Art’ Band that he has built up at the Army Music Training School at Governor’s Island of which he is principal. When I first heard this band, at a concert at Washington Irving High School, with its quintet of saxophones, its quartet of alto and bass clarinets, its quartet of oboes, bass oboe and bassoon, with the tone of its well-rounded brass section so proportioned and controlled so as never to (except for quite special intentional effects) obscure or over-blare the more subtly expressive sound colors of its unusually complete woodwind sections, I realized, more than ever before, the truly immense potentialities of the concert wind band as an emotional musical medium.”

This experience with Clappé lead him to state, “It is not so much the wind band as it already is, in the various countries, that should engage the creative attentions of contemporaneous composers of genius, as the band as it should be and will be; for it is still in a pliable state as regards its make-up as compared with the more settled form of the sound-ingredients of the symphony orchestra.” (8)

After World War I, Grainger established himself as a composer of the highest level of prominence in the Wind Band genre composing over 30 works for the medium.

This article makes clear that his experiences in the Army and with the various military music leaders at the time, solidified his beliefs in the importance and approaches to writing for the modern wind band.

1 The all-round man: Selected letters of Percy Grainger, 1914–1961 Gillies, Malcolm & David Pear (eds), Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. p. 40

2 ibid, p. 208

3 Drawn from James A. Milne, “Arthur A. Clappé”, an unpublished biography and a Letter from Arthur Clappé to Manuel Comulada, June 10, 1917, Grainger Museum

4 Letter from John Philip Sousa to General White, June 6, 1917, Grainger Museum

5 Metronome Orchestra Monthly 34/11, November 1918, p.22-3 Possibilities of the Concert Wind Band from the Standpoint of a Modern Composer

6 http://online.anyflip.com/wkyv/laeu/mobile/index.html

7 ibid

8 ibid

(To follow: a reprint, “Arthur A. Clappé”, a biography published in The Journal of the International Military Music Society - 'Band International'. Published in two parts: Volume 32 No. 1 - April 2010 and Volume 32 No. 2 - August 2010 by James A. Milne.)

Percy Grainger and his Kodak

Anne Ocone — Tue, 13 Oct 2020 13:51:03 GMT

Video by Matthew McGarrell

To view the video: https://vimeo.com/467176217/4049a70be6

During his long career, Percy Grainger used cameras and film to record events and people in his life, to make pictures for publicity, and, as most people do, to take pictures so as to see what they will look like after they are printed. This video is intended as an introduction to Percy Grainger as a photographer. After some commentary employing ideas in Janet Malcolm’s essay, Diana & Nikon, as a filter to view Grainger’s photographs and to link them to his work with the phonograph in collecting folksong, the video shows two groups of pictures that Grainger made on his Kodak 3A Autographic Junior camera during two extended trips:

05:33 Voyage to Europe (with pictures from Sweden, Denmark, and England), begun January 1929

06:53 Voyage on the 4-masted barque, L’Avenir (Copenhagen to Australia), begun September 1933

The following media are seen and heard in the video:

Music

00:00 audio Rufford Park Poachers sung by Joseph Taylor (1908)

01:52 audio Rufford Park Poachers sung by Joseph Taylor (1908)

05:44 audio Horkstow Grange sung by George Gouldthorpe (1906)

06:59 audio Lord Melbourne sung by George Wray (1908)

08:07 audio Green Bushes sung by Joseph Leaning (1906)

Images

00:16 photo Janet Malcolm by Nina Subin

00:21 photo Diana camera

00:23 photo Nikon F camera

00:25 book Diana & Nikon: essays on photography by Janet Malcolm ISBN: 0893817279

00:33 photo Borderland State Park, Easton, Massachusetts by Matthew McGarrell

00:38 photo Puddingstone, Middletown, Rhode Island by Matthew McGarrell

00:43 photo Manville, Rhode Island by Matthew McGarrell

00:46 photo Lincoln Woods, Rhode Island by Matthew McGarrell

00:51 photo Close by Matthew McGarrell

00:56 photo Warren, Rhode Island by Matthew McGarrell

01:01 photo Mãe d'Água, Lisboa by Matthew McGarrell

01:07 photo Mãe d'Água, Lisboa by Matthew McGarrell

01:12 photo Porto by Matthew McGarrell

01:17 photo R Mutt’s Fountain (Marcel Duchamp) by Giuseppe Schiavinotto

01:19 photo Marcel Duchamp at the Walker Art Center, 1965 by Eric Sutherland

01:22 photo Bottlerack, 1961 by Marcel Duchamp

01:30 photo Edison Phonograph by Matthew McGarrell

01:38 photo 7 Cromwell Place by Matthew McGarrell

01:51 photo W88-05 Joseph Taylor, side face by Percy Grainger

02:08 photo W88-01 George Gouldthorpe by Percy Grainger

02:23 photo W88-03 George Gouldthorpe [and one other] by Percy Grainger

02:40 photo W88-04 Joseph Taylor, front face by Percy Grainger

02:55 photo W141-42 Negro church from SW by Percy Grainger

03:01 photo W86-08 Elsie standing in front of tree trunk by Percy Grainger

03:07 photo Springfield 05 (uncatalogued) [West’s Repair Shop] by Percy Grainger

03:13 book Percy Grainger: the pictorial biography by Robert Simon ISBN: 0878752811

03:34 photo W24-15 Baptist church, next to ‘Solfiero’ by Percy Grainger

03-36 photo W64 not numbered-06 [PG and EG, walking away from camera] photographer ?

03:38 photo W56-03 Aldridge grave plot, West Terrace Cemetery, Adelaide by Percy Grainger

03:41 photo W4-07 dressed for South Australian desert tramp, 1924 photographer ?

03:52 photo W24-08 Killala “PG’s favorite boyhood home” by Percy Grainger

03:57 photo W68-09 old house, N. Adelaide by Percy Grainger

04:02 photo W68-12 Prince Alfred Hotel (Aldridge home, RG’s childhood) by Percy Grainger

04:07 photo uncatalogued [Ella, 7 Cromwell Place] by Percy Grainger

04:12 book Picture taking with the No. 3A Autographic Kodak Special (Eastman Kodak)

04:47 photo No. 3A Autographic Kodak Special by Matthew McGarrell

05:43 photo W64-01 January 1929, SS Drottningholm [Ella] by Percy Grainger

05:47 photo W64-08 January 1929, SS Drottningholm [Percy] by Ella Grainger

05:51 photo W64-08 January 1929, SS Drottningholm [Percy and Ella] photographer ?

05:59 photo W64-21 Segeltorp, 1929 [Percy Grainger on skis] by Ella Grainger

06:03 photo W64-23 Segeltorp, 1929 [Percy Grainger on skis] by Ella Grainger

06:07 photo W64-33 Segeltorp, 1929 [Percy Grainger on skis] by Ella Grainger

06:11 photo W64-36 Segeltorp, 1929 [Percy and Ella Grainger on skis] photographer ?

06:19 photo W64 not numbered 05 Rørvig, Denmark by Ella Grainger

06:23 photo W64 not numbered 03 Rørvig, Denmark [Ella and Alfhild (on horse)] by Percy Grainger

06:27 photo W64 not numbered 11 Rørvig, Denmark [Percy, Alfhilde, Herman] by Ella Grainger

06:31 photo W64 not numbered 10 Rørvig, Denmark [Ella and Percy] by Percy Grainger

06:45 photo W360-07 Lilla Vrån, Pevensey Bay, England [Ella Grainger in window] by Percy Grainger

06:48 photo W360-07 Lilla Vrån, Pevensey Bay, England by Percy Grainger

06:58 photo W66-00b L’Avenir off South Coast of England by Williams

07:02 photo W66-L’AV II-06 [off South Coast of England] by Percy Grainger

07:06 photo W66-L’AV XI-01 [from small boat, L’Avenir on horizon] by Percy Grainger

07:10 photo W66-L’AV XI 03 [from small boat, approaching starboard of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:14 photo W66-L’AV IX 03 [from small boat, approaching bow of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:18 photo W66-L’AV IX 01 [from small boat, approaching larboard of L’Avenir]

07:22 photo W66-L’AV II 03 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:26 photo W66-L’AV VII 04 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:30 photo W66-L’AV IV 06 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:34 photo W66-L’AV IV 01 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:38 photo W66-L’AV IV 02 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:42 photo W66-L’AV IV 04 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:46 photo W66-L’AV III 03 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:50 photo W66-L’AV III 05 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:54 photo W66-L’AV IV 05 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

07:58 photo W66-L’AV VII 02 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Ella Grainger

08:07 photo W66-L’AV VII 01 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Ella Grainger

08:11 photo W66-L’AV VI 05 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Ella Grainger

08:16 photo W66-L’AV VII 03 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Ella Grainger

08:21 photo W66-L’AV XII 03 [from deck of L’Avenir] by Ella Grainger

08:31 photo W66-L’AV VII 05 [Captain Nils Ericsson] by Ella Grainger

08:36 photo W66-L’AV VII 06 [Captain Nils Ericsson] by Ella Grainger

08:41 photo uncatalogued [oil painting of Nils Ericsson by Ella Grainger] by Matthew McGarrell

08:46 photo W66-L’AV IV 03 [from rigging of L’Avenir] by Percy Grainger

Percy Grainger and Duke Ellington at NYU: Grainger's Rather Odd Relationship With Jazz, Part 1

Anne Ocone — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 18:05:32 GMT

by Cora Angier Sowa

Duke Ellington at New York University

In 1932, Percy Grainger was teaching a course called "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music" at New York University. On October 25, he invited the famous jazz bandleader Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform several compositions for his class. Under such bandleaders as Ellington (pictured above), jazz had been adapted from different kinds of African and African-American song and made into forms that were popular with a wider, i.e. white, audience. Grainger had become a big fan of jazz, which he saw (as might be expected of him) through the lens of his own rather peculiar musical views.

The origins of jazz

The beginnings of jazz are usually associated with New Orleans, with its brass bands marching in Mardi Gras parades and jazz funerals, and with the singing and dancing in Congo Square, a neighborhood just north of the French Quarter, where enslaved Africans, given the day off on Sunday, would set up a market (at which they could often make enough money to buy their freedom) and dance to rhythms and songs inherited from Africa, like the Bamboula, Calinda, and Juba. The area is now included within Louis Armstrong Park.

But the origins of jazz are complicated, drawing from many sources, African, Asian, and European. In Africa, the roots go back to the songs of the griots or bards, who were the keepers of the history of the tribe, to songs to accompany work, songs for religious ceremonies, and songs of play. Percy Grainger's friend Natalie Curtis recorded many of these songs, and her work in collecting the songs of African and African-American singers was discussed in a previous blog, Natalie Curtis, Busoni, and Grainger.

Songs of the gandy dancers

In America, the African slaves continued the traditions of song, often improvising words to fit the circumstances. There were songs for cotton-picking (sometimes with acid remarks about the white boss when he was out of earshot). With the end of slavery, African American laborers continued the tradition of improvising songs or chants to accompany their work, on the railroad or in construction.

The "gandy dancers" were the track workers on the railroads, in the days before mechanical cranes and steam shovels, like the men pictured in the tintype shown above. (We notice the plump white supervisor standing on the right of the picture.) In the North, the gandy dancers were generally white, many Irish or German. In the South, they were usually Black. Even after the track was laid, crews would periodically have to straighten the track, shoved out of alignment by the constant passing of the heavy trains above. A long line of men with crowbars would stand on one side of the rail, using brute force to rhythmically heave it into place, moving in unison. Spiking the rails in place also required teamwork. It was generally a two-man job, with one man on each side of the rail, striking the spike in fast alternating strokes. The work of the gandy dancers was accompanied by songs or chants, like the sea shanties of sailors. These served two functions, to help keep the rhythm of the work, and to motivate the workers. These chants usually followed a call-and-response pattern, which we find as an important component of jazz. One member of the crew, the "caller," chants a verse of some kind, answered by the others as they heave the rail, thus, giving a heave at each "huh":

Up and down this road I go
Skippin' and dodging a 44
Hey man won't you line 'um...huh
Hey won't you line 'um...huh
Hey won't you line 'um...huh
Hey won't you line 'um...huh

The caller might choose different topics for the initial verse, turning to sexual jokes if the men were tired and needed encouragement (but these latter only when they were out of earshot of women and children and of the white railroad owners).

An example of improvisation

Improvisation to fit the circumstances was an important part of these songs, as it would be for jazz. My own father, Robert M. Angier, describes two examples from Black crews he witnessed when on a summer job with his father's civil engineering firm early in the twentieth century. He recorded them in his book Why Poetry, in the chapter called "Marching Songs."

"... I recall a crew, in Memphis, Tennessee, who worked as a team putting together the forms for the reinforced concrete piling (which I was there to inspect) at the successive commands which, although not verse, rolled rhythmically from the lips of the gang boss. It went something like this:

"Pick up de one side:
Set in de cage:
Pick up t'othah side:
Stick in the pins:
Shake 'im!

"Ain't got but one eye!" piped a youth.

"Whut ain't got but one eye?" intoned the boss.

"Dis hyeah fawm! [form]" answered the youth. One of the lugs on the edge of the half-octagonal steel sheet had broken off, so that the linking strip could not be fastened. With a brief glance in my direction, the gang boss chanted:

"Git a wy-ah!"[wire]

One of the men produced a length of wire which, when looped around the remaining opposite lug and passed under the form, shaped a temporary eyelet for the other side, while all the other men stood at attention until, the loop made and the pin run through, the final command was given:

"Cah-yeh it 'way!"

Another group, working on "double tracking" and elevating roadbed along the Des Plaines River, near Chicago, included one fellow who, I heard him tell the foreman, wanted to "go back to Bobo, Mississippi. B-o-b-o," he spelled it out carefully, in case the foreman might not know. And later I heard him cogitating vocally, to the rhythm of spike maul or tamping bar:

"Ah won-dah of a soot-case'll hol mah clo's!"

"Matchbox'll hol' yuah clo's!" jibed another, and, with perfect calm, without missing a beat, the first continued his improvised chant, but changed the "lyric" (!) to read:

"Ah won-dah of a match-box'll hol' mah clo's!"

Fusion of African and European music traditions

In America, African traditions of complicated, syncopated rhythms, call and response, improvisation, and rhythmic chanting rather than European-style melodic development and orchestration were fused with European musical traditions in many ways. As African slaves adopted Christianity, forms of gospel music and spirituals came into being. In popular entertainment, ragtime fused syncopated polyrhythms with the band music popularized by John Philip Sousa. Ragtime was played on pianos by "professors" in "sporting houses" (bordellos) in the Storyville section of New Orleans. ("Storyville" was the popular name given to a red-light district defined by legislation proposed by City Councilman Sidney Story, to the councilman's embarrassment.)

Ragtime, particularly associated with the "King of Ragtime" Scott Joplin (composer of the "Maple Leaf Rag," among many other pieces), was the first African-American music to have an impact on the wider American and European public. It was popularized in polite mainstream culture by its playing by "society" dance bands. Ragtime even influenced such classical composers as Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, and Igor Stravinsky. Percy Grainger's first exposure to jazz was the ragtime that he heard in the music halls of London.

Spanish, Afro-Cuban, and Creole influences also made their way into the development of African American music.

The "Swing Era" and the big band sound

If the 1920's were the Jazz Era, the 1930's the Swing Era. Jazz became more orchestral, with the addition of stringed instruments. Swing, with its swinging danceable beat, kept the percussive rhythms of the African heritage, along with the call-and-response concept of alternating melodic statement of a theme with solo riffs and variations, sometimes keeping only the chord structure of the original melody. They also introduced new instruments, such as the saxophone, an instrument scorned by classical musicians. Jazz also incorporated the use of glissandos and glides, often featuring "blue notes," or the "notes between the notes," often flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths, and sometimes microtonal notes that were not part of the usual well-tempered scale. (Percy Grainger would later relate these microtones to his concept of Free Music.)

As Blacks migrated north to various northern cities out of the Deep South during the Great Migration, different styles of jazz developed, such as St. Louis Jazz, Kansas City Jazz, and Chicago Jazz. Many Black musicians from New Orleans, including Louis Armstrong and his mentor, "King" Oliver, who had played in Storyville, went to Chicago. Some popular band leaders were Black, like Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington, but many were white, like Paul Whiteman, styled the "King of Jazz" and Benny Goodman, the "King of Swing," who led one of the first integrated jazz groups.

Modern developments

In the era following the years we are discussing, the jazz heritage has influenced many forms of popular music, including soul, disco, and rock and roll, moving ever farther from its origins. Interestingly, Black musical forms have arisen that return to the rebellious roots of those original chants, namely rap and the associated hiphop culture. These compositions, like their forbears, depend not on melody but on a rhythmic patter and on trenchant commentary on events in the life of the singer and his audience. First associated with gangs in the form of "gangsta rap," these compositions also grew out of "the dozens," a game in which contestants try to outdo each other in trading insults, often involving the contestants' mothers. These could take the form of rhyming verses or single lines. (Example: "Yo momma so stupid it takes her an hour to cook Minute Rice".) Boxer Muhammad Ali frequently used such playful versified insults when speaking to reporters, simply leaving them confused. Rap, like jazz before it, has also been taken up by white musicians, with performers like white rapper Eminem, and has gone mainstream, as with popular female rapper Cardi B. Rap has also traveled abroad, to countries like South Korea, where it appears as K Pop.

Percy Grainger and Duke Ellington at NYU: Grainger's Rather Odd Relationship With Jazz, Part 2

Anne Ocone — Tue, 15 Sep 2020 13:41:36 GMT

Etude Magazine and "The Jazz Problem"

In the 1920's, the editors of the music periodical Etude Magazine were scandalized by jazz. In their August, 1924 edition, whose cover is pictured here, the editors assembled a panel of thirteen musical experts, composers, conductors, and writers, each described as "distinguished," "well-known," "eminent," etc., to give their opinions on the merits (or lack thereof) of the musical craze sweeping America and Europe. The topic was continued in the following month, September, with another nine panelists. All were white men, with the exception of one woman, Amy Beach (identified as "Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, Renowned American Composer-Pianist").

The September, 1924 issue of Etude also contained an extended piece, based on an interview, by Percy Grainger (described as "Distinguished Pianist, Composer and Teacher"). Grainger had a long connection with Etude, as described in another blog, "Grainger's Contributions to The Etude Magazine 1915-1943" by Barry Ould.

The Etude editors made no secret of where they stood. In an opening editorial, "Where the Etude Stands on Jazz," they made it clear that they did "not endorse Jazz, merely by discussing it." They say that: "In its original form, it has no place in musical education and deserves none. It will have to be transmogrified many times before it can present its credentials for the Walhalla of music. . . In musical education Jazz has been an accursed annoyance to teachers for years. Possibly the teachers are, themselves, somewhat to blame for this. Young people demand interesting, inspiriting music. Many of the Jazz pieces they have played are infinitely more difficult to execute than the sober music their teachers have given them. If the teacher had recognized the wholesome appetite of youth for fun and had given interesting, sprightly music instead of preaching against the evils of Jazz, the nuisance might have been averted."

The editors go on, in a more benign spirit, to say that certain aspects of jazz, at least in its more domesticated versions, as composed by mostly white composers and played under mostly white conductors, were praiseworthy and could be tolerated: "... On the other hand, the melodic and rhythmic inventive skill of many of the composers of Jazz, such men as Berlin, Confrey, Gershwin and Cohan, is extraordinary. Passing through the skilled hands of such orchestral leaders of high-class Jazz orchestras conducted by Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, Waring and others, the effects have been such that serious musicians as John Alden Carpenter, Percy Grainger and Leopold Stokowski, have predicted that Jazz will have an immense influence upon musical composition, not only of America, but also of the world."

A range of opinions on Jazz from "experts"

The actual opinions of the distinguished pundits varied a good deal, from scandalization to a view that jazz, at least in its Europeanized versions, was a harmless form of popular entertainment and even an important expression of the American spirit. Here is a selection:

George Ade ("American Humorist and Satirist")

Humorist George Ade said "The cruder form of "jazz," a collection of squeals and wails against a concealed back-structure of melody, became unbearable to me soon after I began to hear it." But he concedes, saying "It can be a dreadful disturbance to the atmosphere when perpetrated by a cluster of small-town blacksmiths and sheet metal workers but it becomes inspiriting and almost uplifting under the magical treatment of Paul Whiteman and some of his confreres."

Mrs. H.H.A.(Amy)Beach ("Renowned American Composer Pianist")

Composer Amy Beach's objections were less to the music itself than to the dances that went with it: "If it is merely a question of interesting new rhythms, accompanied by weird harmonics and suggested by lilting melodies, no one could appreciate the charm of such combinations more fully than I, provided that the work is good throughout. Taken, however, in association with some of the modern dancing and the sentiment of the verses on which many of the 'jazz' songs are founded, it would be difficult to find a combination more vulgar or debasing."

John Alden Carpenter ("Distinguished American Composer")

Composer John Alden Carpenter was more accepting, "deprecating the tendency to drag social problems into a discussion of contemporary American music." In his opinion, "I am convinced that our contemporary popular music (please note that I avoid labeling it 'jazz') is by far the most spontaneous, the most personal, the most characteristic, and, by virtue of these qualities, the most important musical expression that America has achieved. I am strongly inclined to believe that the musical historian of the year two thousand will find the birthday of American music and that of Irving Berlin to have been the same."

John Philip Sousa ("Famous Composer-Conductor")

John Philip Sousa was one of the most benign. He begins with a quip: I heard a gentleman remark, "Jazz is an excellent tonic but a poor dominant." He blames poor performances for the lack of acceptance of jazz, concluding, "There is no reason, with its exhilarating rhythm, its melodic ingenuities, why it should not become one of the accepted forms of composition. It lends itself to as many melodic changes as any other musical form. Forms go by cycles. There was a time when the saraband and the minuet occupied the center of the stage, and to-day the fox trot, alias jazz, does, and like the little maiden:—

"When she was good, she was very, very good
And when she was bad she was horrid."

Leopold Stokowski ("Distinguished Orchestral Conductor")

The September, 1924 issue of Etude continued with more critiques. Leopold Stokowski (quoted from "an address before the Forum in Philadelphia") also offered complimentary remarks:

"'Jazz' has come to stay. It is an expression of the times, the breathless, energetic, super-active times in which we are living, and it is useless to fight against it. Already its vigor, its new vitality, is beginning to manifest itself. The Negro musicians of America are playing a great part in this change. They have an open mind, and unbiased outlook. They are not hampered by traditions or conventions."

The last remark is of course not true. Stokowski ignores the rich traditions that lay behind the origins of jazz

Clay Smith ("Well-Known Chautauqua Performer and Composer of Many Successful Songs")

Musician Clay Smith, speaking of the supposed scandalous origins of the word "jazz," brought to the discussion a different perspective, emphasizing the role played by the playing of jazz in the dance halls and honky-tonks of western mining towns, where the writer had played trombone as a youth. In fact, he considered these the true birthplace of jazz (together with its "vulgarity"): "The primitive music that went with the 'Jazz' of those mining-town dance halls is unquestionably the lineal ancestry of much of the Jazz music of today. The highly vulgar dances that accompany some of the modern Jazz are sometimes far too suggestive of the ugly origins of the word."

Smith ends by grudgingly approving some of the more "cosmopolitan" forms of popular jazz, and concludes, with a nod to Stravinsky and Grainger: "But, even the best of this entertaining and popular music has no place with the great classics or even with fine concert numbers, except perhaps in a few cases where musicians of the highest standing, such as Stravinsky, Carpenter, Cadman, Guion, Grainger, Huerter and others with real musical training, have playfully taken 'Jazz' idioms and made them into modernistic pieces of the super-jazz type."

Grainger's answer to the critics

Percy Grainger's rebuttal to the critics appeared in the same September, 1924 issue of Etude. The article was the result of an exclusive interview "secured expressly for The Etude." Grainger was enthusiastic about jazz as a new form of popular music. He is frank about the fact that he is speaking of the highly modernized form of jazz that was currently being played. As would be expected of Grainger being Grainger, he saw jazz in the light of his own obsessions, especially his infatuation with all that he saw or imagined as "Nordic." He saw no reason to get upset over jazz. "What is this bug-a-boo about Jazz" he says. "Jazz differs not essentially or sociologically from the dance music all over the world, at all periods, in that its office is to provide excitement, relaxation and sentimental appeal. In this respect it differs not from the Chinese or native American Indian music or from the Halling of Norway, the Tarantella of Italy, Viennese Waltzes, Spanish Dances or the Hungarian Czardas. The trouble is that too much fuss is made about Jazz. Much of it is splendid music. Its melodic characteristics are chiefly Anglo-Saxon—closely akin to British and American (white) folk-music."

Jazz as "Nordic" music

He renders the opinion of jazz that "Its excellence rests on its combination of Nordic melodiousness with Negro tribal, rhythmic polyphony plus the great musical refinement and sophistication that has come through the vast army of highly trained cosmopolitan musicians who ply in Jazz. There never was popular music so classical." He enlarges on the theme of Nordic heritage, which he saw as related to living in large, open spaces: "The music of all free peoples has a wide melodic sweep. By free I mean those people with strong pioneer elements--people who live alone in isolated situations. This accounts for the great melodic fecundity of the Nordic race. folk who live in congested districts cannot be expected to write melodies with wide melodic range..."On the other hand, the Scandinavian, the Englishman, the Scotchman, the Irishman, whether he be in his native land, an American cowboy or an Australian boundary rider, is often solitary in his music-making; and his melodies have, therefore, wider range of melodic line, as in such a tune as Sally in Our Alley or the Norwegian Varmlandsvisa."

He goes on: "This strong Anglo-Saxon element preserved in America was musically mixed with the equally virile rhythmic tendencies of the Negro. The Negro is not natively melodic, in the bigger sense. His melodies are largely the evolution of tunes he as absorbed from his white surroundings. His musical instinct is rhythmic first of all. (Note the Negro folksongs collected in Africa by Natalie Curtis.) [Not quite so: Curtis' African folksongs, while authentic, were collected from Africans actually living in America, at the Hampton School in Virginia.] Grainger recognized some non-"Nordic" influences: "To this came, doubtless, via San Francisco, about ten years ago, some Asiatic influences which in turn were to make some of the other elements of Jazz." He mentions the use of notes that are sometimes a quarter-tone or so "off key," apparently in reference to the "blue notes" common in jazz.

Grainger was enthusiastic about the introduction of new instruments in jazz, especially in percussion, including the xylophone and bells, and about the use of the saxophone. Grainger himself played the saxophone, and wrote many pieces for band, featuring every type of saxophone.

Relationship of jazz to classical music

Grainger was less sanguine in this article about the long-term prospects of an influence of jazz on classical music. "Apart from its influence upon orchestration, Jazz will not form any basis for classical music of the future, to my mind. . . On the other hand, it has borrowed (or shall we say 'purloined'?) liberally from the classical. The public likes Jazz because of the shortness of its forms and its slender mental demands upon the listener. . . On the other hand, length and the ability to handle complicated music are invariable characteristics of really great genius. We realize this if we compare the music of Bach, Beethoven, Wagner, Delius and Tchaikovsky with the music of such fine but smaller musical talents as Scarlatti, Jensen, Roger Quilter, Reynaldo Hahn and others."

In education, Grainger advocated relieving the student's musical diet with classical training: "In the education of the child, Jazz ought to prove an excellent ingredient. But he also needs to drink the pure water of the classical and romantic springs." However, Grainger's views on the relationship between Delius and at least some kinds of jazz would change in a few years, especially after reading an article on Duke Ellington and Delius by R.D.Darrell.

R.D. Darrell's comparison of Ellington to Delius, and its effect on Grainger

In the periodical Disques for June, 1932, the critic R.D. Darrell wrote a critical appreciation of the music of Duke Elllington called "Black Beauty," after one of Ellington's compositions. It was the first in-depth study of Ellington's music. Darrell saw a similarity between Ellington and Delius, whom he also praises lavishly: "The Teutonically romantic-minded find an experience in Bruckner and Mahler that is shoddy and over-blown to those who find their rarest musical revelation in the pure serenity and under-statement of Delius." He saw in Ellington's music a similar "fluidity and rhapsodic freedom." He also saw a unity of composition that, in his view, could not be created by improvisations by a group of musicians, saying "And where the music of his race has heretofore been a communal, anonymous creation, he breaks the way to the individuals who are coming to sum it up in one voice, creating personally and consciously out of the measureless store of racial urge for expression." Darrell proceeds to quote another critic who says of Ellington's music "So homogeneous he is that it is sometimes hard to tell where folk song ends and Delius begins."

As we see below, there was actually a good deal of collaboration and improvisation in the works of Ellington, but it was behind the scenes, codified by the time the public heard them. Darrell's piece was to have a great influence on Grainger's views, connecting Ellington to Delius, which would lead to Ellington being invited by Grainger to New York University.

Delius in Florida

The reference to Delius was not far-fetched. Frederick Delius was the son of a prosperous British wool merchant of German origin, and was expected to follow in his father's business. In 1884-1885 he escaped this life by having his father send him to Florida to run an orange plantation on the St. John's River (pictured in an 1886 engraving). There he heard the songs of the Black laborers, as well as the songs of crew members on passing ships. In 1886, his father relented, and allowed him to go to study music in Leipzig. But he never forgot the influence of songs he heard in Florida. His Florida Suite alternates between dreamy, impressionistic movements evoking the Florida landscape from dawn to sunset and sprightly dances. The first movement, "Daybreak," ends with a version of the dance "La Calinda."

Delius was a friend of Percy Grainger, and he once proposed, as reported in John Bird's biography of Grainger, that they work together on a collection of "negro folk-songs" in America.

Percy Grainger at New York University - a short-lived career

In 1932-33 Percy Grainger was appointed Associate Professor of Music at New York University. There, he gave a lecture series called "A General Study of the Manifold Nature of Music." It was to be a short-lived career. Grainger and the formal academic life were not a good fit. His lectures were not well-attended. However, the session at which Ellington and his orchestra performed was packed to overflowing. He prepared his students by leading a discussion of Darrell's article in Disques. Ellington's participation was probably arranged by Ellington's manager Irving Mills, who wanted to establish Ellington's reputation as a "legitimate" composer, respected by classical musicians.

Grainger's lecture notes for the the class survive at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne. Some of them are reproduced in Laura Rexroth, "Duke Ellington and Percy Grainger: Black, Brown, and 'Blue-Eyed English'" in Frank J. Cipolla and Donald Hunsberger (eds.) The Wind Band in and Around New York ca. 1830-1950 (publ. 2005). A photo of Mills, Grainger and Ellington, who is playing the piano, (also reprinted in the article) is at the Museum in Melbourne.

Grainger is said to have opened the class by announcing, "The three greatest composers who ever lived are Bach, Delius and Duke Ellington. Unfortunately Bach is dead, Delius is very ill but we are happy to have with us today The Duke."

After the lecture and discussion, the Ellington Band played several selections, including Creole Love Call, Creole Rhapsody, and Tiger Rag. Grainger had the band improvise upon some tunes, whose identity is not preserved, then he himself sat down at the harmonium and piano and played selections by Ole Bull and Grieg. It is not known whether Ellington stayed around for this part of the class.

Nordic strains and Free Music machines

Grainger by now had added another element to his identification of jazz with "Nordic" music. By now he was developing his ideas of "Free Music," music unconstrained by pitch or tempo, like the sounds of nature in the waves and wind. This interest would culminate in his Free Music Machines, proto-synthesizers that he would develop with science teacher Burnett Cross. In the gliding glissandos and "blue notes" of jazz, Grainger saw a precursor of Free Music. In his class notes we find the note "The gliding and off-pitch sounds in jazz considered an important step to the free music of the future." (A discussion of Grainger's Free Music Experiments by Paul Jackson and Susan Colson is available on YouTube.)

Ellington's Creole Love Call and his artistic borrowings

Creole Love Call (with its name evoking the then popular Indian Love Call of Rudolf Friml), was an interesting choice. First performed at the Cotton Club in Harlem, a nightclub where black entertainers (the women were always light-skinned) performed for white audiences, it was the piece that first made the reputations of Ellington and vocalist Adelaide Hall. They recorded this hit in 1927. (You can hear Adelaide Hall's performance on YouTube.) Hall sings in wordless song, in imitation of the instruments, reversing the usual practice of jazz, where instruments echo the human voice.

Although Grainger and other critics saw Ellington's music as representing the inventiveness of a single genius, his pieces were always collaborative. During rehearsals, individual members of the group improvised, and variations that Ellington liked were incorporated by Ellington into a final, unified composition. One of the most important members of his group was pianist and lyricist Billy Strayhorn, who was the actual composer of one of Ellington's most famous songs, "Take the A Train." In the case of Creole Love Call, the melody actually originated with New Orleans jazz great "King" Oliver, who recorded it in 1923 as "Camp Meeting Blues" with his Creole Jazz Band. The melody was brought to Ellington by reedman Rudy Jackson, who claimed it as his own composition. Oliver sued Ellington, but Oliver, a better musician than he was a businessman, had never properly copyrighted the song, and Ellington, even after he learned his error (and fired Rudy Jackson) had no qualms about copywriting the composition as his own. Adelaide Hall, too, played a part in the creation of Creole Love Call. She told how she came to sing the vocal version with Ellington:

"I was standing in the wings behind the piano when Duke first played it. I started humming along with the band. Afterwards he came over to me and said, 'That's just what I was looking for. Can you do it again?' I said, 'I can't, because I don't know what I was doing.' He begged me to try. Anyway I did, and sang this counter melody, and he was delighted and said 'Addie, you're going to record this with the band.' A couple of days later I did."

Creole Love Call made Ellington and Hall a big hit at the Cotton Club and eventually worldwide. The picture at right shows Adelaide Hall in Blackbirds of 1928.

Ellington on Delius and on Porgy and Bess

Ellington did not really see any resemblance between his music and Delius', but the experience at NYU led him to find out more about Delius. He liked the music, and his favorite work by that composer was In a Summer Garden. He listed his other favorite classical pieces as Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe, Debussy's La Mer and Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, and Holst's The Planets.

Ellington had a similar appreciative but critical attitude toward the supposed "Negro" melodies of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. In an interview quoted in The Duke Ellington Reader (ed. Mark Tucker), he gave his opinion: "Grand music and a swell play, I guess, but the two don't go together. . . The first thing that gives it away is that it does not use the Negro musical idiom. . . It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes."

Ellington always saw his music as solidly within the African-American tradition. It was not Nordic or European or anything else. He did not like to call his music "jazz," but in Rhythm, March, 1931 (quoted in Darrell, "Black Beauty") he said: "The music of my race is something more than the 'American idiom.' It is the result of our transplantation to American soil, and was our reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny we endured. What we could not say openly we expressed in music, and what we know as 'Jazz' is something more than just dance music . . . There is no necessity to apologize for attributing aims other than terpsichorean to our music, and for showing how the characteristic, melancholy music of my race has been forged from the very white heat of our sorrows, and from our gropings after something tangible in the primitiveness of our lives in the early days of our American occupation. . . I think that the music of my race is something which is going to live, something which posterity will honor in a higher sense than merely that of the music of the ball-room of today."

Ellington and Grainger: Two worlds touching but not quite communicating

Ellington and Grainger seem never to have met again, but both men, we hope, got something from the encounter. Ellington got the respect he needed for his career from the musical establishment, and perhaps an opportunity to increase his pleasure in classical music. Grainger could point to additional "proof" of his musical theories.

Grainger's contributions to The Etude magazine 1915-1943

Anne Ocone — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 20:48:44 GMT

By Barry Peter Ould

The Etude Magazine was an American print magazine dedicated to music founded by Theodore Presser (1848–1925) at Lynchburg, Virginia, and first published in October 1883. Presser, who had also founded the Music Teachers National Association, moved his publishing headquarters to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1884, and his Theodore Presser Company continued the magazine until 1957. It was a staple for music teachers throughout the country, providing articles related to music history, new developments in music, and practical teaching techniques, as well as musical scores from the classics and new pieces for beginning to advanced students. Begun as an aid for piano teachers, the magazine grew to include information and literature for vocal and instrumental enthusiasts as well. Not only is the series important to the musician, but it provides an insight into the culture itself, including the impact of the development of the car, radio, and television, and expands to world music and the influence of world wars on that culture.

Aimed at all musicians, from the novice through the serious student to the professional, The Etude printed articles about both basic (or “popular”) and more-involved musical subjects (including history, literature, gossip, and politics), contained write-in advice columns about musical pedagogy, and piano sheet music, of all performer ability levels, totaling over 10,000 works. James Francis Cooke, editor-in-chief from 1909 to 1949, added the phrase "Music Exalts Life!" to the magazine's masthead, and The Etude became a platform for Cooke's somewhat polemical and militantly optimistic editorials. The sometimes conservative outlook and contents of the magazine may have contributed to a decline in circulation in the 1930s and 1940s, but in many respects it moved with the times, unequivocally supporting the phonograph, radio, and eventually television, and, by the late 1930s, fully embracing jazz. By the end, George Rochberg was an editor of The Etude under Guy McCoy, who had succeeded Cooke as editor-in-chief after over two decades as an assistant, and the magazine's musical content had come more closely in-step with the contemporary world.

Grainger’s association with this magazine spanned a total of 28 years. His first contribution appeared in September 1915 and his last in September 1943. Below, I have compiled a list of these articles together with the Volume No. and issue No. followed by the page numbers where they appeared. Copies of all the magazines can now be found at:

https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/etude/

where they can be downloaded as PDFs. Grainger’s name as a pianist par excellance also appears in various issues, either in articles by others or referenced in quotes.

In his first appearance in this magazine he was interviewed on the subject of ‘Modernism in Pianoforte Study’ (Volume 33/9; September 1915 pp. 631-632) with a second section of the interview appearing in the next issue (Volume 33/10; October, 1915 pp. 709-710) entitled ‘A Blossom Time in Pianoforte Literature’.

This was followed by ‘Modern and Universal Impulses in Music’ which appeared in (Volume 34/5; May 1916 pp. 343-344) with another phase of this subject appearing in the subsequent edition (Volume 34/6; June 1916 p. 412) ‘The World Music of Tomorrow’.

Grainger’s next major contribution ‘A Master Lesson on Grieg’s “Norwegian Bridal Procession” op. 19 No. 2’ appeared in the November 1920 edition (Volume 38/11 pp. 741-745) along with Grainger’s analysis and a printed edition of the piece for study or concert performance. This was also made available as a separate score with the parallel text of Grieg’s original by Theodore Presser (No. 17035) and copies of this can be obtained from the Grainger Societies music archive.

Another interview with Grainger appeared in the October 1921 issue (Vol. 39/10 pp. 631-632) with the conclusion appearing in the next issue (Volume 39/11 pp. 707-708). This was entitled ‘Glimpses of Genius’ and included Grainger’s writings about Ferruccio Busoni, Frederick Delius, Edvard Grieg, Cyril Scott and Richard Strauss.

For the September 1924 issue (Volume 42/9 pp. 592-594) Grainger writes about Jazz in his essay ‘What Effect is Jazz Likely to Have upon the Music of the Future. This was followed by ‘New Ideas on Study and Practice’ in the December 1925 issue (Volume43/12 pp. 845-846) and concluded in the next issue January 1926 (Volume 44/1 pp. 23-24).

It was another 15 years before Grainger wrote again for The Etude and his next contribution labelled a conference was called ‘Reaching Your Goal at the Keyboard’ (Volume 59/2; February 1941 pp. 79-80, 134). This so-called conference was expressly secured for The Etude by Myles Fellowes.

Grainger’s final contribution was his 4-part essay on Edvard Grieg ‘Grieg – Nationalist and Cosmopolitan’ which appeared in the June to September 1943 issues (Volumes 61/6; 61/7; 61/8 and 61/9, pp. 386, 416-418; 428, 472; pp.492, 535 and 543 and pp. 569 and 616 respectively).

Lisbon Saxophone Ensemble (SAATB)

Susan Colson — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 22:21:42 GMT

By Dr. Paul Cohen

Percy Grainger’s relationship with the saxophone was both joyous and far-reaching. He included the saxophone — sometimes singly, other times within a complete family — in many of his orchestral, chamber, band and solo works. Grainger was convinced of the ideal musical qualities of the saxophone from his very first encounter with the instrument. In a 1943 round letter to his friends, he reminisced:

Around 1904, Balfour Gardiner & I heard our first sax-reed (a tenor) near Frome, Somerset. A man in a country band played one to us. And I knew then & there that I was hearing the world’s finest wind-tone-tool — the most voice-like, the most mankind-typed.

His enthusiasm was such that he owned both a soprano and baritone, and he enlisted in a World War I armed forces band playing the soprano saxophone! His extensive public writing about the saxophone was effusive in praise, extolling its virtues to the highest degree. A typical example comes from the preface to Lincolnshire Posy, in which Grainger asserts: ...to my ears the saxophone is the most expressive of all wind instruments — the one closest to the human voice. And surely all musical instruments should be rated according to their tonal closeness to man’s own voice!...

Grainger was especially interested in the sonority of instrumental families, and his particular favorite was the family of saxophones. For many years he wanted to write for saxophone ensemble, but was unable to find an appropriate group to try out his works. In the summer of 1943 Grainger had a particularly strong and interested group with which to work, and he enthusiastically wrote out saxophone ensemble parts to many of his own arrangements and original settings.

This version of Lisbon, (better known as the first movement of Lincolnshire Posy) was written by Grainger on August 2, 1943 while on the summer faculty of Interlochen. He experimented with three different versions; low key of AAATB, high key of SAATB and low key of SATTB. The high key version of SAATB was the most satisfactory and is the one heard here and published.

The above copy (in the video) is an unedited edition. All of Grainger’s markings and indications as originally found in the parts and the score have been retained. Nothing has been added or deleted. The scoring - simple and imaginative - is remarkable for it's color and variety. Grainger heard his music in a very special way and knew how to let it be heard.

Percy Grainger and the Intimate Saxophone

Susan Colson — Wed, 20 May 2020 16:30:58 GMT

[This post is excerpted from an article written by Dr. Paul Cohen. The complete article is here. Enjoy this recording of Molly on the Shore from Dr. Cohen's CD American Landscapes, his solo CD of American music for soprano and alto saxophone. Molly on the Shore is an original setting by Grainger and not an arrangement. Dr. Cohen’s restoration is drawn from the manuscripts of Cecil Lesson and Percy Grainger.]

“Around 1904 Balfour Gardiner & I heard our first sax-reed (a tenor) near Frome, Somerset. A man in a country band played one to us. And I knew then & there, that I was hearing the world's finest wind tone-tool —the most voice- like, the most mankind-typed, “ --Percy Grainger

When Percy Grainger enlisted in the United States Army as musician third class (summer of 1917), he chose to audition on the soprano saxophone! When the time came to join, Grainger apparently bought a soprano, learned the Blue Bells of Scotland (his entire repertoire), walked to Fort Totten (New York), and enlisted as a bandsman. He kept secret his identity as an internationally acclaimed concert pianist for some months, and concentrated his efforts on playing saxophone and oboe, while exploring the instruments and possibilities of the wind-band.

It was here that he composed his remarkable Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away which, in the original orchestration, (since revised by the publisher) includes parts for soprano and bass saxophone, and contra-bass sarrusophone! This original version has been republished by Southern Music, and can now be heard as Grainger originally intended.

His love for the saxophone grew over the years, and he often expressed his unbridled enthusiasm to all who would listen. In a preface to one of his most famous works he wrote:

". . . to my ears the saxophone is the most expressive of all wind instruments- the one closest to the human voice. And surely all musical instruments should be rated according to their tonal closeness to man's own voice! . . . "

Percy Grainger's relationship with the saxophone seems to have been intensely personal, but always joyous and fruitful. His frequent use of the entire family of saxophones, in addition to his numerous and enthusiastic writings about the instrument, speak eloquently of his feelings and thoughts. It is from his informal correspondence and anecdotal references, however, that one begins to appreciate the depth of passion and importance that the saxophone played in his life. This is charmingly illustrated in a letter to his friends in which his compositions for saxophone ensemble are discussed. He once again used his "blue-eyed English."

"Some folks have hook-worms inside them: & I understand that the hook-worm has to be at-rest-set (satisfied) before the man can come into his own. My hook-worm is tonal fun. No tone- fun, no Percy. And this summer, I got my tone-fun out of the Sax-reed (saxophone) group at Interlochen. Yet it has taken from 1904 to 1943 to have my hopes of sax-reed team-work fulfilled. Every other summer there was some spoke put in the wheel of my sax-reed hopes — either the group was un-whole, or it could not get together to rehearse, or they wanted to rehearse quite othery things from those I wanted to try out on them. But this summer I had my way. As wont-some, I had taken to Interlochen our 2 sax-reeds — the she-high (soprano) & the he-mid-low (baritone). The sax-reed teacher (Rollin Silfies) took the she-high himself (most sax-readers shun the she-high like a pest) & did most sweetly on it (among other things he played the long she-high sax-reed single in Rufford Park Poachers in my Lincolnshire Posy). In his big group we had 1 she-high, 3 or 4 she-lows (altos), 3 he-highs (tenors), 1 he-mid-low (baritone), 1 he-low (bass).This was something to work with! So I wrote out parts. . . (& this was almost the only writing out of parts I did this summer at Interlochen)." --Percy Grainger

No one could ask for a more committed champion of the saxophone!

The Harmonium Celebration at 7 Cromwell Place

Anne Ocone — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:59:22 GMT

Percy Grainger used three harmoniums that we know of, a Mustel Model 4 (left mysteriously at the Sydney Conservatorium in March, 1935 after his concerts there and destined to live in the basement of Verbrugghen Hall for 80 years), an American-built Estey at 7 Cromwell Place, sent to the Grainger Museum in Melbourne after he died, and the restored instrument currently in the house, an Adler (serial #107256, from 1910) built by the Adler Organ Company of Louisville, Kentucky.

Andrew Robson, in an interesting online article from 2014, describes the intriguing Mustel and Grainger’s 1935 appearances in Sydney during a two-year tour of Australia and New Zealand, also mentioned in Percy Grainger by John Bird (p. 208).

In his article, “Delius Hostile to Harmonium Parts in my Chamber Music Scores,” Grainger describes the harmonium as “. . . the most essential of all chamber music instruments.” Gillies/Pear/Carroll, Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger , Oxford U. Press, 2006. (“harmonium, use of” 195-96, 199 (p. 196).

Certainly the instrument entered the pantheon after being the inspiration for “The Immovable Do”; but Grainger used it as a specific option in The Old Woman at the Christening, Youthful Suite, Youthful Rapture, The Peora Hunt, Mowgli’s Song Against People, Harvest Hymn, The Fall of the Stone, The Beaches of Lukannon, and potentially (wherever there is an organ part) in Danish Folk-Music Suite, the orchestra version of Marching Song of Democracy, Hill Song #1, The Immovable Do, and English Dance. The larger instruments can sound like a pipe organ, and were an attractive alternative to pipe organs in small churches; or, chameleon-like, the harmonium can disappear into the fabric of sound supporting the harmonies. Click here for a list of Grainger’s works with harmonium compiled by Barry Peter Ould.

The harmonium, the instrument itself, also became raw material for Grainger’s experiments in “Free Music” as he used and reused parts to create new instruments.

Background:

“The name “Harmonium” was patented in 1842 by Alexandre François Debain (1809-1877) of Paris. It was for a keyboard instrument which used pressurized air from bellows pumped by two foot pedals to produce sound from free-reeds (the same method of sound production found in the accordion and harmonica) creating an instrument which possessed the tonal qualities of a pipe organ and the expressive control of a string instrument. (full article)

Walter Piston, in his bible, Orchestration, has only a slight paragraph on the harmonium, noting its use in small orchestras to make up for deficiencies in wind tone. Very seldom used in orchestras, much less an opera pit, Richard Strauss uses the harmonium in the “Vorspiel” of Ariadne auf Naxos at Reh #4 to blend the sound of the chamber-size ensemble, sustaining the harmonies and freeing the individual winds to more elaborate parts. Then, at Reh #10, it accompanies, in a humorous way, the dialogue between the Music Teacher (sung) and the Landlord (spoken.) The sound of the harmonium, similar to an accordion, was instantly recognizable and familiar as a domestic instrument.(Click here for a very thorough demonstration of a Mason + Hamlin 61-note “Liszt Organ:”)

Around the turn of the century much more elaborate reed organs were developed. Designated “Kunstharmonium,” (Art Harmonium) the instrument could be registered in sophisticated ways, with a couple of keyboards and the possibility of splitting keyboards from side to side into melodic and accompanying sounds, and with espressivo swell boxes controlled with the knees. Some even incorporated piano or bell sounds. Click here for the Kunstharmonium performance played by Jan Hennig.

The blending quality of many of the rich reed registrations were made use of by Arnold Schoenberg and his students for his “Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen” concerts. These ground-breaking private concerts were critic-free chances to hear new music and recent, even unheard, Bruckner and Mahler symphonies. Condensed orchestrations by Berg, Webern, and other Schoenberg pupils were made and performed. At a fundraiser, Strauss waltzes were arranged for string quartet, piano and harmonium; Mahler’s Fourth Symphony was arranged by Erwin Stein for Soprano and 12 players: flute (doubling piccolo) Oboe (doubling English Horn) two Clarinets, 4-hand piano, strings, some percussion and harmonium. There are several recordings of this available today.

Notably, in 1925 (15 years after the premiere of the opera but at the beginning of the all consuming German film industry,) a silent film of Der Rosenkavalier was made, written by von Hoffmanstal and arranged by Strauss with provision for a large, live orchestra accompaniment, without singers.

All movie theaters had live accompaniments, and large theaters in metropolitan areas had resident orchestras. The then brand-new Eastman Theater in Rochester had two orchestras: a pit orchestra for accompanying the wildly popular silent films shown many times a day, and a larger one (which later became the Rochester Philharmonic) for entertainment in between films and for the main evening shows. Large production companies would send around the scores and parts to music written for the specific movies, with flexible scoring (“pit arrangements”) which could be adapted for the particular theater (cues written in all parts to make substituting easy.)

The “Salon Orchestra Version” authorized by Strauss and published by Fürstner “distilled” the orchestration down from 100 to 13 players: flute, oboe, 2 trumpets, trombone, 2 violins, cello, bass, piano, some percussion, and harmonium.

Eric Culver, April 14, 2020

From Suppositories to Brilliantine: an apothecary time capsule

Anne Ocone — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 19:01:49 GMT

by Matthew McGarrell. As the White Plains, New York home of Percy Aldridge Grainger and Ella Viola Strom is gradually transformed into an accessible landmark, museum, and research facility, treasures emerge to become objects of fascination as well as evidence of the lives of two enigmatic twentieth-century creative artists. Everything at 7 Cromwell Place—from light fixtures to plumbing, from furniture to wall paper, from pianos to paintings—bears witness to the idiosyncratic lifestyles of Percy and Ella. For several years, I have been making photographs and videos in the house, sporadically but intently, focusing on details that mostly have changed little since the hands of Ella and Percy were upon them. The “star” of this video—the medicine cabinet in Percy and Ella’s bathroom—affords opportunities for intimate observation and reveals something of the natural approach to health that the Graingers practiced. I am indebted to our guide, Barry Peter Ould, for his knowledge of antique apothecaries and the gentle humor with which he displays it.

My growing collection of photographs made at 7 Cromwell Place can be seen here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/willblax/albums/72157708846752652

Natalie Curtis, Busoni, and Grainger

Anne Ocone — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 22:54:24 GMT

by Cora Angier Sowa.

Percy Grainger's appreciation of American folk song

Percy Grainger was a composer with many interests. One of these was the collecting and arrangement of folksongs of various continents, and his work with English, Scandinavian and South Pacific song is well-known. In the years he spent in America, he developed an interest in the music of America. In a previous blog, Percy Grainger in the Ozarks, we spoke of Grainger's appreciation of the mountain music of the U.S., as exemplified by his performances of the old song "Arkansas Traveler." But he also became interested in the songs of the Native Americans, or "Indians," as they were then called, and in the complex forms of the music of African Americans. In these pursuits, he was influenced in particular by the work of Natalie Curtis Burlin, intrepid collector and writer, who overcame hardships, both physical and bureaucratic, to record first the music of the Hopi of Arizona and other Native American tribes, then the elaborate part-singing of the Blacks at the Hampton Institute in Virginia.

Natalie Curtis' flight from her wealthy New York upbringing

Natalie Curtis was born into a wealthy New York family in 1875. Her family had a brownstone on Washington Place, and her father was a distinguished physician. Her brothers were Harvard-educated; Natalie and her sisters did not, as Victorian women, have that opportunity. However, Natalie showed an early talent as a musician, practicing both voice and piano obsessively for hours each day. One of her piano teachers was Ferruccio Busoni (with whom Grainger also briefly studied). She was well on her way to becoming a well-known concert pianist, but in those days she was expected to get married, and married ladies of her social class did not have careers.

Natalie's brother George became a librarian at the Astor Library in New Haven, Connecticut. However, he suffered from asthma, and went West for his health, as many ailing Easterners did. He found work as a ranch hand in Arizona, where he regained his strength. Natalie meanwhile, worn down from over-practicing as well as emotional stress, suffered a complete breakdown. She too, fled to the Southwest to join her brother, and he became her constant companion in her subsequent travels among the Hopi. (Incidentally, there is no connection between this Curtis family and the photographer and ethnologist Edward Sheriff Curtis, who was born on a farm in Wisconsin, where his father was a minister and farmer. They only coincidentally shared a surname and a common interest in documenting Native American life.)

Cowboy life and song with brother George

Natalie shared the outdoor life with George, traveling by horse and sleeping under the stars. In 1920 she would write in The Nation:

I have ridden with cowboys, sung with them, seen round-ups and bronco-busting, spent months amid a thousand head of cattle on one of the loneliest ranges in Arizona. When the men left to "ride the range" and I was alone in the cabin with a Colt revolver for companion; when I heard the plaintive sob of the wood pigeon in the cedars . . . Then I understood the note of utter loneliness that sounds in many a cowboy song,

Cowboy music is not just one genre

We have to wonder which cowboy songs she heard. Doubtless the men sang only "cleaned-up" versions for her, suitable to sing in front of ladies. One of the most famous, for example, "Streets of Laredo," had an original version, based on the English ballad "The Unfortunate Lad" (also known as "The Unfortunate Rake") in which the hero is dying not of a gunshot wound, but from venereal disease, one of the most common causes of death for cowboys; the other most common cause was lightning strikes. The cowboy song originated in songs sung or played at night to soothe the thousands of cattle on long drives from Texas to the railheads in Kansas City or South Dakota, to keep them from stampeding at some sudden noise.

The cowboys themselves were a mixed lot — White Confederate veterans, freed Black slaves, Mexicans. Their music varied, too, from old Appalachian ballads to contemporary show tunes to impromptu compositions. (Natalie, speaking of American folk music in her Negro Folksongs writes of "the songs and ballads of the British Isles, still held in purity in the mountain fortresses of the Southern States, though strange versions of them crop up in the cowboy songs of the frontier.") William H. Forbis, in The Old West: The Cowboys tells us that one cowboy sang Presbyterian hymns, another played the violin, and that some songs "had mournful tunes but no words and were termed 'Texas lullabies'." (On a personal note: My great-uncle Albert Powell was a Texas cowboy in the 1890's, working on long cattle drives. His father, my great-grandfather James Powell, was a Baptist minister and rancher, so Albert probably knew lots of Baptist hymns, but I don't think Albert himself was particularly religious. I wish I knew what songs he sang to soothe the bovines.)

Natalie made an arrangement of an old cowboy song, which she simply titled "A Cowboy Song." It was performed on April 4, 1920 at the Musical Art Society of New York. Also on the program were two of Natalie's arrangements of Native American melodies, which she collected in the next phase of her life. These arrangements were the Pawnee "Victory Song" and the Cheyenne "Dawn Song."

Charles Lummis introduces Natalie to Native American culture

Natalie and George visited Los Angeles, where they met Charles Fletcher Lummis, journalist and activist in Native American rights. Lummis, one of the founders of the Southwest Museum of the American Indian near Pasadena, was born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard, where Theodore Roosevelt was one of his classmates, a connection that would prove advantageous to both Lummis and to Natalie Curtis. Lummis was a founder of the Sequoyah League, which fought for the rights of Native Americans to keep their own culture, which was under siege by U.S. Government policy.

In Los Angeles, Lummis invited Natalie and George to attend a performance by Navajo singers from Arizona, and his stories of tramping though the Southwest ignited her interest in the region.

The Indians' Book

Natalie and George Curtis arrived in Yuma, Arizona in 1903, and they set forth into the desert, She brought with her an Edison recording machine. She made contact with the Native people, and strove to gain their trust. Her arrival was controversial, as the policy of the U.S. government, under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, was to "civilize" the "savage" Indians by forbidding them to speak their own language, sing their songs, perform their sacred dances, wear Native clothing, wear their hair long, or keep their Native names. Children were forcibly taken from their parents and sent to distant boarding schools, founded on a military model. The most famous of these was the Carlisle School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, founded in 1879. (Its most famous graduate was the remarkable athlete Jim Thorpe.)

Natalie and George eventually made their way to the Hopi pueblo of Oraibi, perched on top of the stone outcropping known as the Third Mesa. There she won the trust of the elders, especially the Chief, Lololomai. The Hopi had songs for every aspect of life — songs for planting crops, grinding corn, putting children to sleep, dancing, watching the dawn, and every chore. Sitting on a rooftop with Lololomai and other singers, she began (in secret, to avoid the BIA), she began to collect and record the Hopi songs. During a visit in the East, Natalie made use of family connections with President Roosevelt to obtain from him a special letter of permission to continue recording the Indian songs and studying their culture.

The Hopi and other Indian cultures

In 1907 Natalie published The Indians' Book, in which she presented not only the songs of the Hopi, but those of Native American tribes from many parts of America, from Maine to the Great Plains to the Navaho and Apache of the Southwest. We find there the melodies, with the words in both the Native tongue and in English, plus extensive essays on the culture of each tribe and details of how the songs were performed. There are work songs, war songs, and dance songs, and songs for every aspect of life. The entire The Indians' Book is available on the Internet.

An unfortunate aspect of Curtis' work was that she was influenced by an "evolutionary" view of the world's people that was already becoming outmoded among anthropologists such as her friend Franz Boas. According to this view, races evolve from a primitive "childlike" state of untaught emotional expression to a state of "civilization." For example, she writes "The Indian's religious thought, uttered with the simplicity of childhood, is born of his recognition of spirit in every form of life ..." and again: "If the Indians' Book can help to a recognition of primitive men of latent capabilities; if it can help ... to herald the day when adult races wisely shall guide child races, and civilization nourish the genius of every people, then will this utterance of the North American Indians be not for the race alone, but for all humanity."But she nevertheless saw that by becoming "civilized," the modern nations were also losing something of creative artistic genius.

After the publication of The Indians' Book and Roosevelt's intervention, some modifications were introduced into the government treatment of Native American culture, and an exemption was granted for musical and artistic performance.

In August, 1913, Theodore Roosevelt joined Natalie and others at the village of Walpi on the First Mesa of Arizona to witness the Hopi Snake Dance, in which the dancers dance while handling the sacred snakes. Natalie and Roosevelt were seated together in the audience.

Busoni's Indian Fantasy, with Grainger in the audience

In 1915, Ferruccio Busoni composed his Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, inspired by Native American songs which Natalie had collected. Natalie wrote a review of Busoni's Indian Fantasy in the October, 1915 issue of Southern Workman, the journal published by the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where she had pursued her recording of Native American, and later, African American songs and folktales. In the review, she recounted how the composition came about, and her meeting with Stokowski, who conducted the piece's first performance.

Natalie met a young Leopold Stokowski when he arrived in America in 1905. She told him about Indian music and shared with him some of the songs she had collected. He listened, she wrote, in "reverent silence," and "was deeply moved, for this music seemed to him the very voice of the 'New World'." When he asked for some little remembrance, she says that she gave him "a silver ornament wrought into art-shape (a flower form) by some facile though untaught Navaho Indian silversmith." (This is, of course, nonsense, like her "evolutionary" ideas. The silversmith wasn't untaught. He would have learned his craft from an older smith, who would have been taught by his own teachers!)

A few years later, Natalie was asked by her old mentor, Busoni, for a few Indian melodies that he could work into "a rhapsody or fantasy for piano and orchestra." The result was Busoni's Indian Fantasy, which was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Stokowski. At the rehearsal on February 19, 1915, Natalie sat with Madame Busoni on one side and Percy Grainger on the other.

The piece is in three movements, a free "Fantasia," a Canzona ("The Blue Bird Song"), and "Finale." Musically, it is impressionistic. Natalie wrote:

With the first bars of the orchestral introduction (based on a song of the cliff-perched Hopi Indians) the walls melted away, and I was in the West, filled again with that awing sense of vastness, of solitude, of immensity. The boundless horizon, the endless stretch of plains and deserts, the might of the Mississippi — all this, the spirit of the real America (a spirit of primeval latent power) Busoni had felt while traveling across the continent, and now had tried to reproduce. . .

With all the resources of piano and orchestra Busoni conjures before us a succession of different pictures and ideas — primitive America — the sweep of the prairie winds, the roll and gleam of waters, the aerial song of birds . . .

Natalie remarked on the lack of drums in the piece, which are so characteristic of Native American music, but she adds that "this characteristic feature enters at the last, and with perhaps the greater dynamic effect through having been withheld at first." One Indian theme, she says, "which Busoni has expanded into a broad and stirring melody, and which he calls 'The Chant of Victory' seemed to him possible for adaptation as one of our national anthems."

Stokowski hopefully thought that the Indian Fantasy would have a great influence on the future of Western music. Natalie quotes his words after that first performance: "I consider this the most important new step in the development of music since DeBussy first began to break fresh paths in tonal and harmonic relations. It will have a very deep influence on the trend of music in the future."

You can listen to a YouTube performance of Busoni's Fantasy by pianist Giovanni Bellucci (Fantasía India Op.44, para piano y orquesta. Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de la RAI Director: Daniele Callegari) and make up your own mind about its effects.

The Hampton Series of Negro Folk-Songs

Natalie first came to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia in 1904, with the intent of studying and recording songs from the great number of Indian students from many tribes who were in residence at the time.

The Hampton Institute was founded by General Samuel Armstrong Chapman in 1868 to provide education for newly freed Black slaves. One of its earliest graduates was Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute. It is today's Hampton University. It was coeducational from the start, with the women being taught domestic skills. In 1878 Hampton began to accept American Indian students, eventually enrolling applicants from some sixty-five different tribes. Subversively, Hampton encouraged the Native Americans to perform their folk music, which government policy tried to suppress. Unfortunately, the program ended in 1923, when it was feared (this being in the pre-civil rights South) that Black and Native students were fraternizing too much. The aim, it was said, to integrate the Indians into white, not black society!

While at Hampton, Natalie undertook to help the Indian students learn each others' languages, while transcribing their music for her own project. These songs were included in her Indians' Book.

African American part-singing

It may have been the anthropologist Franz Boas, who was a friend of Natalie, who first suggested to her the idea of doing for the music of the African Americans what she had done for the Native American.

Natalie toured the South meeting with Black communities where African heritage was preserved, although her actual recording was done at Hampton. She describes visiting the Calhoun Industrial School where she attended "a great meeting of colored people" that was "held one year to listen to discussion by Northern white scholars concerning the advancement of their race." The attendees, for their part, treated this event like a camp meeting, hitching their animals in the woods and gathering in a big clearing. Suddenly they burst into spontaneous song. She goes on to say, "And as usual with Negroes, this was extemporaneous part-singing, — women making up alto, men improvising tenor or bass, the music as a whole possessed so completely by them all (or so utterly possessing them!) that they were free to abandon themselves to the inspiration of their own creative instinct." (From the Hampton Series of Negro Folk-Songs Book IV).

Of particular interest to Natalie at Hampton was the elaborate part-singing, the improvisational a capella song. To record each part separately was a challenge, because each singer was unable to sing without the simultaneous singing of all the other parts. She adopted the method of putting the recording device next to the singer whose voice she was recording, while the others sang in the background, audible to the first singer but not picked up by the machine. Then she repeated the process for each singer.

The result of Natalie's effort was the four-volume Hampton Series of Negro Folk-Songs (1918-1919). As with the Native Americans, there were songs for every aspect of life. There were the well-known spirituals, but also work and play songs, like the "Peanut-Pickin' Song," the "Hammerin' Song" from the mines of Virginia, "Chicka-Hanka" (a railroad workers' song), and "Liza-Jane." The complete series of Hampton Institute Negro Folk-Songs, Vols. I-IV, is available on the Internet.

In a 1912 essay, Natalie identified "Four Types of Folk-Song" in the United States: Native American, African American, mountain white, and cowboy.

Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent

There were in residence at the Hampton School students who were from Africa, and Natalie made a special project of recording music that they brought from their native tribes. Her two principal informants were C. Kamba Simango, from the Ndau Tribe, Portuguese East Africa, and Madikane Cele, of the Zulu Tribe, Zululand, South Africa. The result was Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent, published in 1920. In this music, too, she found complex polyphony and part-singing, solo voice followed by chorus, and rhythmic syncopation. There were also native instruments, indluding the drum and the mbi'la, a wooden box with metal strips tuned to different lengths, plucked by the thumbs. Various forms of hand-clapping were also practiced. The tonal system did not correspond to the Western scale, and was difficult to reproduce on the modern piano.

Natalie published Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent in 1920. The work comprised not only songs, as in The Indians' Book, but folk tales such as "The Hare and the Tortoise" and "The Hare and the Baboon." Included in Songs and Tales are detailed directions for performance, illustrated by the (relatively short) directions given on the example of the "Dance for Girls" illustrated here:

Only the two dancers can clap this clap; though they as well as the onlookers may also clap all the other claps. The first beat of each bar carrying the words of the song and accented by the two emphatic beats of the dancers, is made to stand out vigorously from the rest of the song; the following syllables, accompanied by the more rapid hand-clapping, sound somewhat parenthetical in character.

Curtis' Songs and Tales from the Dark Continent is also available on the Internet.

Grainger's review of Curtis' work

Percy Grainger wrote a review of Natalie's work on African American music in the New York Times Book Review of April 14, 1918 (which is reprinted in Malcolm Gillies' and Bruce Clunies Ross' Grainger on Music). It was titled "The Unique Value of Natalie Curtis' Notations of American Negro Folksongs."

Grainger terms music composed with the help of written notation "conscious music," that which is composed without written notation "unconscious music." He saw that both kinds of music have positive qualities lacking in the other, and thought, according to the common belief, that the "primitive" or "untaught" music would eventually die away, and should be preserved as a historic artifact. He writes:

It would probably be safe to assert that no composer of conscious music seems ...capable of creating tunes of a certain indescribable melodic fragrance that abounds in almost every branch of unconscious music! On the other hand, unconscious music (very naturally) rarely, if ever, rises to the heights of harmonic intricacy and subtlety native to conscious music.

Grainger recognizes Natalie Curtis' unique ability to record and explicate the improvisational part-music of the Blacks. He writes that

...the problem is one calling for the sharpest of ears, the most alert of musical mentalities, the warmest and most expansive of racial sympathies. But Natalie Curtis-Burlin has all these qualifications in a superlative degree, as she has amply shown in her previous remarkable musical and literary accomplishment, The Indians' Book.

Dedication of a song to Percy Grainger

Natalie dedicated one of the songs in the Hampton Series, "God's A-Gwine Ter Move All De Troubles Away," to Percy Grainger. She writes:

"To Percy Grainger (who loves this song), Composer, Pianist, Folk-lorist, This record is dedicated with warm appreciation of those qualities of artistic insight and human sympathy that make him a firm friend of the Negro and of Negro music; for the unconscious art of simple men finds reverent recognition and buoyant response from the genius whose own sunny nature makes all who know him believe that

"God's A-Gwine Ter Move All De Troubles Away."

She recounts a story about a concert of Black music given by Black musicians at the Musical School Settlement for Colored People in New York, where Grainger comforted a young woman pianist who totally flubbed her performance and left the stage feeling a failure. Grainger immediately went backstage:

Hurrying behind the scenes he met the dejected little pianist as she came from the stage. "Don't mind," he said comfortingly, "we have all done the same thing; every artist has. That's part of a public career. Go back and play again. Don't you hear them applauding? This time you'll play better than ever!" Thus encouraged, the girl reappeared before her audience and now came off with flying colors. She had never met the great pianist before, but he marked a turning-point in her life, for he had helped her to change failure to victory.

Grainger's arrangements of Native American songs

Grainger made arrangements of several of Natalie Curtis' works (and Natalie herself also composed and performed original compositions based on both Native American and African American themes). Grainger's arrangements were:

From Songs and Tales of the Dark Continent, "Two Songs of Love": Iga'ma lo Ta'ndo (Zulu), Lu'mbo Igo Lu'do (Chindau), 1920;
From Negro Folk Songs (Hampton Series) "Negro Lullaby" for mixed voices (1934), for string orchestra (1939);
"Matachina Dance" from Memories of New Mexico (Spanish-Indian melodies from Santa Fe, New Mexico) (1925), employing the following musicians: Group 1 (on platform): oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, harmonium, harp, piano #1, 2 violins, viola #1, cello #1;

Group 2 (behind platform): flute, piano #2, viola #2, cello #2, bass;
"Lenten Chant (Crucifixion Hymn) and "Sangre de Cristo" ("Blood of Christ"), also from Memories of New Mexico (1925), using the following: Flute (also piccolo), oboe, clarinet, bassoon, 2 horns, timpani, bells (tubular, staff), metal marimba, harmonium, piano (4 hands)+ad lib., harp, strings.

Curtis' marriage and death

In 1916 Natalie moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. New Mexico was being promoted by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway as a cultural destination, and a colony of artists and writers was becoming established in Santa Fe. These included a number of independent women who, like Natalie, had fled restrictive lives in wealthy or upper middle class families on both coasts. Their stories, including Natalie's, are told by Lesley Poling-Kempes in Ladies of the Canyons (2015).

In Santa Fe, Natalie met and fell in love with modernist artist Paul Burlin, ten years younger than herself. They hoped to marry in her hometown of New York, with her family and her New York friends. But her mother was horrified. Not only was he younger than her, but he had no respectable profession such as banking or medicine, did not even know anyone in the Social Register, and besides he was Jewish! So they married in Santa Fe, and moved into a modest adobe cottage, where they lived happily.

After the First World War, the U.S. art world turned away from modernism, and in 1921 the Burlins moved to Paris for the sake of Paul's career. Natalie continued a career as a lecturer on American folk music. In a lecture during a conference at the Sorbonne, which she gave in French, she refuted the opinions expressed by the Harvard music professor Edward Burlingame Hill, who claimed that the music of the Indians and Negroes was not American folk music because those peoples were not truly American! She pointed out American Negroes were "good enough 'Americans' to die for American ideals in our wars" and had a long tradition of folk music and songs "that are the very voice of our South." She sang some Native American songs, and the European audience was, she later said, "electrified."

On the evening of October 23, 1921, after an afternoon at the theater, Natalie was getting off the bus in the pouring rain, when she was struck by a speeding automobile driven by a doctor going to a medical emergency. He stopped, but Natalie died at the hospital. She was just forty-five years old and was at the height of her career.

The right results for the wrong reasons

Natalie Curtis and Percy Grainger both subscribed to the "evolutionary" theory of civilization, according to which "primitive" people progressed from "childhood" to "civilized" adulthood. The fact that the peoples being studied had no writing, but improvised stories and songs, reusing phrases and episodes to fit the context was taken to show that these people were simply inspired by some kind of emotional instinct. The work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord with Serbo-Croatian and ancient Greek epic lay in the future. Those scholars laid the groundwork for a knowledge of the nature of oral transmission and composition (and recomposition) that uses formulaic language and formulaic melody to transmit a rich cultural heritage. The epic poems we know as the Iliad and Odyssey were handed down orally, with constant recomposition, for hundreds of years before a version of each was written down (the melodies that went with them are lost). Yet no one would accuse the ancient Greeks of being uncivilized! (The nature of ancient Greek epic is also treated in my own Traditional Themes and the Homeric Hymns, 1984.)

The research by Alex Haley into his African ancestor Kunta Kinte, and his meeting with the traditional griots, or bards, chronicled in his Roots,the Saga of an American Family, lay even further in the future. Haley emphasized the necessity of the musical accompaniment to aiding the bard in his composition.

Grainger may have been in some ways a racist, with his obsession with the "Nordic race," but his definition of "Nordic" seems to have been rather elastic, having as much to do with a general expansiveness of mood as with biology. For example, as Bruce Clunies Ross points out in "In Pursuit of Nordic Music" in Penelope Thwaites' The New Percy Grainger Companion, he considered the music of the Black jazz composer Duke Ellington and the Jewish George Gershwin to be "Nordic," but not that of Wagner!

But despite misunderstanding of the nature of the music and culture of the Native Americans and African Americans, Natalie Curtis, Charles Lummis, Grainger and others who collected and arranged their songs and folktales did preserve the melodies and stories of these peoples for them during a time when the dominant society was trying to stamp them out. The people, thankfully, are still here. Native children are being taught their own languages, and African Americans are researching their own roots. We are all richer for it.

"The Buffalo"

Beside the main door of the library at Hampton University, a bronze statue was erected, named "The Buffalo," depicting one of the members of the 367th Infantry of the 92nd Division during World War I, named "Buffalo Soldiers" after the Black cavalry who guarded Army forts of the American Southwest in the 19th century. (Ironically, their duty was to guard settlers against attacks by Apache Indians!) The statue is dedicated "In Memory of Natalie Curtis, Beloved by many of different races and colors, 1875-1921."

______________________________________________________________

I thank our own Barry Ould for first making me aware of the works of the fascinating figure of Natalie Curtis, and for providing me with the list of Grainger's arrangements of Curtis' melodies.

Percy Grainger House "Concert In The Parlor" Preview

Anne Ocone — Tue, 28 Jan 2020 22:25:06 GMT

by Vincent Lionti, viola, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and Board Member, International Percy Grainger Society

How would you like to go back in time (oh, about 100 years or so), sit in Percy Grainger's living room parlor and enjoy a performance of some of this great composer's music as well as that of a few of his famous friends and colleagues? If you are intrigued by this idea, I cordially invite you to 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York, for a concert that pianist Richard Masters and I will be giving on Sunday, May 3, 2020 at 2:00pm. You'll hear and see the same piano and harmonium that Percy played and composed on. You'll sit among the same furniture, pictures on the wall and furnishings that adorned Percy and his wife Ella's humble home during their lifetime. You'll see the Tiffany stained glass windows, the tasseled Victorian lampshades and the chin-up bar that hangs in the entrance foyer. House concerts were a very important facet of Percy's music-making, where he could try out new compositions in front of family and friends before publishing and performing them around the world.

The complete program is as follows:

GRAINGER The Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol

GRAINGER Youthful Rapture

YORK BOWEN Phantasy, opus 54 (1918)

ARNOLD BAX Piano Sonata in E-flat major (1921)

FREDERICK DELIUS Violin Sonata No. 2 (1923) arranged for Viola by Lionel Tertis

GRAINGER Molly on the Shore (transcribed by Lionel Tertis, notated and edited by R. Masters)

York Bowen's musical career spanned more than fifty years during which time he wrote over 160 works. As well as being a pianist and composer, Bowen was a talented conductor, organist, violist and horn player. Despite achieving considerable success during his lifetime, many of the composer's works remained unpublished and unperformed until after his death in 1961, the same year as Percy Grainger's death. In his book Grainger on Music, Percy writes of hearing a performance in Stockholm of "...the English composer York Bowen's melodious and effective Second Piano Concerto..."

Sir Arnold Bax, born a year after Grainger, was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. Lewis Foreman has written that some "music of Bax exhibits an unexpected resemblance to Percy Grainger at his most energetic."

Percy Grainger met Frederick Delius in London, April 1907, probably at the home of the painter John Singer Sargent; the two met and exchanged music. Upon looking at Grainger’s setting of the folksong Brigg Fair (1906), Delius declared that their harmonies were identical! The next year, Delius wrote his orchestral rhapsody Brigg Fair, and dedicated it to Grainger. In his 1952 essay on Delius, Grainger noted that Delius "…did not so much create new ideas and idioms as respond exquisitely to those brought to him…”

Please join us for a brief journey back in time at the Percy Grainger House on May 3, 2020 at 2:00pm! A reception follows the concert.

Tickets will be available online starting March 5th, 2020. The Percy Grainger House is located at 7 Cromwell Place in White Plains, New York, 10601. Parking is available along the street as well as in the municipal parking garage located directly opposite the house.

Grainger Society Stands with Australia

Susan Colson — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 17:55:11 GMT

Fire on any scale was a concern to Percy Grainger. In fact, he was so concerted about it and its devastating effects he had two fire proof rooms installed in his basement.

The devastating wild fires in eastern Australia would have been of grave concern to Grainger. He would have certainly been one of the first to support his homeland and step up to help. He was known for his generosity, establishing a scholarship in his mother's name at University of Adelaide and playing concerts for the US Red Cross, are just two examples among many of his generosity and support for community.

In the spirit of his concern and lifelong support of Australia, the International Percy Grainger Society is supporting the Australian Red Cross, Melbourne, in its efforts to comfort and support those how have lost homes and the volunteers that are fighting the fires. Please click here to join us in our support.

GRAINGER THE MUSIC ARRANGER

Anne Ocone — Tue, 31 Dec 2019 19:01:22 GMT

by Barry Peter Ould. In the impressive roll-call of music arrangers throughout twentieth-century music, no musician looms as large in this field as the composer/pianist, Percy Aldridge Grainger. His numerous arrangements of works by other composers, as well as arrangements of his original and folk-music settings, present a body of work which is perhaps unique in the annals of music history. Grainger’s musical interests covered a wide spectrum from medieval polyphony to the twentieth-century, which culminated in his own early experiments in producing electronic music on ‘free music’ machines.

Grainger’s development as an arranger can be roughly divided into three periods. His earliest work as an arranger of traditional music can be dated to 1898. when he took the song ‘Willow Willow’ from William Chappell’s ‘Old English Music’ and wrote a new accompaniment to the existing melody. This was soon followed by 25 traditional melodies from Augener’s ‘Minstrelsy of England’ all with new accompaniments by the 16-year-old Grainger. In 1900, during a visit to West Argyllshire in Scotland, the young Grainger was heavily influenced by what he saw and heard and this was to have a profound effect on the music he produced thereafter.

His next set of arrangements was 12 songs from the Scottish collection ‘Songs of the North’, for which he wrote new piano accompaniments. Another two pieces from the same collection were arranged for a cappella voices, and it is in these settings that the beginnings of Grainger’s unique harmonic style can be heard. Grainger continued to make new settings of existing source material more or less up until he embarked on collecting traditional folk songs. The years leading up to this important phase of his life were filled with an insatiable appetite for work.

His first public recital as a pianist took place in 1901, but he was also very busy playing at private functions. It was during these ‘At Homes’ recitals that Grainger came into contact with many of the leading musicians and composers of the day. These early years in London saw the composition of his paraphrase transcription of Tchaikovsky’s ‘Flower Waltz’, his first venture into that particular art form and piano transcriptions of 4 Irish Dances by his friend and mentor, Charles Villiers Stanford. This would in turn lead to a series of piano transcriptions on pieces he particularly adored and thus securing him a position amongst the ranks of composer-pianists who were all attracted to this genre.

It was also during this period that Grainger met for the first time, his musical hero, Edvard Grieg. He had long been a fervent admirer of the Norwegian’s music. While still a boy in Australia, he had come under the spell of Grieg’s piano music, taught to him by his mother, Rose. His earliest orchestral arrangements were of three of Grieg’s ‘Lyric Pieces’ from op. 12. scored in July 1898, which predated his first song arrangement of ‘Willow, Willow’ by some 4 months. In 1902, during his stay at Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, Grainger penned perhaps his most famous arrangement. It was his choral setting of the ‘Irish Tune from County Derry’ which has in latter years been wrongly attributed the title of ‘Danny Boy’. This sumptuous melody was to be arranged in many different ways during Grainger’s lifetime, but the first published edition of his ‘elastic’ scoring concept was a highly chromatic version of the tune.

In 1904, a meeting with Lucy Broadwood inspired Grainger to start collecting folk songs in the field. The material he collected between 1905 and 1909 would become his new source of inspiration, leading to the creation of one of his major musical achievements: the composition of the series ‘British Folk Music Settings’, which forms the largest collection of pieces among the generic headings he gave to his compositions. The folk songs he collected were mainly from Lincolnshire and Gloucestershire, but he also notated a number of sea chanties from John Perring and Charles Rosher, a deep sea fisherman and retired sailor respectively. It was from Rosher that he collected ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor’ used to great effect in his ‘Scotch Strathspey and Reel’. Perring provided ‘Shallow Brown’, perhaps one of Grainger’s greatest settings. Grainger also visited Denmark where he undertook several expeditions to collect material, the last being in 1922. Again, the songs he collected in Denmark would be used in a series of compositions entitled ‘Danish Folk-Music Settings’ of which his ‘Danish Folk-Music Suite’ for orchestra is the crowning achievement.

A series of eight concerts between 1912-1913, organised and sponsored by Henry Balfour Gardiner, a fellow student at Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt, presented Grainger with an opportunity to present some of his choral and orchestral arrangements for the first time. At the first of these concerts, a setting of a Faeroese dance folk song ‘Father and Daughter’, with guitar ensemble was a huge success. It brought Cecil Forsyth’s attention to Grainger’s unique scoring for guitars which he later used in his book on orchestration. The fifth concert included one of Grainger’s earliest orchestral settings from folk music sources, namely ‘Passacaglia on Green Bushes’.

A publishing deal with Schott and Co. was secured in 1911 and, after the success of a handful of popular pieces including ‘Shepherd’s Hey’, Grainger was encouraged to make piano arrangements of them to widen their popularity. Thus the process of transcribing his own pieces began. Whilst Grainger’s original piano works are almost without exception transcriptions (the majority of his piano versions were made after their original instrumental or orchestral scores were composed), it is in the thirty or so transcriptions of other composers’ music that his originality as a composer for the piano shines forth.

After this period Grainger and his mother departed for the United States. This third phase was to be the most extended. As his ideas for new works were drying up, especially so after his mother’s death in 1922, Grainger undertook the constant rearranging of previous compositions. A brief period in the United States Army as bandsman gave him the opportunity of writing for the military band. It was during this time that he arranged a number of his popular pieces for band. During his London years he had acquired a thorough knowledge of wind instruments, augmented by his time as bandsman, and this would prove invaluable when he came to write such masterpieces as ‘A Lincolnshire Posy’. However, the anonymity of army life however did not last long and it was soon discovered that his true talents lay as a concert pianist. In 1918, he was coaxed into giving a piano recital in aid of War Bonds. For this recital he dished up the piece to which his name would be inextricably linked with for the remainder of his life. The tune had been given to him ten years earlier by Cecil Sharp who had collected it from traditional sources and his arrangement of ‘Country Gardens’ would provide Grainger with an income for life.

After his time in the United States Army he resumed work as a concert pianist and his vigorous nature never allow him to rest. Grainger’s remaining years in the United States were oriented towards education, and a series of teaching posts were made available to him. This provided him with the opportunity to make arrangements of pieces for multiple pianos so that his piano students would be able to play alongside him and thus accustom themselves to playing in an ensemble. For the more gifted pupils, he made special two-piano arrangements of some of his original works and folk music settings.

It was at the Chicago Music College beginning in the summer of 1919, that the two first numbers of his ‘Free Settings of Favourite Melodies’ were written out. The ‘Hornpipe’ from Handel’s ‘Water Music’, however, appears to have been thought out earlier than this. It is a straightforward treatment of the original melody, though technically more demanding than it sounds. The second, Brahms’s ‘Wiegenlied’ (‘Cradle Song’) op. 49 no. 4, is a contemplative study characterised by much arpeggiation. The third piece in the series is a transcription of the song ‘Nell’ op. 18 no. 1 by Fauré. Grainger’s filigree treatment of the melody was made in the February of the same year in which Fauré died. The transcription of one of Fauré’s most poignant love songs, ‘Après une rêve’ op. 7 no. 1 followed in 1939. In the twilight years of Grainger’s life, although frail, he would often be heard playing these two Fauré melodies. Before 1920, work commenced on ‘Ramble on Love’ with the full title Ramble on the Love-duet in the Opera ‘The Rose-Bearer’ [Der Rosenkavalier] FSFM No. 4. But it was his mother’s suicide in 1922 that drove Grainger to complete this most elaborate of all his piano paraphrases, with her name obliquely enshrined in the title.

For the Chicago Music College’ summer school in 1928, Grainger made the first of his impressive transcriptions for percussion ensemble of Debussy’s ‘Pagodes’ (Estampes) whom Grainger had first met during his years in London. In 1932, Grainger was appointed associate professor and chairman of the music department at New York University and, through the auspices of Gustave Reese, Grainger was introduced to a recording of medieval music by the English musicologist, Dom Anselm Hughes. This experience was to bring Grainger’s attention to a body of music which would preoccupy him for the remainder of his life. His work on arranging and trying to popularise this music lead to the publication of a series of pieces entitled ‘English Gothic Music’.

In the following years whilst visiting his homeland, Grainger made a series of transcriptions from recordings of ethnic music from the Pacific regions and the harmonisation of a Chinese tune, ‘Beautiful Fresh Flower’, which he had read about in A Theory of Evolving Tonality by the American musicologist, composer, organist and conductor Joseph Yasser. The melody of ‘Beautiful Fresh Flower’ was also used by Puccini in his opera Turandot.

From 1930 onwards Grainger began lecturing and teaching at the National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, and for these annual events he turned his attention to making many arrangements of works by different composers, among whom J. S. Bach took a central role. At the same time, he began a series of masterly arrangements under the heading ‘Chosen Gems for Winds’ including works by Josquin, de Cabezon, William Lawes and Eugene Goosens as well as pieces made available to him from his collaboration with Dom Anselm Hughes. A similar set of arrangements for strings was also undertaken, and many of these works were performed during the concerts Grainger organised at the Interlochen summer music schools. For his final concert in the summer of 1944, he made a transcription of Ravel’s ‘La Vallée des Cloches’ for tuneful percussion and strings. This was his second transcription of a Ravel piano work. In 1934, he had transcribed ‘Le Gibet’ for piano and marimbas, but the score has never come to light and is presumed lost.

Such is Grainger’s breadth and vision that if for some strange reason all music apart from Grainger’s arrangements were to disappear, we would be left with a body of work which would give us a fundamental understanding of the development of music from different cultures throughout the ages. It is unfortunate that Grainger’s reputation as a composer is largely based on a handful of popular piano arrangements, while the bulk of his inventive and highly individual settings of folk-music, together with his arrangements of a wider gamut of music from all periods, and his own original compositions, for the most part go unperformed and unheard. The multifaceted genius of Grainger the music arranger has yet to be fully appreciated.

BERNARD HERRMANN REVISITED

Anne Ocone — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 17:57:00 GMT

Bernard Herrmann as he appeared in the Hitchcock motion picture classic “The Man Who Knew Too Much”

By Dana Paul Perna. It will come as no surprise to this readership that Bernard Herrmann is included amidst a shared appreciation among Grainger enthusiasts. The person to whom he was said to have once stated “Grainger changed my life” (quoted as per John Bird to me in a personal conversation), as well as “Grainger was my only true teacher”, how could he not rank high among those who could tout having been artistically nurtured by the Thunda-from-Down-Unda? Among the recordings Herrmann had planned to make had his sudden death not intervened, was one to have been devoted to Grainger in all his tuneful percussion richness and imagination. It came to pass in the hands of another conductor, but one only wishes we could have heard Herrmann bring his own original concepts and vision to the endeavor, especially if it were to have become one of his London Phase 4 discs, whereby all of it would have been captured on tape by way of that legendary audio engineer extraordinaire, Arthur Lilley.

Without any ego attached to any of what I am about to author, in 1986, I wrote an article about - and titled - BERNARD HERRMANN - for the Grainger Society Journal, as linked here for your reading pleasure and enjoyment. Greatest examples of the Journalistic Arts? Hardly, but my intention was related in a similar mode to those of my same intentions with regard to Grainger. During this period, in a pre-YouTube, Spotfly, TCM, Social Media, TicToc - what have you - World that it was, when I were to mention Herrmann, or Grainger, or Moross even to “intelligent musicians” - and, may I add, pianists, specifically with regard to Grainger - they would look at me as if I had four eyeballs - or any other BALLS (which it took, believe me) to express such well-warranted admiration with respect to either of them. Pianists, as I was to discover, were particularly clueless in terms of Grainger’s output for their instrument. Like Percy, there was almost nothing in relation to there being any presence of Herrmann, even during his 75th birthday year that 1986 marked. It was my feeling that Percy would not have minded having devoted space within a journal he was named for to expose a spotlight on one among his more - if not the MOST - illustrious of students.

It was Grainger who encouraged the young musician, as Jerome Moross shared with me while expressing his similar reaction to Grainger as his informal teacher. (Moross was not “enrolled” in Percy’s NYU class - Benny, however, was.) As Moross reflected: “To Grainger, there were two kinds of people; those who were interested in Music, and those who were not. If you were ‘not’, he had no interest in you. If you “did”, like Benny and I, class began after ‘class’ had ended.” Who else but Grainger would, not only talk about Early Music in depth and specificity - at a time when that was almost unheard of - but, actually bring in to class recorders, shawms, and even a serpent, in addition to playing these instruments as demonstration to the class, sometimes with his wife Ella in tow, while dressed in whatever was left of his World War I doughboy uniform, as Moross stated, “looking more like a Hobo than the other formally attired professors we were accustomed to.” (It should be noted that Herrmann later employed a Serpent to underscore a tarantula for his score to the motion picture “White Witch Doctor.”) He also expressed his admiration for Grainger’s effusive approach to music, his expansive knowledge of the subject, and his unorthodox approach to teaching it that allowed Herrmann, Moross and others, to look at music in a more open-minded manner. (It remains to be noted that Herrmann’s other teacher at NYU was Philip James, who, among other things was the first music director of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra that he co-founded in 1922.)

In terms of the “after class” Moross mentioned, as he continued, “No music subject was off limits! He never treated us like ‘youngsters’; he always treated us like equals - just young ones. Benny was like a sponge then” adding that Grainger was especially pleased that Herrmann was so deeply interested in, enthralled and inspired by the British composers, several of whom Percy knew, or had known personally. Particular attention must be paid to their mutual admiration for Frederick Delius, stories about whom Grainger imparted to his younger colleagues. It is no wonder why some of Herrmann’s earliest efforts reflect and possess a certain “Delian Aura” about them, such as his early concert masterpiece “Aubade”, the title to which he later changed to “Silent Noon” after the Rossetti poem of the same name: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCAK_FogZS0 ….and, yes, Herrmann was present when Grainger invited Duke Ellington to visit the NYU campus, calling Moross to “GET YOUR ASS DOWN HERE IMMEDIATELY!” since he did not want his DeWitt Clinton High School classmate to miss out on such a history-making event.

Herrmann came to know the who’s who among his contemporaries, largely due to his participation in the Young Composer’s Group, but on his desire to do so as well. Among those whom he came to know during this early period included Copland, Siegmeister, Gould, George Gershwin, Robert Russell Bennett, Oscar Levant, Brandt, Ives, Cowell (who served as his first publisher), Still, Varèse, Vernon Duke, Charles Seeger among numerous others. Grainger participated (performing “Green Bushes”) on Herrmann’s first concert of the New Chamber Orchestra of New York on May 17, 1933, an orchestra that Herrmann formed at age twenty-one! - during the Great Depression when no one had $$$$$. How crazy is that? You can read a letter Benny wrote to Henry Cowell (a musician also associated with Grainger) the day after the concert by going to: http://www.bernardherrmann.org/articles/a-letter-to-henry-cowell/ By the time he assumed a staff conductor’s position for the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1934, confidence would never be a characteristic Herrmann would ever be accused of NOT possessing. Two years later, he was appointed music director of their Columbia Symphony Orchestra, forging a name for himself within the medium of Radio, pre-dating his future work in motion pictures, television and recordings.

To state that “the rest is history” would prove an understatement.

Turning back to my previous 1986 article, what has changed since? When there were only a handful of recordings of Herrmann’s concert and chamber works on the market, including one devoted to his opera “Wuthering Heights”, these were mainly the products of Herrmann himself, either as performed under his baton, or under his supervision. Even these had become hard to come by. When YouTube began, Herrmann was not particularly present, nor was Grainger, for that matter, either. Over time, what has changed (as it has for Grainger), in a huge way is that Herrmann is very much present now. Early in TCM’s broadcasting of films that he scored, for example, mention of his contribution to their end result, unless it was one of his Hitchcock gems, was never included, which is not the case any longer. That his concert titles have been taken up in contemporary times, including the fact that his “Symphony” was finally given a long-overdue performance in Carnegie Hall (e.g. as performed by The Orchestra Now, conducted by Leon Botstein that occurred on Friday, November 3, 2017 at 7:30 pm in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage), has proven that those of us who knew of this Master’s hand would find-an-audience became confirmed. New recordings have been produced, and YouTube is bursting with Herrmannism to the extreme….and that’s just for starters. Even a selection of his “sketches” have been converted, in several instances, by way of digital representation over that medium, one that had not existed during Benny’s lifetime. There is even the online Bernard Herrmann Society website that established the Maestro with a Social Media presence he could never have imagined. Check it out for yourself by going to: http://www.bernardherrmann.org/ .

Orchestras that once openly looked “down” on his music are programming it - and what a list that is becoming, too. Los Angeles Philharmonic - an orchestra Herrmann was “forbidden” to conduct nor to perform his music - released one commercially made CD devoted to Herrmann’s film music under Esa-Pekka Salonen’s direction, while they have performed some of his titles in concert since; in fact, during the inaugural week of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, selections by him were included among those historic festivities, and eventual telecast.

The New York Philharmonic performed Herrmann under the baton of no less than John Williams, who had also programmed Benny’s work years earlier while he was music director of the Boston Pops. Of course, Herrmann is part of their history, having received the world premiere of his “Moby Dick” under the baton of then music director, (pre-Sir) John Barbirolli.

photo of Bernard Herrmann discussing his score to MOBY DICK with conductor, John Barbirolli, then music director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra

More recently, the New York Philharmonic’s string section (with mutes!) performed Herrmann’s score for “Psycho” in a “live” performance while the Hitchcock classic was being screened. His “Psycho Suite”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQwzJ6VvUD0 (released under the title “Psycho (a Narrative for Orchestra)” on Benny’s recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBkuUc6Pvek) has practically become a concert staple for Halloween, or “Thriller”-themed concerts. In Bordeaux, France, a great deal of attention was paid to Herrmann over three events in which HE was the featured subject. The first concert’s audio was cybercast, meaning that I was able to listen to it while it happened - this truly supreme presentation: Thursday 7th and Friday 8th of March 2019 at 20hr – Concert “Bernard Herrmann – The Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema”. The Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine (ONBA) conducted by David Charles Abell, and with soprano Ana Maria Labin and the pianist Tanguy de Williencourt, will offer a program that will include music from the movies Psycho, Fahrenheit 451, Citizen Kane, The Bride Wore Black, Hangover Square, Obsession, The Ghost and Mrs Muir and North by Northwest. Yet, two more events occurred during the same week, these: 1) Monday 11th of March at 20h – Music Conference “Bernard Herrmann – His life and his great scores” Thierry Jousse, film critic and French director, will speak about the life of Bernard Hermann and his great scores written for the cinema, accompanied by Jean-Michel Bernard, pianist and composer, who will musically illustrate this tribute to the great Maestro; 2) Thursday 14th & Friday 15th at 20h – Movie in concert “Vertigo” The Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine (ONBA) conducted by Ernst Van Tiel will perform live Bernard Hermann’s soundtrack for the movie “Vertigo” (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

…and that does not even scratch the surface in any way, shape, or form! In terms of his work just for the cinema alone - excluding everything else, which is quite an “else” to exclude!!! - he has become one of the most revered, studied and influential figures to have ever graced the medium. For that reason, he can now be considered to rank among the most important composers to ever have been born on the soil of the United States of America, period.

To fail on my own side of the coin would prove inexcusable, therefore, I prepared two episodes of my cyber-radio program devoted to Herrmann’s work, the first providing an overview of his life and career: http://mixlr.com/moog1-radio/showreel/dpp-17/ It additionally pleases me to inform readers that, years ago, I had the great privilege of “crashing” the concert and first recording session in Phoenix, Arizona devoted to Herrmann’s previously alluded to “Symphony.” (While Herrmann had recorded it, it had not been recorded in a digital form of a later vintage.) One of my fondest memories was when the trumpet player entered the sound room to check in. His T-Shirt read “I Think Before I Clam.” How reassuring!?!?!? To myself, I immediately thought, what WOULD Benny have exclaimed if he had seen that? True, he could have laughed out-loud, but, more likely, given how serious he was when it came to all matters where and when WORK was involved, I could well imagine him having yelled out:

“HEY, THAT’S DISRESPECTFUL! EITHER TAKE THAT SHIRT OFF, OR GET THE HELL OUT!”

Oh, yes, and let’s not forget that Benny has even served as postage:

To our great fortune, Herrmann’s contributions carry on in the 21st Century, perhaps even more musically relevant than ever. I have even heard a small combo jazz quartet - YES, a JAZZ QUARTET !!! - play his theme to “Taxi Driver” in a manner that the other standards were handled on the same gig. Too HIP for the room? You better believe it, Daddy-O. In a different version by a different artist, just to show you what I mean, DIGGETH - as BENNY’s tune ROCKS THE HOUSE ANEW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSMmuejLMFI Absolutely 100% delicious - just as if Travis had stopped the meter long enough to dig into a New York Pastrami-on-Rye from Katz’s!

In the end, what else can be learned by any of this? Whether it was Grainger, or Herrmann, or Moross, or Germaine Tailleferre, or Cyril Scott….. or any among a number of composers one feels has been neglected, vindication - not just that it comes, but when it comes - is always such a wonderful thing, indeed!!!!

Postscript

Upon completing this article, some additional news came my way, thereby making the necessity for this much-needed POSTSCRIPT. A bit macabre though it may be, yet remembering that Bernard Herrmann did compose a “Concerto Macabre” (for piano and orchestra), this latest addition, therefore, will seem wholly appropriate as you read on.

Upon learning that Herrmann was buried some 25 minutes from where I lived, I decided that it was only fitting for me to pay my respects by visiting his grave, which I did on two attempts. The first attempt became a wash-out, while attempt number two, fortunately aided by a groundskeeper, could not have gone any better. The weather was perfect - sunny and bright, not too warm, the air was crisp, the location appropriately quiet, if not a bit eerie, too (e.g. no one was there other than the groundskeeper [who walked away] and me). At left, how the site appeared at that time.

I know what you are thinking, but, yes, as truly simple and direct as a demarkation could get. You would never suspect that this is the resting place for one of the Masters given its understatement. (The dot at the top left indicates that this site is to be “perpetually cared-for”, which forms, in part, the basis for this “postscript.”) In paying my respects, I included mention of Percy Grainger, Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, Jerome Moross, and Edgard Varèse within my salutation (why not?), plus all the members of any-and-all the Percy Grainger Societies, John Bird, Barry Peter Ould, William Grant Still and Kevin Scott….before adding my final gesture; the reason for this pilgrimage in the first place.

Some of you will know that Herrmann’s first wife was the renowned writer, Lucille Fletcher, among whose most famous works remains “Sorry, Wrong Number” having aired as a chilling radio drama in 1943 that starred Agnes Moorehead, later having been turned into the motion picture classic that starred Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster (the latter having been a classmate of Herrmann’s [and Jerome Moross, too] at DeWitt Clinton High School in New York.) Just to add this tiny touch of color onto the fabric, Ms. Fletcher’s drama formed the basis for the final stage work Jerome Moross (Benny’s classmate and childhood friend) was to complete. He was at work on it - its manuscript sitting in its working stages on his piano - when I visited Moross at his New York apartment. At right, poster for the Motion Picture release of "SORRY, WRONG NUMBER"; the cinematic adaption of Lucille Fletcher's historic radio drama.

Upon their marriage, the couple spent their Honeymoon at the Grand Canyon. As part of my visit to that same Natural Wonder, I picked up a piece of Arizona red rock, both as a souvenir, and as a just-in-case I were to ever visit Herrmann’s resting place (that’s truth, by the way!!!) The time had come with regard to that well intended visitation as I placed, as is customary, this most appropriate chunk of Arizona red rock on the top right of his gravestone. Two other stones (of a more local variety) had already been placed there making me realize that Benny had not been forgotten. This company of stones looked somehow very cozy together as the luminescent sunlight fully illuminated them. Having occurred on a late Tuesday morning, with my pilgrimage thus completed, I went to lunch at Rachel’s Café in Syosset before returning home.

While preparing this article, I planned to locate photos to enhance some of my verbiage with pictures. Among them included Benny’s resting place. Not that I was planning to use any of them, I noticed that, when I had paid-my-respects, it was just his stone and a shroud created out of a low-resting bush - exactly like all the others in the row. Since that time, it would appear that his family has stepped in, having added an additional stone at the foot of it.

You can almost consider it to be a “coda”; an appropriate form of expression with which to pay homage to one of the most remarkable figures Music has ever known. Bernard Herrmann's gravesite as it appears now

Visit to the Grainger House

Anne Ocone — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 17:46:33 GMT

by Callum McLachlan. For a young pianist, Grainger’s music initially seems extremely daunting on the page. It is immediately recognizable and so overwhelmingly detailed in terms of specifics (pedaling, voicing, dynamics and articulation) that the demands at times seem impossible. The look on the page contrasts dramatically with the sound in the concert hall or on recordings, as the music has a savage directness, an immediacy and power that makes its impact seem inevitable, natural and universal. Grainger has a huge range, from touching original works filled with wonderful melodies and gorgeously rich harmonies, to vibrant reworkings of folk songs and remarkable arrangements of works of other composers, from Bach, through Faure and Tchaikovsky to Gershwin and Strauss. The one unifying factor that runs through the variety of styles in his music is that it always speaks to the heart with directness and urgent conviction.

In April I was privileged to be invited by the esteemed pianist Sandro Russo to give a recital in the Scarsdale Concert Series which included an all-Grainger second half of 50 minutes.

Grainger’s White Plains Home was only a half hour drive and Sandro kindly arranged for me to visit the house. What an experience it was to venture into the very same rooms that the great composer-pianist had frequented over fifty years earlier! To see his piano, to walk around and soak up the ambience was to relive history: The house seems to have been left exactly as it had been when Grainger was last there. It was touching to see his old concert attire still there in the wardrobe! However, the most impacting memory of this trip was being afforded the opportunity to play Grainger’s upright Piano. I chose ‘To a Nordic Princess’ and ‘Bridal Lullaby’, and although the Piano was naturally out of tune, it had a wonderful charm, and the middle pedal was in fantastic condition! It was a profoundly moving, inspirational and memorable experience, and it made a lasting impression on me - one that I will cherish for the rest of my life.

Note from IPGS: We are grateful to this month's guest blogger Callum McLachlan. Callum, age 19, is an internationally known pianist and musician. After attending Chetham's School of Music, Manchester, UK, for seven years and winning all the major prizes there, he began studying in Salzburg at the Mozarteum in 2018. He has performed solo recitals in New York, Spain, Poland and Austria, as well as throughout the UK. We thank him for his perspective and wish him the best in his musical pursuits.

The influence of Walt Whitman

Anne Ocone — Sun, 21 Jul 2019 17:15:27 GMT

by Dana Paul Perna. 2019 marks the Bicentennial of WALT WHITMAN’s birth. Often referred to as “The Poet of Democracy,” his poetry has incentivized, inspired and influenced all manner of artists across the board in every corner of the world where his words have taken root to resonate. Poets, painters, composers, musicians, writers, actors, visual artists, world leaders….you name it, have placed his writings to register among those most celebrated by any of those authored in the English language.

Recently, a framed portrait of Walt Whitman was unearthed in the basement of Percy Grainger’s White Plains home. This should come as no surprise when one realizes how valued the Grainger’s found Whitman’s words. Among the gifts Percy presented to Ella when he proposed was a copy of “Leaves of Grass”, which he inscribed to her - paraphrasing as I will, something to the effect of “Let us discover the ‘Poet of Democracy’ together.”

If we limit Whitman’s influence simply to composers who have turned to Whitman, either for texts for their works, be them songs, or for more extended compositions of the (soloist-and-)chorus-with-orchestra variety, or for instrumental works drawn from them, it represents a stellar list of masters that include Holst, Vaughan Williams, Adams, Delius, Neely Bruce, Coghill, Siegmeister, Carpenter, Converse, Rorem, Hoiby, Schonthal, Weill, Hanson….and that does not even represent a beginning point for the innumerable creations that have musically flowed forth.

To this point, and for those readers who may be interested, save the date of 3 August 2019. Beginning at 8:00 pm - unless you arrive early when a Pre-Concert lecture is set to commence at 7:15 pm - an outdoor concert in celebration of Walt Whitman’s Bicentennial has been scheduled. The location will be at Heckscher Park, Huntington, Long Island, New York (not far from Whitman’s actual birthplace) and will include the World Premiere performance of A Walt Whitman Reader by Dana Paul Perna (Recording Secretary of Percy Grainger America, and the International Percy Grainger Society), to be performed by acclaimed bass-baritone, Robert Osborne, accompanied by renowned pianist, Jeffrey Biegel. (It is suggested that any interested attendees bring something to sit upon, and that hydration is also recommended. Please note that weather conditions can neither be determined, nor controlled.) Here is a link regarding that event:

http://www.huntingtonarts.org/event/huntington-summer-arts-festival-l-i-orchestra-with-david-stewart-wiley-and-jeffrey-biegel/?fbclid=IwAR2Q6d1ZCrNH5JOUTabqA-fHNrzWJcpaGyjd2CVSlS9v2AxmU6SxghUehtk

In terms of Percy Grainger more directly and specifically, he also numbers upon the many who turned to Whitman as inspiration for his music, leading Percy to have composed one of his most significant compositions, namely MARCHING SONG OF DEMOCRACY. For those who may wish to, or are able to attend, on this year’s “Last Night of the Proms” (e.g. Proms 75), the BBC Singers, Symphony Chorus and Orchestra, to be conducted by Sakari Oramo will be performing that Grainger masterpiece on that occasion (in this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44eizaByCS4). Scheduled to occur on 14 September 2019 at 19:15 (e.g. 7:15 pm), here is a link that will provide you with further information: https://www.bbc.co.uk/events/ezcd2m

…..but, the final words should come from Walt Whitman, as (allegedly) heard by way of this 1890 cylinder recording, reciting a passage from his poem “America”: WALT WHITMAN 1890.mp3

The Grainger House: A Delightful Challenge

Susan Colson — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 15:15:52 GMT

by Susan Edwards Colson

In addition to the Grainger music and legacy, there is the house itself. The Percy Grainger House, 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, is a stunning time capsule. It is an increasingly popular tourist destination, with the certainty of an immersive visit to a bygone era for delighted visitors. It is also a hold out, a 19th century house left standing in a rapidly modernizing, urban neighborhood.

The house is filled with Percy’s things and Ella’s things too, in dusty choc-a-block stacks. Visitors comment on Percy’s extreme organization of scores and letters, box after box, and Ella’s softer approach to her own poems and sketches, tied together with a pink ribbon or two. Going through a closet now with several years of sorting experience, I feel an intuitive sense of who might have packed what when. Who cherished it, then eventually forgot it? Ella, probably. Who noticed it late in life, then, touched by the memory, added a note of explanation? Ella, certainly. Who deemed it important enough to be packed away wrapped in the October 5, 1930 New York Times edition announcing that CBS had broadcast the New York Philharmonic live over the radio for the very first time that day? Percy, no doubt.

Preservation of the house is truly important. The IPGS board of late lives and breathes the three R’s of historic houses: rehabilitation, restoration and reconstruction. Rehabilitation is our first challenge, balancing the need to update the house to meet changing uses while retaining the property's historic character. Restoration will dictate that we depict the Grainger House at a particular place in time, packing away evidence of other periods, to tell the Grainger story in an understandable way. Reconstruction will establish a coherent interpretation, item by item.

This is an enormous undertaking! We are grateful to those who have believed in us, invested in us, and coached us along the way. Early on, the Greater Hudson Heritage Network’s Needs Assessment Program sent site preservation experts to survey the collection. Their careful, thoughtful, recommendations initiated deep reflection and sent us in the right direction.

In 2015, the Museum Association of New York provided a grant that allowed the IPGS board to engage its long time members, friends and board to complete a Strategic Plan. This plan has guided the house reconstruction and helped shape our plans for a celebration of Percy Grainger’s 100th year in White Plains.

The Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services of New York provided an Archival Needs Assessment that thoroughly examined our program, identified and addressed specific needs, operational efficiencies, facility and storage concerns, and collection management issues. The assessment pinpointed problems, recommended solutions, set priorities, and helped guide the development of our archival program. Their follow-up 2018 grant allowed us to buy software to organize our collection, and a large scanner for documentation.

A Technical Assistance Grant (“TAG”) from the Preservation League of New York State allowed us to complete a building condition survey with the help of architect Joanne Tall of KamanTall Architects. The technical survey focuses on the windows and exterior doors providing essential information for stewardship of the house. Joanne’s thoughtful observations and helpful insights to the building structure will continue to inform the restoration plan for the entire house. There are serious considerations concerning the Percy Grainger House’s historic character as well as any intended use. She was also instructive about alterations needed to meet accessibility requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the concern of visual change to our historic building. (The Technical Assistance Grant Program is made possible by the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Generous additional support for this project has been provided by the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area.)

An essential, practical question for the IPGS board is: Will the building be used strictly to house the collection and limited to interpretive tours, or will it be given a new and expanded use? We hope that any such expansion can make full use of the historic house without compromising its historic character. We work to achieve this balance and make it so.

Percy Grainger in the Ozarks

Anne Ocone — Sun, 12 May 2019 15:58:20 GMT

by Cora Angier Sowa

Springdale Arkansas, in the heart of the Ozarks

In June, 2014, I had the good fortune to visit Springdale Arkansas, located in a lovely area of Northwestern Arkansas, deep in the Ozark Mountains. Springdale is best known as the headquarters of Tyson Foods; the headquarters of Walmart and of the J.B. Hunt trucking company are nearby. A few miles to the south is Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas. To the north, in southern Missouri, is Branson, known for its theme parks and tourist locations.

I was in Springdale June 10-15 for the convention of the National Railway Historical Society. We were guests of the Arkansas and Missouri Railroad, which is also headquartered in Springdale. The A&M is a short-line road, only 140 miles long, that is an important connector between the BNSF Railroad to the north, and the Union Pacific and Kansas City Southern Railroads to the south, on the Arkansas River. We spent most of our time going on rail excsursions, and took plenty of photographs, in a land where wooded hills and rocky cliffs are intersected by deep valleys. There is a saying that "It's not that the mountains are so high, but the valleys are so deep." This is true, for as the Ozark Plateau was uplifted by great geologic forces, streams continued to cut their way into the land. The scenery is beautiful, but it was not a place I expected to find Percy Grainger.

Percy Grainger's music in Springdale

The evening of June 13, there was a banquet, preceded by a social hour where we were entertained by a quartet of saxophone players. They turned out to be students from Springdale High School and their teacher, Daniel Hodge. They played a program of light music on a full range of sizes of saxophones (with Mr. Hodge switching from alto to soprano sax at one point in their performance). As they concluded their set, I asked if they ever played Percy Grainger. They do, big time! Mr. Hodge told me that they play, among other pieces, Handel in the Strand, Tune from County Derry, and Lincolnshire Posy. They have purchased a copy of our LP of the Lincolnshire songs recorded by Grainger, "Unto Brigg Fair," which they have in their library.

Mr Hodge and his students graciously posed for their picture, which you see above.

Grainger's music for wind band

I was pleased to find that The Springdale students and their teacher were so familiar with Grainger's music, so far from locations that we often think of in connection with Grainger. However, there are two reasons why this is not so surprising at all. One concerns Grainger's involvement with music for wind band, the other with his three-year residence in the Ozarks, from 1940 to 1943.

Grainger's compositions for wind band are among his most important works, valued by wind players everywhere. Timothy Reynish writes, in the chapter on "Music for Wind Band" in Penelope Thwaites' The New Percy Grainger Companion:

"Percy Grainger is undoubtedly the greatest composer in the past century to be involved in the wind band and its development. He is the only composer of stature to consider military bands the equal, if not the superior, in expressive potential to symphony orchestras (or as he described them 'bow-down-to-blend bands'). . . From his program note to Lincolnshire Posy (1939):
"Why this cold-shouldering of the wind band by most composers? Is the wind band — with its varied assortment of reeds (so much richer than the reeds of the symphony orchestra), its complete saxophone family that is found nowhere else . . . its army of brass (both wide-bore and narrow-bore) — not the equal of any medium ever conceived? As a vehicle of deeply emotional expression it seems to me unrivalled."

Grainger's years in Springfield, Missouri, 1940-1943

During World War II, Percy and Ella abandoned their home in White Plains and moved to Springfield, Missouri, a town in southeastern Missouri located on the Springfield Plateau of the Ozarks. It is home to several universities, including Missouri State University. The reasons for their move have been speculated on. The place was centrally located for the strenuous touring about the country that Grainger was engaged in at the time. It was also far from both coasts, where there were fears of an enemy invasion. While there are no accounts of Grainger giving any concerts or workshops in the immediate area of Springdale, he toured extensively in that general part of the country, including Little Rock, Arkansas (at the other end of the state), in Columbia, Missouri (where the University of Missouri is located), and an entire series of concerts in Oklahoma, the neighboring state. He also paid a visit to Branson, Missouri.

During their time in Springfield, the Graingers leased an apartment with a balcony on the third floor of the Wilshire Apartments, pictured below. In his journal he praises the scenery and atmosphere of the Ozarks, and in a letter to Ella in 1941 when she was out of town he says "How I love Springfield and our Missouri home! Glorious sunrise, of course, and the same balcony Missouri-Kansas breeze. Everything is choicely clean, tidy and sweet in this apartment . . . It is a rare love and art nest . . ."

Grainger liked the song "The Arkansas Traveler" and liked to play it. A catalog of "Grainger's Collection of Music by Other Composers" at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne lists a copy of an arrangement of the tune by Frank S. Kenyon, described as an "American country dance." And the Guide to the Pianist's Repertoire by Maurice Hinson lists among folk song adaptations by composer David Guion: "Arkansas Traveler: an old folk tune heard by Guion as a fiddle 'breakdown'; often performed by Percy Grainger." The most familiar words to the song are about a clever country man who makes a fool of a city slicker who acts in a patronizing way, but there are several sets of words, all different from each other. Like another Grainger favorite, "Tune From County Derry," better known by its most familiar words as "Danny Boy," the tune of "Arkansas Traveler" is an old melody. Both are older than any of the words that have been set to them, and their origins are lost in the mists of time.

Marissa Kyser's research on Grainger's Springfield years

Marissa Kyser, a graduate student at Missouri State University in Springfield, has done extensive research on Grainger's years in Missouri. A trumpet player herself, she has delved deeply into her subject in both Springfield and Melbourne, examining journals, letters, newspaper articles, financial records, and whatever other pieces of information can shed light on this too little known period of Grainger's life. Many tales and rumors have circulated in Springfield about Grainger's years in their city, and Ms. Kyser's work is to untangle these rumors and bring them to light.

Ms. Kyser will be giving a lecture at the Grainger House in White Plains on May 11 at 2:00 P.M. on Grainger's Springfield years. We invite all of you to come and hear what promises to be a fascinating talk.

Join us to hear Marissa Kyser speak on Grainger's Springfield years !

Date: May 11, 2019
Time: 2:00 P.M.
Location: 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York 10601
Donations gratefully accepted

Etude Magazine: Percy's SERIOUS Piano Lesson

Susan Colson — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 22:27:02 GMT

The Etude was an American print magazine published between October 1883 and 1957, roughly the lifetime of Percy Grainger. The magazine was published by Theodore Presser, the founder of the Music Teachers National Association.

The Etude was aimed at all musicians, from novices to serious professionals. It printed articles ranging from popular interests to more-involved musical subjects --history, literature, gossip, politics—and contained write-in advice columns about musical pedagogy in general. It also printed sheet music and discussions by famous pianists.

In November 1920, Percy Grainger contributed his notes on how to play Edvard Grieg’s Norwegian Bridal Procession, including discussion of “two salient point of modern pianism: (1) the sustaining pedal, (2) non-stretching fingering.” Find the full text of the article here.

James Francis Cooke, editor-in-chief from 1909 to 1949, added the phrase "Music Exalts Life!" to the magazine's masthead, and The Etude became a platform for Cooke's somewhat polemical editorials. This change in editorial policy may have finished it. But in many way, the magazine moved with the times and embraced current technology, unequivocally supporting the phonograph, radio, and eventually television, and, by the late 1930s, fully embracing jazz. It was a true reflection of the heyday of piano.

Grainger, ‘Blue-Eyed English’, and the Art of the Letter Writer

Anne Ocone — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 20:32:13 GMT

Paul Jackson. Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, and International Percy Grainger Society Board Member.

‘There is one thing I look down on new-timey folk for: their not being able to write A LONG LETTER.’¹So wrote Percy Grainger to his friend and fellow-musician Gustav Adolph Nelson in the summer of 1942. Among his many accomplishments – composer, pianist, conductor, writer, teacher, folk-music collector, artist, inventor – Grainger’s ability to write letters, often long letters, remains a relatively unexplored part of his life’s work. Ranging from the conversational and practical, to the ideological and autobiographical, Grainger’s letters form perhaps the largest part of his output – estimates range between 10,000-50,000 letters – and chronicle his personal and artistic life from his early years in Australia, through his formative studies in Germany from 1895-1901 and his maturation in Edwardian English concert society between 1901-1914, to his long life in America, his adopted home, from 1914 until his death in 1961. Grainger’s fame, firstly as an international concert pianist and then as a composer, opened the doors to acquaintances with composers, musicians, artists, poets, writers, folklorists, educators, society figures, royalty and even an American president. His letters detail his professional and personal activities, plotting the arc of his career, and also serve to chart the course of the development of his views on music, the creative artist, race, sex and language (among many other things). From the exuberance of his early writings, which burst forth with accounts of his voracious engagement with the world and his seminal encounters with a range of influences, through the mid years of detailed, perhaps even obsessive, self-documentation, to his old age, when an emotionally mellower Grainger enjoyed new-found recognition, the letters provide an essential insight to a thinker of distinction.

To date, only three volumes of letters have been published: The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901-14 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1985), the first and most significant presentation of Grainger’s letters from his years in London; The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914-1961 (Oxford University Press, 1994), 76 letters from a wide range of areas following the composer’s move to America; and Comrades in Art: The Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, 1957-61 (Toccata Press, 2010), correspondence between Grainger and the Scottish pianist and composer, Ronald Stevenson, covering the last four years of Grainger’s life.

Central to Grainger’s body of writing is the group of 33 letters² known as the ‘Round Letters’. Intended for posterity (as, indeed, was all of his output), these letters were copied and sent to fellow composers, friends, family and acquaintances periodically from 1942 until 1958, three years before his death. Grainger frequently wrote letters and articles whilst travelling by train or boat between concert engagements, often on headed hotel notepaper. As he took no other form of transport (he would not fly), such travelling could take several hours or, in the case of overseas trips, several weeks or months. Grainger used his time fruitfully on these trips, composing, attending to his business affairs, writing to friends, family and professional colleagues, and writing articles. He would generally write by hand, and then type up the draft, making several copies with his own, in-house, copying systems at White Plains. Grainger’s efforts to establish the Grainger Museum in 1938 as a study centre for Australian music meant that he not only lodged many of his letters there – a boon to modern researchers – but also asked letter recipients to send him back letters for which he had no copies (such requests were not always met with approval, particularly from ex-lovers!).

The Round Letters are also distinguished by their use of ‘Blue-Eyed English’ (also known as ‘Nordic English’ or ‘Rosy-Race-y English’), Grainger’s attempt to formulate a language which replaced words he thought of as having Latin and Greek roots with words of his own devising based on Anglo-Saxon terminology. The preface to The Love-Life of Helen and Paris, written in 1924 when he and his future wife Ella Ström were courting, sums up his thoughts on the matter:

The English stretches of this story are written (as well as I can) in “Nordic English”. I have always believed in the wish-for-ableness ((desirability)) of building up a mainly Anglo-saxon-Scandinavian kind of English in which all but the most un-do-withoutable ((indispensible)) of the French-begotten, Latin-begotten & Greek-begotten words should be side-stepped ((avoided)) & in which the bulk of the put-together ((compound)) words should be willfully & owned-up-to-ly ((admittedly)) hot-home-grown out of Nordic word-seeds. My nature-urge ((instinct)) tells me that speech (like tone-art ((music)) & all other arts) ought to be over-weighingly ((preponderantly)) a forth-showing ((manifestation)) of race, place & type, & that nothing is gained (at least from an artist’s mind-slant ((attitude))) by making speech a gathered-togetherness ((conglomeration)) of worn-out Europe-wide word-chains ((sentences)) such as “in commemoration of this illustrious anniversary”, “this involved situation demanded a readjustment of the entire machinery of representation”, & the like.

Such language not only reveals something of Grainger’s character – not least, his preoccupation with notions of race – but also frequently make for patterns of expression that capture particular ideas in a revealing way. Commenting on the Declaration by United Nations in 1942, Grainger writes that:

‘First of all, world-haps: I have always preached that world-peace (the one thing we all yearn for, of course) could only be brought about by team-work between the British World-Realm ((Empire)), America, Russia & China. And now this team-play (almost unthinkable tho it seemed only a short while ago) is fact-fully ((actually)) happening. I have always said that the mete-ment ((measurement)) of any theed’s ((nation’s)) clear-thinkingness is its understanding of the Russian out-try-th ((experiment)). I have always longed to see the whole English-speaking world at-oned. I have always longed to see the whole Rosy-Race-y ((Nordic)) world brought together in spirit. Now all these hopes are fulfilled. So I feel more at rest than I have for many years. [Feb 15-17, 1942].

Grainger’s hectic concert life is chronicled in some detail throughout the letters. Even in his sixties and seventies he toured throughout the US, performing at civic halls and high schools. His music enjoyed something of a renaissance during these years, and the frequent performances he took part in or attended gave him the opportunity to reflect on a lifetime of composing:

I think I wrote you in my last Round Letter that this season was proving a somewhat dull one for me, from my tone-wright’s ((composer’s)) angle. This dullness has somewhat lifted, toward the end of the season. The other day in Boston I heard Green Bushes & To a Nordic Princess very finely given – & I think highly of the last-named piece, as being truly string-&-wind-band ((orchestra))-minded. Ella & I have just come from Oberlin College, Ohio, where I gave Hillsong II (22 single winds), a stunningly played & sung group of English Gothic Music (13th to 17th year-hundreds), my seldom-done County Derry Air (which is the setting of Irish Tune from Co. Derry written in 1920 for sing-band ((chorus)), organ & band—a setting which has nothing in common with the 1902 setting. The 1920 setting has a Handel-like bredth & grandness about it) … So I have nothing to grumble about, just now, on the ground of non-forth-played-ness ((non-performance)). To hear Hillsong II (first scoring, 1907) is enough to at-rest-set me for some time. [May 17, 1944].

Whilst an uncharacteristically humorous Percy noted in 1958, after hearing a performance of the piano-only version of Random Round, that:

At Cincinnati I heard for the first time a properly worked out perform[ance] of my Random Round in the dish-up for 6 pianists at 2 pianos (the original form is 3 voices, 3 strings, 2 guitars, flute, xylophone, wooden Marimba, ukulele etc): 6 elderly ladies, all with immense backsides, romped away at terrific speed & quite note-perfect. The sound is utterly unlike anything else. [March 25, 1958] ³

On a more serious note, Grainger frequently makes the case that the creative artist’s works should be judged in the light of a full understanding of their whole life, that youthful output is every bit as valid as mature work, and that we hear music in the light of previous experience and earlier knowledge:

In dealing with an oversoul [genius] ⁴ we must, I feel, sense the truth of Goethe’s saw “Art is who-th” ((personality)). We listen to Meistersinger without forgetting that Wagner before it wrote the Ring & Tristan. If Wagner had done away with all his earlier works before writing Parsifal, we would listen to Parsifal in a poorer mood. When we listen to the Minuet of a Symphony we are still somewhat swayed by the soldierliness of the first movement; as we listen to the bustle of the last movement, we are still somewhat under the spell of the slow movement’s dream-world. Art cannot be sundered from its hap-lore ((history)) any more than can a tree from its roots. And the greater the oversoul, the truer this is of his art; for we judge him by his whole art-life & by the breadth of his lifelong intake. [May 17, 1944].

The Round Letters – all 85,000 words of them – are currently being edited and prepared for publication. To date, only 4 Round Letters have been published in full, in The All Round Man (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Grainger on Music (Oxford University Press, 1999) and publication of the full set of letters will provide another useful resource to researchers and to the general public who want to better understand the thoughts behind Grainger’s ever-fascinating, and sometimes perplexing, music!

¹Letter dated 11 June 1942 from Grainger to Gustav Adolph Nelson (1900-1979), pianist, organist and conductor, and music director of the Gustavus Choir at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota from 1930-45.

² The Granger Museum’s (incomplete) collection of Round Letters suggests there are 39 letters in the collection. However, my research has shown that the first six letters in the collection, dated between 1924 and 1940, are not part of the Round Letters proper, which Grainger identifies as beginning on 15 Feb, 1942 in his own cataloguing system.

³ Concert given on 11 March 1958 at the Wilson Auditorium, University of Cincinnati, with Grainger’s former pupil, Dorothy Stolzenbach Payne, and members of The Keyboard Club. The ‘6 elderly ladies’ were identified as Mrs. Robert Pugh, Mrs. Elmer Hess, Mrs. Ranald West, Mrs. Ford Larrabee, Mrs. Luke Jacobs and Mrs. Raymond P. Myers.

⁴ ‘Oversoul’ is generally translated as ‘genius’, although the latter term is neither as poetic, not perhaps as nuanced, as the former.

Percy Grainger's Free Music Machine: Reimagining the Music of the Real World Around Him

Anne Ocone — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 15:19:30 GMT

By Cora Angier Sowa. What is that strange object?

What is that strange object in storage on the top floor of the Grainger House at 7 Cromwell? (We hope to raise funds to conserve and put it on display.) It looks like a demented beach chair, half folded up. It is, in fact, a small model of Percy Grainger's biggest idea, the Free Music Machine, a device to produce music that was like the sounds of the real world, unconstrained by conventional pitch and rhythm. Designed in the last years of his life, he felt that it was his "only important contribution to music."

His fascination with the sounds around him

From the time he was a child, Percy Grainger was obsessed with sounds. In Melbourne, Australia, where he grew up, his mother would take him boating on the lake in Albert Park, where he was fascinated by the sound of the waves lapping against the boat, as well as by their visually smooth shapes. He spent hours listening to the eerie sounds of the wind as it blew down chimneys or through the telegraph wires. These experiences led Grainger to want to create music that was continuous, like the real, continuously fluctuating world.

The sounds of the railroad train provided another source of pleasure. On a trip through Europe as an adult with his mother, as described by John Bird in his biography of Grainger, "It was whilst travelling by train in southern France and Italy that Percy was suddenly struck by the rhythmical complexities of the sounds penetrating the railway carriage as it rattled over point systems. For Percy this single experience touched off a desire to make radical experiments with irregular rhythms in music."

A squeaky door

Daniel N. Leeson, U.S. Army computer specialist and clarinettist, was assigned to an IBM office next door to Grainger and they became acquainted. He tells the following story, quoted in Portrait of Percy Grainger by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear: "I once saw him open and close a closet door in his house 15 or 20 times because a new and different kind of squeak had developed in the hinge and he found the sound interesting." Leeson also tells how Grainger turned down eating in a fancy restaurant in favor of his favorite donut shop, where there was a jukebox. He was particularly fascinated by new records by Elvis Presley because of his sound: "Listen to that sound! It's really wonderful!!"

Making the piano resonate like an orchestra

Many know Grainger only as a collector, arranger, and adapter of folk tunes, in such simple forms as "Country Gardens" or in reimagined works like "Lincolnshire Posy." Band musicians are eternally grateful to him for his prodigious output of band music. In his own day, he was known as a virtuoso pianist, interpreter of Grieg, Tchaikovsky, and Bach. But even here, he was fascinated by producing sounds that only he could hear in his head. In a masterful lecture and demonstration at the Percy Grainger Piano Mini-Festival in White Plains in May, 2018, composer and International Percy Grainger Society Vice President Mark Grant demonstrated some of the tricks used by Grainger to produce the sound he wanted, in particular using the resources of the piano to sound like an orchestra. These included playing arpeggiated chords ("harping sounds," he called them), and raising or lowering the center (or "sostenuto") pedal of the piano to make selected chords continue, then fade away. (To listen to Mark's entire presentation, click here.)

Free music finally created

But the desire to create the continuous sounds he could hear in his head never left Grainger. In 1938, he said,

"...Out in nature we hear all kinds of lovely and touching 'free' (non-harmonic) combinations of tones, yet we are unable to take up these beauties and expressiveness into the art of music because of our archaic notions of harmony.
"Personally I have heard free music in my head since I was a boy of eleven or twelve in Auburn, Melbourne. It is my only important contribution to music ... Yet the matter of Free Music is hardly a personal one. If I do not write it someone else certainly will, for it is the goal that all music is clearly heading for now and has been heading for through the centuries. It seems to me the only music logically suitable to a scientific age." (Grainger's Statement on Free Music, 6 December 1938, Grainger Museum, University of Melbourne, Australia, quoted in Penelope Thwaites, The New Percy Grainger Companion.)

Grainger first tried using available instruments, such as the theremin (invented by Léon Theremin), played by waving the hands between two antennas attached to oscillators, one antenna controlling the frequency, the other the volume. He modified a piano to play microtones (the "Butterfly Piano"), but this was not satisfactory, as the tones still moved in stepwise progression, not with the gliding movement he desired.

The Reed-Box-Tone-Tool, the Kangaroo Pouch and the electronic Free Music Machine

In 1945 he met Burnett Cross, a high school science teacher who also had a background in music. In a collaboration that lasted for the rest of Grainger's life, the two developed increasingly sophisticated machines (which were also of increasing size, eventually filling most of an entire room). On early versions, they experimented with hitching together arrays of Solovoxes, electronic instruments manufactured by the Hammond Corporation. A version called the Reed-Box Tone-Tool used harmonium reeds, played by punched paper tape like that used to control player pianos, with suction from a vacuum cleaner applied to its back. As they tinkered, they built contraptions out of all kinds of "found" materials. John Bird describes the process in his biography of Grainger:

"All kinds of junk were utilized as well as the more common items which were bought at local hobby and hardware stores. At times Ella and Percy would don their finest clothes to avoid police suspicion and spend part of an evening rummaging amongst the piles of rubbish by the back doors of department and furniture stores. Eventually the machines employed such improbable articles as pencil sharpeners, milk bottles, bamboo, roller-skate wheels, the bowels of a harmonium, linoleum, ping-pong balls, children's toy records, egg whisks, cotton reels, bits of sewing machines, carpet rolls, a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, and, of course, miles of strong brown paper and string."

For Grainger, invention came easily. One of his inventions was a roller for holding the pages of a musical score in one long roll instead of separate pages that had to be turned. Penelope Thwaites sums up Grainger's inventiveness as "a kind of outback ingenuity common to the older traditions of Australia and the U.S. ... a resourceful use of available materials summed up in story and song in the phrase 'stringybark and greenhide'..."

(In the interests of full disclosure: As a child I myself invented a "rubber band guitar," consisting of a cigar box with rubber bands wound around it, tuned by stretching the bands to make different notes — Note: I later became a harpist! I also made a "milk can marimba" out of small condensed milk cans, played with a stick. There's nothing like inventing your own instrument to stimulate the mind.)

Perhaps the most famous of Grainger and Cross' machines was the "Hills and Dale" or "Kangaroo Pouch," which had rolls of paper with the edges cut in a wavy pattern, made to turn on a roller. As the roll revolved, mechanical followers rode the outline cut into the side of the paper, controlling the pitch of a set of oscillators and the volume of the amplifiers. In the beginning, Grainger wanted nothing to do with the electronic synthesizers that were being invented by others. He felt that their inventors approached the problem wrong end to, inventing a device, then searching for something to do with it, whereas he started with the music, then searched for a means of realizing it. The final version of the Free Music Machine was, however, purely electronic. In the last version, the cut paper outlines were replaced by patterns painted on rolls of clear plastic. A row of spotlights shining through the plastic projected light beams onto an array of photocells, which in turn controlled the oscillators. The inventors were working on this device at the time of Grainger's death. A full description of all permutations of Grainger and Cross' radical inventions, with illustrations, appears in Rainer Linz, "The Free Music Machines of Percy Grainger," first published in Experimental Music Instruments, Vol. 12, No.4, 1997.

Examples of the Free Music Machines are on display at the Grainger Museum in Melbourne. At 7 Cromwell only the small model remains.

Percy's work on his experimental machines, installed in his living room, can be seen in the archival photos reproduced above: (1)Burnett Cross and Percy working on the Free Music machine, 1951, (2)Percy's "Kangaroo Pouch" Free Music machine, set up in his living room, ca. 1950. (Illustrations from Inez Bull, 7 Cromwell Place: A Loving Tribute to Percy Grainger.)

HEAR GRAINGER'S FREE MUSIC IN CONCERT ON FEBRUARY 13, 2019!

Do you want to hear what Free Music sounds like? In February, 2019, you will get a chance!

Various musicians have played the music that Grainger composed for his Free Music Machines, on a variety of instruments, including a version played on the theremin. In 2011, as part of their Downtown Music at Grace Church in White Plains, Vincent Lionti, violist with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and International Percy Grainger Society Board member, led a group from the Met Orchestra in a program that included Grainger's Free Music No.1.

And now we will get to hear them again!

At noon (12:10 PM) on February 13, 2019, at Grace Church in White Plains, you will once again get an opportunity to hear Grainger's Free Music No. 1. played by Vincent Lionti and musicians from the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.

Date: Wednesday, February 13, 2019
Time: 12:10
Location: Grace Church, 33 Church Street, White Plains, NY
Admission: Free, but donation is gladly accepted
Contact: www.DTMusic.org

A teaser from a past performance:

Meanwhile, you can listen to the performance of Free Music No. 1 of February 20, 2011 at Grace Church by clicking on Free Music Performance.

Percy Grainger's "Arrival Platform Humlet" for Solo Viola, from "In a Nutshell"

Anne Ocone — Wed, 12 Dec 2018 22:03:03 GMT

by Vincent Lionti, viola, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Board Member, International Percy Grainger Society.

My own introduction to the music of Percy Grainger was having the good fortune to take part in a swashbuckling performance of "The Warriors" conducted by Gerard Schwarz at the Waterloo Festival in the summer of 1982, Grainger's Centenary year. Fast forward to February 20, 2011, when I was entrusted with putting together a concert of sixteen Grainger works for a memorial commemoration of his death exactly 50 years before, to the day, in 1961. I began to slowly discover, during those intervening years, one piece after another of Percy's that had irresistible charm, was well crafted and highly original. Because I didn't play a "band" instrument, and was primarily interested in chamber music, I came upon these pieces only by accident or by word of mouth from friends and colleagues. This is how I learned of the existence of the "Arrival Platform Humlet", when my friend the violist Paul Coletti found it hard to believe that I, of all people, had not heard of the work. He promptly supplied me with a copy. Of course, meeting fellow Board member Cora Sowa, who in turn introduced me to Barry Peter Ould and his Bardic Editions of vast quantities of Grainger's chamber music, was a revelation. With Grainger's "elastic scoring", many of his compositions were easily adaptable to various instrumentations, with the composer's blessing. The "Arrival Platform Humlet" is one such piece, but violists have a special affection for it, and like to claim it as their own.* I have always had a great fondness for it and have felt a special connection to the composer when I play it because of the following story:

I had many wonderful conversations with Stewart Manville before he died. Stewart was, as we all know, the great archivist and curator of the Estate of Percy Grainger, and married Percy's widow, Ella, in 1972. Any time I played a concert with a Grainger work on it, I would invite Stewart to say a few words about the music and its composer. It was the next best thing to having the composer there in person. Stewart always graciously accepted my invitations to speak, and would speak rather eloquently while the audience sat transfixed. He related the story to me (which unfortunately can't be corroborated) about one of the only times (possibly the only time) that he ever came face to face with the composer, waiting (probably in the 1940's) for a train, sure enough, on the arrival platform at the White Plains (New York) train station. Stewart spotted the great composer standing alone on the platform and inched closer to him. Before Stewart realized what he was doing, he began whistling nervously. The composer eyed him suspiciously, but then smiled and said, "... the arrival platform, I take it?" Apparently the train arrived, and they went their separate ways. One of the last times Stewart spoke publicly was at the 50th Anniversary commemoration concert in 2011, mentioned above. He broke down emotionally during his speech, and had to be encouraged by members of the audience exhorting him to continue.

The "Arrival Platform Humlet" puts the violist through his paces demanding skill, agility, imagination, a solid technique, and to some degree, endurance, even though the piece is only about three minutes long. Numerous and sometimes awkward double stops require spot on intonation, and the player needs to get comfortable climbing into the very highest registers and Everest-like regions of the instrument, demonstrating acrobatic tricks and leaps while up there. The violist may be tempted to compare Grainger's "Humlet" to Paul Hindemith's Solo Viola Sonatas; the two composers were almost exact contemporaries, born 12 years apart and died two years apart. Both were virtuoso proponents of their respective instruments, had huge solo careers, performed and conducted widely, taught at American Universities and institutions, and composed large quantities of music "on the side".

Penelope Thwaites writes in "The New Percy Grainger Companion" that Arrival Platform Humlet dates from 1908, at the height of Grainger's love affair with the Danish Karen Holten, and the excitement he describes of meeting at the railway station is clearly autobiographical. She also writes that any performance of it "should be fierce and exhilarating". Grainger first met Karen Holten in 1904, when the composer was 22 while on a concert tour with cellist Herman Sandby. They soon began an eight year relationship that ended on the eve of World War I. Their last meeting was at a Copenhagen Railway Station, shortly before Grainger left England for America. Karen Holten married two years later and died in 1953. There seems to be no doubt that Karen Holten was the muse that inspired the creation of the "Arrival Platform Humlet".

*Editor's note - It has recently been reported to the Grainger Society that "Arrival Platform Humlet" is currently being arranged for Solo Tuba!

**live recording of Vincent Lionti, viola, made at the Percy Grainger 50th Anniversary Memorial Concert, Sunday, February 20, 2011, Grace Church, White Plains, New York (audio recording made by Rocco Bueti).

Percy Aldridge Grainger and Interlochen National Music Camp* 1930, 1937, 1942-1944

Anne Ocone — Tue, 20 Nov 2018 16:39:39 GMT

by Barry Peter Ould. When Grainger first visited Interlochen National Music Camp in 1930, he had already travelled far and wide from his native Australia, gathering folk tunes and concertizing in Britain as well as Europe and eventually in America where he and his mother, Rose arrived in September, 1914. Grainger’s first association at Interlochen was as guest conductor. By 1937 when he joined the faculty and began teaching there, he was attracted to the quiet, and to the idea of not travelling, and the salary he received was also appealing.

Grainger, with his wife Ella, lived in a cabin within earshot of the band shell. The days were long – private teaching from eight in the morning until 6:30 in the evening and evening rehearsals until ten o’clock. After this, Grainger would often practice until one or two in the morning. He was popular with the students, although the music he chose to teach was not. He remarked that he felt like “a lonely old crow on the bough.” He complained of being unable to find a talented student and was puzzled by the emphasis on developing piano technique – which came to him naturally. He told one student, “You can get more keyboard skill out of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues than out of a boatload of studies by tone-deaf nit-wits like Czerny.”

Another student persisted in playing a piano passage faster than he was capable, explaining that he had heard Horowitz play it “like a blue streak in his recording.” Grainger dismissed the phenomenon by saying, “There likely wasn’t room on the recording at the right speed, so he had to hurry it up.”

Eventually the teaching and rehearsing got to be too strenuous, and Grainger became increasingly disillusioned with the staff and students at Interlochen. It was simply not the place for him. After his last summer there in 1944, he vowed, “I shall never teach again.” His wife echoed his sentiments by commenting, “It would have been so nice there if it wasn't for all those horrible children.”

The following list includes information on the concerts Grainger was involved in during his association with the Interlochen National Music Camp and I am indebted to their current archivist and librarian, Byron W. Hanson, for his work in compiling this information. I hope that this preliminary information will be of use to any future scholar who might be wish to undertake a more detailed study of Grainger’s time at the National Music Camp.

*The National High School Orchestra Camp was established in 1927 by music educator Joseph Edgar Maddy (1891-1966), and opened at Interlochen, Michigan in 1928. In a climate where school music provision was very limited, the camp was initially set up to provide opportunities for high school students to rehearse and perform together. By the 1930s, the Camp Orchestra was broadcasting for CBS and NBC radio, and in 1939 performed at the New York World’s Fair. One of the very few examples of Grainger on film is contained in the 1943 Interlochen publicity film, Youth Builds a Symphony, where Grainger is shown demonstrating the correct way to play Country Gardens to a throng of students as well as brief clips of him conducting, playing the Delius ‘Piano Concerto’, and running and leaping onto the podium to the shouts of “we want Grainger”.

All photos taken between 1930 and 1944 at Interlochen National Music Camp.

1930

August 24 3:00pm PAG conducted a substantial concert featuring keyboard ensembles, band, orchestra, and choir. It began with his settings of Bach fugues in A minor (four pianists), C major (pianists and four harmonium players), and Purcell four-part fantasia No. 8 (pianos, harmoniums and string orchestra). The National High School Orchestra presented To a Nordic Princess and Spoon River. Next were five pieces for choir combined with various instruments: Australian Up-Country Song, Recessional (Kipling), The Hunter in His Career, Irish Tune, and Father and Daughter. Next came “Hillbillie’s Song”, a student work played by the orchestra conducted by the composer, Lee Briggs, then Marching Song of Democracy (choir and orchestra), and “Love Song” by Herman Sandby, played by a cello ensemble. The orchestra played Danish Folk Song Suite and the band closed with Children’s March and Shepherd’s Hey.

7:00pm The Camp’s third season closed with another substantial concert in two parts. The first part is indicated as being a broadcast, but considering that Les preludes and fifteen shorter works performed variously by band, orchestra, choir, a faculty cellist, and a tenor in a New York studio are listed, unless the broadcast extended beyond its customary hour it seems unlikely all were actually heard by the radio audience – unless severe cuts were taken. Part two indicates a somewhat shorter program, although part of the band’s portion is “a group of request numbers”. PAG is listed as conducting in part one only; the three works are Shepherd’s Hey (band), Irish Tune (choir), and Spoon River (orchestra).

1937

June 28 “Talk by Percy Grainger” followed 45’ orchestra sight reading.

July 1 Faculty concert – PAG played Cyril Scott’s arr. of Handel’s “Hornpipe from the Water Music and “Cherry Ripe”, followed by David Guion’s arrangement of “Turkey in the Straw”.

July 4 10:30am PAG gave talk at Interlochen Bowl Service: “The Characteristics of Spiritual Music”.

3pm National HS Band concert – PAG conducted a group of four early pieces “The Annunciation Carol”, Bach-Dolmetsch “March”, Bach Air from 3^rd Suite, Fantasy (5-part) No. 1 (Jenkins), and later, “Irish Tune from County Derry”.

9pm NBC NHSO broadcast – JEM conducted “Spoon River” with PAG at the piano and John Hammond at the Hammond Organ. PAG repeated Annunciation Carol and the two Bach pieces from the afternoon concert, and conducted 1812 Overture and Irish Tune played by massed orchestra, band, and Hammond Organ [which had been but two years on the market]. PAG introduced the three early pieces on the air; Bill Kephart’s radio script printed in the following week’s booklet reveals that the Irish Tune preceded the 1812 overture, and both were played by the combined ensemble.

July 8 Faculty recital – played Brahms F minor clarinet sonata (Op.120/1) with Gustave Langenus.

July 11 3pm NHS Band concert – conducted Machaut “Ballad, No. 17”, Josquin “La Bernardina”, Gardiner “Shepherd Fennel’s Dance” and selection from Victor Herbert “Eileen”.

8pm NHSO concert – played 2^nd and 3^rd movements of Grieg concerto.

9pm broadcast – played 1^st movement of Grieg, and repeated the Gardiner and Josquin pieces with NHS Band [Maddy conducted the concerto].

July 18 3pm NHS Band concert – PAG conducted Prelude in the Dorian Mode (Cabezón), Tuscan Serenade (Fauré), and O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sunde gross (Bach), and was at the piano for Children’s March, G. T. Overgard, conducting.

9pm repeat of Cabezón Prelude, and Children’s March.

July 21 7:30pm NMC Band – conducted Grieg “Norwegian Dance No. 1”, Irish Tune and Shepherd’s Hey, ”Funereal Chant” (Fauré) and Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” with a cornet solo, then played piano in “Spoon River” with Overgard conducting. Bainum is credited for band arrangement of Spoon River.

July 29 Faculty concert – played piano (continuo) for 2^nd Brandenburg Concerto, then duet with Skeat for C major fugue from WTC I/1 arr. for Hammond Organ and Bilhorn Folding Organ – no indication who played which. His piano ensemble class (4 pianos,16 hands) ended program with Fugue in E major (WTC II/90).

August 1 3:00pm NHSB concert – PAG conducted “A Children’s Overture” White), and his arrangement of “See What His Love Can Do” from Bach Cantata 85. [It may have been played in the afternoon and only trimmed from the evening broadcast due to time constraints. See comment below regarding broadcast radio script published in the following week’s program.]

8:00pm NHSO concert – played 2^nd and 3^rd movements of Tchaikovsky B-flat minor concerto.

9:00pm broadcast – played 1^st movement of concerto (orchestra; Maddy) and conducted 1^st performance of his arrangement of ”Fantasy and Air (Wm. Lawes). [The Lawes and the Bach cantata selection are both listed here and “1^st performance” is noted for the Bach, but it is likely neither was played since they do not appear in the radio script published in the next week’s program.]

August 5 Faculty Concert – PAG played Brahms E-flat major clarinet sonata, Op. 120/2 with Burnet Tuthill.

August 8 3:00pm NSHB concert – conducted “Interlochen Camp Reel” (Cowell).

8:00pm NHSO – PAG and Clarke Kessler played mvts. 1 and 2 of Bach C major 2-piano concerto, Vladimir Bakaleinikoff, conducting.

9:00pm broadcast – they played the 3^rd movement of Bach, and PAG conducted Cyril Scott’s “Festival Overture”. The Scott is not in the radio script published the following week, so likely was not broadcast.

August 12 Faculty concert – performed movements 3-4 of Beethoven violin/piano Sonata Opus 30/3 with Cecil Leeson, saxophonist/transcriber.

August 15 3:00pm NHSB concert – conducted Franck Chorale No. 1 (arr. Ralph Leopold) five Norwegian Folk melodies from Op. 66 (Grieg-Storm Bull), Josquin “Royal Fanfare”, and Fanfare to precede “La Peri” (Dukas).

8:00pm NHSO concert – “To a Nordic Princess” and Scott’s Festival Overture” were performed. PAG is listed only as conducting the Scott; Bakaleinikoff presumably led the Nordic Princess.

9:00pm broadcast – PAG conducted the NHSO in Le Carillon (Bizet), The Elf-hill (Herman Sandby), and “Molly on the Shore”. He is also listed as conducting the Franck Chorale and Storm Bull’s Grieg arrangements. [In the next week’s program, the radio script does not include the Franck and lists only 3 of the 5 Grieg movements.]

August 18 National Music Camp Band presented 8pm “Clinic Concert” at which a number of visiting band directors each conducted a selection announced only by number from a list of 24 pieces. Children’s March with PAG at the piano is No. 6 on the list. The printed comment saying only that “a program of nominal length will be chosen by the visiting band directors” offers no indication as to which of the listed pieces were played.

August 22 3pm NHSB concert—PAG conducted Two Pieces for “Tuneful Percussion” Instruments: Pagodas (Debussy-Grainger) and Eastern Intermezzo. Ella is listed among 16 performers; there is no indication of who plays what instrument(s).

8pm NHSO concert—PAG conducted Song of the High Hills (Delius).

1942 (little program information for this year – other performances likely)

August 16 High School Choir – “Australian Up-Country Song”, Henry Veld, conducting.

August 23 NHSO concert – “In a Nutshell Suite” PAG at the piano, probably Thor Johnson conducting. Final concert of summer.

1943

July 1 Conducted Irish Tune on WKAR broadcast (strings/horns).

July 6 Orchestra sight reading included Spoon River and Molly on the Shore. PAG played Grieg Concerto (unstated who conducted what).

July 14 Band sight reading included “Over the Hills and Far Away” (cond?).

July 17 7pm WKAR broadcast – PAG played Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue, Guy Fraser Harrison conducting.

8:30pm Faculty concert – PAG played Grieg G sonata with Stolarevsky. The Merry King was played by 12-piece wind ensemble – members unidentified.

July 18 Repeated Gershwin for evening concert.

July 20 Orch SR played Grieg Concerto, JEM cond. PAG cond. Molly (identical repertoire to 7/6: unusual: possibly an error, possibly a postponement.)

July 24 WKAR broadcast-conducted English Waltz, Harvest Hymn.

July 25 Repeated 7/24 selections for evening concert.

July 30 PAG (steel-string guitar) and Ella (gut-string guitar) did “Random Round”. Additional performers not identified.

July 31 7pm-Delius Concerto-3mvt version (TJ) for WKAR broadcast.

8:30-Solo recital

Star Spangled Banner

Fantasia and Fugue in g Bach/Liszt

The Carman’s Whistle Byrd

Handelian Rhapsody Cyril Scott

Etudes symphoniques, Op. 13 Schumann

Liebestraume #3 Liszt

Paraphrase on “Flower Waltz” Tchaikovsky-Grainger

August 1 NHSO concert – repeated Delius: 3 mvts listed, so original version.

August 13 7pm conducted band in Harkstow Grange [sic] and The Lost Lady Found from Lincolnshire Posey [sic].

8:30 conducted about 20 players in Pagodas, 1^st of two pieces for tuneful percussion. Eastern Intermezzo was conducted by Thomas J. Glenecke.

August 14 Faculty concert – pianist in Quintet (from the Seventh Realm) by Fickensher.

August 15 Saxophone Quintet played the Four Note Pavane (Ferrubosco/Grainger) at morning service.

3:30pm PAG conducted band in all of Lincolnshire Posey [sic]. Considering that E. Rollin Silfies is listed as soprano saxophone soloist for Rufford Park Poachers, Grainger appears to have chosen the saxophone version. Composers Domenico Savino and Ferde Grofé also conducted their own works on this concert.

1944

July 6 Conducted The Four Note Pavan (strings) for WKAR broadcast.

July 14 Conducted “The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart” (band, string orchestra, organ and piano)WKAR broadcast “PREMIERE PERFORMANCE”.

July 15 NHSO broadcast (WKAR) – soloist for Morton Gould “American Concertette”, Homer LaGassey, conducting.

Faculty concert – Fauré Quartet No. 2, Op. 45 with Millard Taylor, Mihail Stolarevsky, and Allison McKown.

July 16 Afternoon – repeat performance of The Power of Rome…

Evening – repeat performance of “American Concertette”.

July 19 Band sight reading (LaGassey) – piano soloist for Children’s March.

July 29 Faculty concert – played “English Dance” for three pianists at two pianos with Marjorie MacKown and Guy Fraser Harrison.

July 30 High School Choir sang “Australian Up-Country Song”’ conductor probably Maynard Klein.

August 5 WKAR broadcast – played Gershwin “Concerto in F” with NHSO. Homer LaGassey likely conducted, as he is listed in next day’s concert program.

August 6 NHSO concert – “Concerto in F”.

August 12 NHSO broadcast WKAR – composer at piano for “Danish Folk Music Suite”. Also, Russell Howland’s “Sussex Psalm” was performed (“inspired by and dedicated to PAG and based on his harmonization of “A Sussex Christmas Carol”). Thor Johnson conducted entire program.

Faculty concert – PAG played “Lullaby from ‘Tribute to Foster’” and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.

August 13 NHSO concert – repeat of August 12 program. If the program is complete this would have been his last performance at Interlochen.

August 24 College Division Orchestra broadcast WKAR – student conductors led 16 pieces including “Spoon River”.

IN SUPPORT OF GRAINGER AND HIS COMPOSER COLLEAGUES

Anne Ocone — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 23:44:13 GMT

by Dana Paul Perna. Percy Grainger’s music for band is renowned and highly heralded. Another article in regard to, or in support of that fact is completely unnecessary, unless it proved to be included as a prologue to a Doctoral Dissertation. It has become common for band directors to program a Grainger work surrounded by titles by other composers on the same concert. What may prove to be of interest to readers of this blog occurred to me following a lecture I had presented at Grainger’s home (May 6, 2018), namely that a theme for a concert can be built around Grainger and his Composer Colleagues. In terms of these “Composer Colleagues”, I am referring to those who mattered to him most, either as professionals, associates, and/or as friends. In support of that thought, here is just a small listing of titles and composers whose works can be culled from for such an endeavor towards a program that will consist of some real content, quality and imagination. The selections fall into three categories: 1) music Grainger transcribed/arranged for band as penned by his colleagues; 2) music by his immediate group of colleagues written directly by them for the medium; and 3) music by his immediate group of colleagues as scored on their behalf by others. Let us begin with a listing that is far from complete:

1) Music Grainger transcribed/arranged for band as penned by his colleagues. As part of “Chosen Gems for Band”, Grainger’s intention was to include music from all periods, Medieval right up to the 20th Century, in order that bands had a full range of repertory from which to perform from. In a few instances, some of his “composing colleagues” were included within that mix, all of whom having numbered among his friends, too. It is not a long list, but it includes these truly golden gems:

Tuscan Serenade by Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) - for band with a Euphonium solo. Grainger played his own “English Dance” for the French Master while he was still living in London during Fauré’s visit there. From that point on, Grainger was always a devout champion of his music.

Intermezzo by Herman Sandby (1881-1965) - the Danish Master who was Grainger’s Frankfurt classmate, and the cellist for whom Percy dished-up his “Youthful Rapture,” as well as the suite “La Scandinavie” when they performed as a duo together.

Folk-Tune by Eugene Goossens (1893-1962), one of Grainger’s favorite conductors that he enjoyed the pleasure of having worked with as piano soloist, and/or composer during Goossens' tenure as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (It is also known under its more complete title Sheep Shearing Song, an edition with that title being available by Southern Music, as edited by R. Mark Rogers.)

Down Longford Way by Katharine Parker (1886-1971). Among Grainger’s favorite pupils was this Tasmanian-born composer/pianist, whose nickname was “Kitty”. The “Longford” in its title relates to her Tasmanian birthplace. Parker was thrilled that Grainger transcribed this title from her piano suite “Four Musical Sketches“. Due in large measure to that transcription, it has since proven to have become her most performed title. (For those of you who know it, there is also a first-rate band version of this same opus by Leroy Osmon {via RBC Music Company}, that is not too dissimilar from Grainger’s own setting.)

While not for a large band’s instrumentation is Bruyères by Claude Debussy (1862-1918), to whom Grainger also performed-in-the-presence-of during Claude’s visit to London, this Prélude having been transcribed for a small ensemble of winds with harmonium during Grainger’s time in a branch of the United States Army Band.

2) Band music by his immediate group of colleagues written directly by them for the medium. Henry Cowell (1897-1965), who lived with The Grainger’s in their White Plains home for one year, composed several titles for band, many of which seem to have disappeared from catalogs. Noted Cowell scholar, Grainger enthusiast, and Director of Instrumental Music Activities at Carthage College, Dr. James Ripley has prepared scorings, setting some of Cowell’s exceptional piano pieces (e.g. Cowell’s complete Four Irish Myths) for band, as well as more recently having completed a new edition of Celtic Set, the work that Grainger helped to shepherd on Henry’s behalf.

Among Grainger’s students, in this case from his days teaching at Interlochen, is the late Walter S. Hartley (1927-2016) who composed directly for band, creating a supreme catalog of his own for the medium. Among that output includes a set of transcriptions Hartley prepared that he titled - in appropriately Graingerian-style - A Tit-Bit Suite, which is comprised of two of Percy’s posthumously published piano originals Harlem Walkabout, and A Bridal Lullaby, as well as ELLA Grainger’s The Bigelow March. I believe that this set is still awaiting its world premiere. For interested parties, their performing materials are available through Bardic Edition.

Two colleagues of Percy’s that require mentioning were Morton Gould (1913-1996) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), the latter having been among those colleagues with whom Grainger enjoyed one of his longest friendships. Apart from that, any additional comment as to the value of the music these two great Masters created directly for the band medium becomes extraneous.

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) prepared his own first-rate settings of Grainger’s Country Gardens and Handel in the Strand, respectively. While they may be quite different than Percy’s, they remain no less imaginatively prepared by “The March King”, capable of standing in contrast to Percy’s concept of these genuine warhorses on their own merits.

3) Music as scored on their behalf by others.

On the other side of the coin is a title by one of Percy’s teachers that has become available in rolls royce fashion as expertly arranged by R. Mark Rogers in a manner that I doubt even its composer could have scored much better, namely Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924; as published by Southern Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1zwQcPn9-Q )

A composer who greatly admired Grainger, and with whom Grainger met on one occasion, was Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), the composer/conductor/pianist whose championship of Grainger helped lead to a renaissance of interest in Percy’s music. Of Britten’s important works, a transcription of his ‘Four Sea Interludes’ from the Opera “Peter Grimes” - yes, you are reading that correctly! - now exists due to its masterful setting by Musician 1st Class David J. Miller of the United States Navy Band (where he is also a member of its trombone section) that remains completely faithful to one of Britten’s best known, and most celebrated compositions.

On a more personal note, I have prepared versions of works by composers who knew Grainger, one, in particular whose music Percy actively championed. Of the one who “knew him” (and visa versa) was Jerome Moross (1913-1983) who, despite having had a successful career writing for the theatre, television, radio and motion pictures did not compose directly for the band medium. Selecting his orchestral work Biguine - or, as Jerry put it to me, “Oh, you mean my little Latin number!” - I dished-up a scoring of it for band, which is available through Subito Music. His reflections about Grainger were most insightful, having left a most positive impression on him that I was honored he shared with me.

Of the composer Percy championed remains Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), of whom I have prepared band versions of his two earliest, yet most engaging among his titles, specifically Cave of the Winds (published by LudwigMusic Masters Publications) as well as the recently released After the Cake Walk, editing and expanding the materials from its original 1901 scoring by Lee Orean Smith into - and for use within - our present time (published by Southern Music Publications under their “Concerts in the Park Series”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsjMk_WOt9Y ) While these two titles are indicative of the music the young Dett and others would have heard at the turn-of-the-20th-Century, these foot-stompers possess some of the catchiest and most engaging melodies he was ever to compose that are certain to make an audience smile from ear to ear.

We Have Fed Our Sea for a Thousand Years: Upcoming Grainger concerts

Anne Ocone — Tue, 09 Oct 2018 14:07:32 GMT

As part of the remembrance of the Armistice Day Centenary, this November there will be three concert performances entitled War and the Human Heart, to be held in Logan, Utah, Chicago and Valparaiso, Indiana. The purpose of the concert series is to commemorate the Centenary and honor veterans by communicating to the audiences what a veteran's experience is really like.

On the concert program is Percy Grainger's We Have Fed Our Sea for a Thousand Years (1911), based on the poem of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Both Grainger and Kipling knew the war first hand: Kipling’s son John was killed in action at age 18, during the First World War Battle of Loos in September of 1915. Grainger served in 1917-19 as a U.S. Army Bandsman.

While still a student at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfort, Grainger discovered Kipling’s poetry and began setting it to music. We Have Fed Our Sea for a Thousand Years was originally composed between 1900-1904, and rescored in 1911. As noted by Grainger’s close friend, the pianist and composer Cyril Scott, "Whenever Grainger elects to produce one of his Kipling settings . . . he becomes Kipling."

The concert dates and locations:

UTAH: Saturday, November 3 @ 7:30 pm (MT)

Daines Concert Hall, Utah State University, Logan, Utah USA

Presented by the American Festival Chorus and Utah State University, Craig Jessop conducting (http://www.americanfestivalchorus.org/performance/2018/war-and-human-heart)

ILLINOIS: Saturday, November 10 @ 7:30 pm (CT)

St. James Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois USA

Presented by the Rembrandt Chamber Players, Craig Jessop conducting (http://www.rembrandtchamberplayers.org/events/war-and-the-human-heart/)

INDIANA: Sunday, November 11 @ 5 pm (CT)

Chapel of the Resurrection, Valparaiso University, Valparaiso, Indiana USA

Presented by Valparaiso University, Christopher Cock and Jeffrey Scott Doebler, conducting (https://www.valpo.edu/music/whh/)

Percy Grainger and The Cincinnati Kids

Susan Colson — Mon, 17 Sep 2018 19:11:19 GMT

by Mark N. Grant. The number of living people who actually knew Percy Grainger is shrinking every year. But former Grainger Board member Lucinda Hess, a pianist, and her brother Rick, a fine singer, still recall Percy and Ella vividly from their childhood visits in the 1950s to both 7 Cromwell Place and Ella’s Pevensey Bay house in England, as well as Percy’s many visits to their hometown, Cincinnati. (Rick and his wife Pat now live in Riverdale in the Bronx. Cindy lives in Putnam County. Her longtime partner, Edward Hogan, attended Grainger Board meetings with Cindy for years until his death in 1998.)

Percy gravitated to the Midwest and in the 1930s played concerts with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. After the war he returned to perform not only with the CSO under Thor Johnson’s baton but with semi-professional chamber music groups in the city. One of his prize students was the fine pianist Dorothy Payne (1904-1992), with whom he sometimes rehearsed his two-piano works. Mrs. Payne was the piano guru of Cincinnati and the doyenne of the city’s amateur music groups Matinee Musicale, which took place at the Netherland Plaza Hotel in the middle of the day, and the Keyboard Club. Rick and Cindy Hess’s mother, Lucinda Robb Hess (1912-2005), was a fine pianist herself and a student of Dorothy Payne (as well as of Claudio Arrau and Robert Goldsand). Their father Elmer owned the Hess Blueprinting company in town and was a gifted amateur pianist who couldn’t read music but could play anything by ear.

Rick remembers during his college years at Miami University of Ohio singing Ella’s composition Farewell to An Atoll (arranged by Percy) in Mrs. Payne’s living room with Percy in the audience; Percy warmly complimented Rick on his singing. Rick and Cindy also witnessed Ella performing on the Solovox during one of these concerts. “Percy was so patient; a lot of the pianists in the club weren’t the best musicians but he was very nice to everybody,” recalls Cindy. He was informal, she adds: “One time the pedals sort of fell down suddenly from the piano, and Percy stopped playing and got up and raced over to prop the pedals up with a book he found in the room.” Rick confirms that Percy was kind and patient. “I remember Percy accompanying the locals Pete and Louise Wilshire on the clarinet and violin. They were terrible!” he grins, adding “I also heard Percy late in life play his 4-hand arrangement of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess with Mrs. Payne at the Women’s Club in Cincinnati. He must have missed half the notes!” But in earlier performances Rick says he found Percy’s energy and fire larger than life (and his accuracy better).

Mrs. Hess met Ella through Mrs. Payne and thereafter she would visit 7 Cromwell Place every year in January or February. She must have met Elsie, Ella’s daughter from a previous liaison, too, because in 1953 or 1954 she insisted on taking Cindy and Rick during a trip to Europe to meet Elsie and her husband Robert Bristow at Ella’s cottage on Pevensey Bay, a seaside resort on the southeast coast of England. Teenagers at the time, Rick and Cindy were told that they were meeting Ella’s “ niece” (as Ella herself referred to Elsie). They visited only for the day, and remember Elsie and Robert as being lovely hosts, although they recall being told that Robert had recently gotten rid of a nice garden there and replaced it with stones.

Later in the 1950s Mrs. Hess brought Rick and Cindy to visit 7 Cromwell Place. During lunch on one visit, Ella opened a six-ounce bottle of coke and meted out four single glass servings to Mrs. Hess, Rick, Cindy, and Percy, admonishing Percy, “Don’t drink it all at once!” while she herself drank Vichy water. Another time, while Ella was chatting with Cindy on the front stairs to the porch, Cindy remembers “Percy suddenly appeared from behind after doing a pirouette over the top of the wood balustrade to the porch” – he was about 75 at the time– to which Ella quipped, “He’s showing off for you, young lady.” Indeed, Percy was still energetic; during one practice session in the music room at Cromwell Place, with Cindy and her mother at one piano and Percy at the other, he stopped suddenly, jumped up and crossed to the other piano and said, “You missed a note!” But on later visits, Percy increasingly looked “spaced out”: in the terminal phase of his cancer, they recall, he just stared a lot.

Cindy also recalls that during those visits to Percy and Ella at Cromwell Place in the 50s, Burnett Cross, the physics teacher who worked with Percy on his Free Music machines, was there a lot of the time. “The Free Music machines took up the whole living room,” says Cindy now. She remembers that “Ella seemed very gracious and kind. She struck me as both elegant and delicate.”

Another musical Cincinnatian who visited Percy at 7 Cromwell Place in the 50s was Ramona Helfer (1909-1972), who as “Ramona” was a popular jazz singer/pianist who appeared on radio and with the Paul Whiteman Band in the 1930s. (Her third husband was the well-known baseball broadcaster Al Helfer, whom Rick Hess met and remembers as being a huge bear of a man; Al sometimes stayed over at the Hess home in Cincinnati.) In the late 1950s Burnett Cross made several home recordings of Percy and other musicians playing the pianos in the Cromwell Place music room. Percy had recently seen the 1957 film The Bridge Over the River Kwai and made an arrangement for six hands at one piano of the film’s theme, the “Col. Bogey March.” Here is a recording of a 7 Cromwell Place rehearsal of that piece played by Dorothy Payne, Ramona Helfer, and Ella, with Percy coaching the threesome in the background.

Mrs. Payne and Mrs. Hess continued to visit Ella at 7 Cromwell Place for some years after Percy’s death in 1961. During one visit in the late 1960s, while they were sitting in Ella’s bedroom upstairs, Ella confided, “I’m in love!” She was referring to Stewart Manville, our late archivist/curator. Stewart and Ella got married in 1972.

Postscript: Dorothy Payne wrote a memoir of her life and career that contains several chapters on Percy Grainger. It has recently been updated by her daughter, Rebecca Shockley and republished.

Historic House Museum. Yup. That’s what we’ve got here. Things strewn about…

Susan Colson — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 23:32:56 GMT

by Susan Colson. Percy’s wheelbarrow is in the basement. Percy fashioned it himself to carry his music and instrument-laden trunks back and forth to the White Plains Trains Station. His concerts kept him coming and going at such odd hours that the White Plains station master eventually streamlined service by delivering a key to his very own storage closet where the wheelbarrow could stay until pressed back into service. Ray, whose family has owned the local Scarlet Deli for decades, remembers Percy running down the street with the wheelbarrow, which Ray termed a “rickshaw.” “Wiry little guy, polite, odd voice,” Ray, now well in his 70’s, remembers Percy, his customer and neighborhood eccentric.

Although frequent, not all of Percy’s trips were pleasant. On the train returning to White Plains from Los Angles in the days after his mother’s death, Percy wrote a shaky, stream-of-consciousness letter to Balfour Gardiner, his friend and fellow student from the Hoch Conservatory. His wandering May 3, 1922 communique lists 33 items to be done “in case of a breakdown of my forces en route.” The letter instructs Gardiner to publish the “manuscripts, music, etc.” to be found “strewn around in the music room on pianos, in drawers and in the loft (attic) at White Plains.” The letter further notes “Could plot of ground (owned by me) next to White Plains home be used for building small fireproof Grainger Museum?”

During the next decade, Percy would build such a museum in Melbourne, Australia. It would house the items Percy deemed important enough to classify, note, and send off to his homeland. Seven Cromwell Place would hold the things of his daily life, the things he describes as “strewn around.” It still does.

Luckily, for those of us who provide tours, most visitors arrive with the idea of “a residence” well understood, they are not expecting Musée du Louvre. Although Percy has been gone nearly sixty years (and his wife, Ella, nearly forty) it is not a great stretch for visitors to imagine his life within these walls. Many who come, indeed most, are musicians. Take the case of pianist and recent visitor Jacob Rhodebeck, of Hastings-on-Hudson, who arrived together with his wife, mezzo-soprano Christine Free Rhodebeck and their little daughter, Vivienne, in tow.

“Of course, I know Percy Grainger’s music, especially Gum Sucker’s March and Spoon River from my college days” noted Jacob, “it’s just that, until I saw the house on Trip Advisor, I had no idea he ever lived in White Plains.” Jacob reported that he was fascinated by Percy’s quirky homestead, with its three pianos filling the music room. The music room also holds a random boomerang beside a cherished 1906 postcard from Edvard Grieg. Both of these items sit directly under a lamp with the type of silk shade favored by his mother, Rose. Percy’s chin up bar is tied irreverently to the formal colonnade’s marking the entrance to the living room. The Rhodebeck family was impressed, it was clear that Percy lived, worked, and slept, here.

During their visit, Jacob spent a few moments playing the Steinway (serial number 88,422 places its manufacture circa 1897) while Vivienne danced. This piano, which Percy was reputed to cherish for its “singing quality” Is always a point of fascination. Another recent visitor, Duncan Applby found playing the piano a highlight, as noted in his google review.

So, here we are in White Plains, replicating Percy’s life and environs as authentically as possible, hoping to help visitors experience his home in a way that taps their senses and emotions. We grapple with how to make this more meaningful, more purposeful, visit by visit, visitor by visitor.

Composer Dana Perna's Take on Percy Grainger

Susan Colson — Sun, 13 May 2018 13:35:23 GMT

"To learn piano, study the Cyril Scott Sonata No.1," said Percy Grainger to the young piano student, who, after dutifully acquiring the sheet music, was completely mystified by Grainger's odd advice.

This incident and many more were shared by Grainger enthusiast Dana Perna on a recent Sunday afternoon at 7 Cromwell Place. Grainger was acquainted with practically anyone who was anyone in the music world during his early 20th century career. His colleagues included Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Richard Strauss, Claude Debussy, and Frederick Delius. Dana mentions them all, along with many others, during this engaging lecture.

Watch the video here.

David Miller, Navy Band, Visits 7 Cromwell Place

Susan Colson — Mon, 07 May 2018 10:23:42 GMT

In the early 20th century, Percy Grainger wrote a virtuoso concert work entitled In Dahomey (Cakewalk Smasher), in which he blended tunes from Will Marion Cook's Broadway show and Arthur Pryor's popular song. Grainger may have seen Cook's In Dahomey on stage in London in 1903 and he started composing his work that year, completing the score about 1909.

In this tribute to contemporary African-American music, the clash of the two tunes created what Grainger Society President Barry Ould has termed "a page of almost Iversian dissonance." After consulting with Barry, Petty Officer David Miller arranged In Dahomey and shared the final production with the Grainger world.

Here is a conversation about how it happened.

See a list of David J. Miller's arrangements here.

Composer Mark N. Grant Illustrates Grainger's Bag of Tricks

Susan Colson — Thu, 03 May 2018 00:25:15 GMT

Watch the video here.

Long-time Grainger aficionado Mark Grant explains some of the piano techniques that Percy Grainger found particularly useful to develop his own style and maximize the use of the instrument. For example, Grainger used large, extravagant chords, which he termed "harping chords" repeatedly and became a master of the sostenuto pedal (the middle piano petal) to translate the sounds of an orchestra into the piano.

Mark compares Grainger's playing to other pianists of his day and beyond. His talk allows Grainger's techniques to come alive for the audience with examples, illustrations and explanations along the way.

NOW ONLINE: Percy Grainger's Ethnographic Wax Cylinders

Susan Colson — Wed, 14 Mar 2018 23:41:19 GMT

Click here to listen.

The British Library has made available about 350 English folk songs recorded by Percy Grainger in different regions of England between 1906 and 1909.

The sound recordings have been cataloged and indexed by librarian, researcher and folklorist Steve Roud, author of Folk Song in England (Faber & Faber, 2017). Roud has also matched them up with Grainger's transcriptions of the songs, where these exist, on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website, thanks to their digitization of the Percy Grainger Manuscript Collection.

Links have also been included on the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website to corresponding sound recordings featured on British Library Sounds. Listeners are able to hear the songs while following Grainger’s unique transcriptions of recordings by singers. Examples include folksingers: Joseph Taylor, Joseph Leaning, George Gouldthorpe, Charles Rosher, William Fishlock, Tom Roberts, Dean Robinson, and many more.

All recordings have been cataloged to include Roud numbers (this number refers to songs listed in the online databases Folk Song Index and Broadside Index), Grainger’s Melody numbers, and the numerical references to the discs and wax cylinders these sound recordings existed on previously.

Percy's Piano Roll Version of Country Gardens

Susan Colson — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 02:17:14 GMT

Listen here.

While he grew to hate performing Country Gardens, it is most certainly the song most identified with Grainger. His 1919 performance is recorded on a piano roll for all to enjoy.

White Plains: A Blooming City

Susan Colson — Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:39:35 GMT

Mark N. Grant and Susan Edwards Colson, IPGS Board Members, discuss the Percy Grainger Home, 7 Cromwell Place, with Marie Silverman Marich, from White Plains Beautification Foundation. Marie's broadcast, This Blooming City, uses Percy Grainger's composition, Country Gardens, as its theme song.

(Click on the image to hear the interview.)

John Amis Interview

Susan Colson — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 13:09:02 GMT

Percy talks about collecting folk songs, plays, and talks about meeting Edvard Grieg. Interesting.

Percy Pondered "All Sorts of Questions"

Susan Colson — Tue, 30 May 2017 13:16:56 GMT

At the end of our evening on May 12, there was a wonderful discussion let by Robert Sherman. Here is part of it:

The Guest Book

Susan Colson — Sat, 27 May 2017 01:29:48 GMT

By the late 1970's visitors to 7 Cromwell Place were a routine event. Someone finally decided in October 1977 that it would be a good idea to keep a record. The Guest Book was acquired and took its place on a desk in the corner of the dining room.

The Guest Book's pages hold quite a story. The very first signature is Burnett Cross. He's the fella who worked on the free music machines with Percy during the 1940's into the 50's. It is fitting that he has the honor of starting off.

About midway down the second page is Barry Ould's signature. His visit is dated May 1, 1978, Ella Grainger's birthday. Barry, the current president of the International Percy Grainger Society, was lucky to arrive just then and spend some time with Ella. Ella passed away a little over a year later in July 1979 at 90. Barry keeps visiting White Plains each year and tending the collection. Percy Grainger's works are still a major focus of Barry's music publishing company, Bardic Editions.

Two lines down from Barry, British Composer Ronald Stevenson signed in beautifully crafted script. He must have come to celebrate Ella's birthday, since his signature is dated May 1st also.

It's interesting to see who has visited 7 Cromwell Place over the years. Many musicians, often along with their families and friends, and a band director or two. Several years ago, the IPGS board was holding its annual meeting when there was a knock at the door. It was the band director from Ohio State University, who happened to be passing by. He decided to knock and had the good fortune of catching the board mid-meeting. Rolf Stang, Ella's longtime friend, dutifully left the meeting and led a tour.

Visitors at the May 12, 2017
Historic Landmark Dedication sign and examine the Guest Book.
(Lower right)

Last year, the entire band, two buses full of high students, from Fargo North High School, Fargo, North Dakota, stopped by. With over eighty students, the house was overflowing, but each seems to have a great time looking over Percy's scores and programs. Each one, along with their chaperones, signed the Guest Book.

The Guest Book is nearly filled now, ready to be filed away. It will take its place in among the many treasures that make up 7 Cromwell Place.

To visit to 7 Cromwell Place is to step back in time—and to step into Percy and Ella Grainger’s life.

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 15:00:00 GMT

There is Percy’s bamboo chin-up bar irreverently fixed across the columns in the parlor. There are Percy’s pianos--all three squeezed into a small music room. Glancing around in the front hall lets you know right away that, while this large grand house was built by a banker to make a statement about his social position and place in society, the Graingers used it a little differently.

To the Graingers it was home. Percy and his mother, Rose, moved here in May 1921. Percy took the summer off from his near-constant touring schedule to settle in and help Rose unpack the shipment from London. (They had left on a moment’s notice as WWI broke out, and their furniture had been hastily packed away in 1914.) But at the end of April 1922, the ailing Rose took her own life and Percy was at loose ends over the death. Percy saved pages from the New York Times, carefully chosen for the fact that they contained tragic stories, wrapped the brass bed from Rose’s room, and placed it in the attic. The porch swing where they sat to enjoy summer 1921 was taken down and placed in the attic, too. There they remain.

In 1928, after her marriage to Percy (in the Hollywood Bowl!), Ella Viola Strom moved in to 7 Cromwell Place. She must have sensed that she was stepping into Rose’s home. Rose’s dishes were still in the pantry, her mementos and family pictures still in her room. Percy and Ella dressed in their wedding finery and had photos taken by the front stairs. A new era was starting at 7 Cromwell.

Not everyone was so happy about Ella’s arrival. Frederick
Morse was the leading portrait photographer in White Plains and his wife Tonie was the niece of Percy's concert agent Antonia Sawyer. Fred and Tonie were Percy’s friends and had long stayed in the house while Percy was away (and he was always away-- his list of concert dates is astounding.) The Morses knew that Ella had met Percy on a trip returning from Australia, and that she had been in Australia visiting her lover, Iyemasa Tokugawa. To remind her that they knew her background, and possibly suspicious of her present motives, the Morses had the dining room papered in an Asian-themed wall paper.

Ella got the message. The dining room was recovered in a more suitable style. The Morses were moved next door to a house (no longer standing) that Percy built for them at 9 Cromwell.

Ella lived at 7 Cromwell for the rest of her life. Recipes in her handwriting are still in the kitchen. Her stuffed-to-overflowing sewing stand sits in the dining room. One of her most poignant touches are the tiny artworks and jottings she left around remembering Percy: a tiny heart tacked on his bedroom door, a note placed on a promotional poster for some concert or that other where a little yellow sticky notes that “this captures the serious look at PG often had,” and sometimes the beginning of a sketch on the back of a receipt from a New York shop “Tappe Mode.” Also prominently displayed in the living room are several of Ella's "rime tiles" -- exquisite ceramics Ella crafted with her own poems and illustrations etched in.

The Grainger story is written room-to-room at 7 Cromwell Place. If you forget, just look around.

Dr. K.K. Nygaard (U of Melbourne) on Percy Grainger - 7-6-85

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 11:00:00 GMT

Dr. Kaare K. Nygaard was Percy Grainger's physician during the last 10 years or so of Percy's life in White Plains, NY (the early 1950s until Percy's death on Feb 20, 1961). Dr. Nygaard was in a unique position to observe Percy's illnesses and his character, and gives his fascinating insights into Percy's complex personality, motivations, and life story in this lecture at the University of Melbourne in Australia in 1985.

CLICK to listen to this one hour recording of Dr. Nygaard.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE: A Halloween Tale

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 12:00:00 GMT

Is the Grainger House haunted?

For years, there have been reports that the Grainger House is haunted. Musicians composing alone at Percy's own big work table in the dining room have suddenly felt Percy's presence, approving or disapproving, beside them. A former housesitter of reliable and sound mind even claims that he saw objects move on three different occasions: a table leg in the kitchen vibrated; a backpack strap on the second floor oscillated; and a light switch in the basement turned off by itself.

Recently, because of the number of vagrants and other security concerns in the neighborhood, the White Plains police have been making regular rounds about the house. Surveillance cameras have also been installed inside the house.

Strange things are happening

On the night of Saturday, July 2, 2016, another as yet unexplained occurrence was captured on film: something triggered the motion detector in the dining room, once at 8:32, again at 9:23. A lighted object flew across the room, passing out of sight as it left the room. It did not fly like a moth or a bat, and nothing could be found wrong with the camera itself. And a laser beam wouldn't set off the motion detector. Creepy! You can see the videos for yourself by clicking on the links provided below. At the bottom of this item, you will find some screen captures from the first video. In it, the object begins as a tiny dot against a dark background in the upper right hand corner. It grows in size as it passes across the table and exits in the lower left. In the second video, the object flies from left to right. Security camera experts have viewed these films and have offered no scientific explanation.

Who was it?

Was it Percy, testing an inspiration for some new musical device? Was it Ella, resident sprite of the household? Was it Percy's mother Rose, wishing to assert her domination? What do YOU think it was? Click on the links and see.

https://video.nest.com/clip/a414fbc0e1c7466a8a3701a50b98da41.mp4

https://video.nest.com/clip/78208f34d9c746f18a90b149b0f6f342.mp4