Percy Grainger
Percy Aldridge Grainger (born George Percy Grainger; 8 July 1882 – 20 February 1961) was an Australian-born composer, arranger and pianist who moved to the United States in 1914 and became an American citizen in 1918. In the course of a long and innovative career he played a prominent role in the revival of interest in British folk music in the early years of the 20th century. Although much of his work was experimental and unusual, the piece with which he is most generally associated is his piano arrangement of the folk-dance tune "Country Gardens".
Percy Grainger
Australian composer
Australian composer
20 February 1961
Grainger left Australia at the age of 13 to attend the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. Between 1901 and 1914 he was based in London, where he established himself first as a society pianist and later as a concert performer, composer, and collector of original folk melodies. As his reputation grew he met many of the significant figures in European music, forming important friendships with Frederick Delius and Edvard Grieg. He became a champion of Nordic music and culture, his enthusiasm for which he often expressed in private letters, sometimes in crudely racial or anti-Semitic terms.
In 1914, Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely in Europe and Australia. He served briefly as a bandsman in the United States Army during the First World War through 1917–18, and took American citizenship in 1918. After his mother's suicide in 1922, he became increasingly involved in educational work. He also experimented with music machines, which he hoped would supersede human interpretation. In the 1930s he set up the Grainger Museum in Melbourne, his birthplace, as a monument to his life and works, and as a future research archive. As he grew older, he continued to give concerts and to revise and rearrange his own compositions, while writing little new music. After the Second World War, ill health reduced his levels of activity. He considered his career a failure. He gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.
Later career[edit]
Second World War[edit]
The outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 curtailed Grainger's overseas travelling. In the autumn of 1940, alarmed that the war might precipitate an invasion of the United States eastern seaboard, he and Ella moved to Springfield, Missouri, in the centre of the continent.[95] From 1940 Grainger played regularly in charity concerts, especially after the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war in December 1941; the historian Robert Simon calculates that Grainger made a total of 274 charity appearances during the war years, many of them at Army and Air Force camps.[93] In 1942 a collection of his Kipling settings, the Jungle Book cycle, was performed in eight cities by the band of the Gustavus Adolphus College from St. Peter, Minnesota.[96]
Postwar decline[edit]
Exhausted from his wartime concerts routine, Grainger spent much of 1946 on holiday in Europe. He was suffering a sense of career failure; in 1947, when refusing the Chair of Music at Adelaide University, he wrote: "If I were 40 years younger, and not so crushed by defeat in every branch of music I have essayed, I am sure I would have welcomed such a chance".[97] In January 1948 he conducted the premiere of his wind band setting of The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart, written for the Goldman Band to celebrate the 70th birthday of its founder. Afterward, Grainger denigrated his own music as "commonplace" while praising Darius Milhaud's Suite Française, with which it had shared the programme.[98]
Recordings[edit]
Between 1908 and 1957 Grainger made numerous recordings, usually as pianist or conductor, of his own and other composers' music. His first recordings, for The Gramophone Company Ltd (later HMV), included the cadenza to Grieg's piano concerto; he did not record a complete version of this work on disc until 1945. Much of his recording work was done between 1917 and 1931, under contract with Columbia. At other times he recorded for Decca (1944–45 and 1957), and Vanguard (1957). Of his own compositions and arrangements, "Country Gardens", "Shepherd's Hey" and "Molly on the Shore" and "Lincolnshire Posy" were recorded most frequently; in recordings of other composers, piano works by Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Grieg, Liszt and Schumann figure most often.[144] Grainger's complete 78 rpm solo piano recordings are now available on compact disc as a CD box set.[145]
During his association with the Duo-Art company between 1915 and 1932, Grainger made around 80 piano rolls of his own and others' music using a wooden robot designed to play a concert grand piano via an array of precision mechanical fingers and feet; replayings of many of these rolls have subsequently been recorded on to compact disc (CD).[146][147] This reproduction system allowed Grainger to make a posthumous appearance in the Albert Hall, London, during the 1988 last night of the Proms as soloist with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Grieg's Piano Concerto.[148]
Since Grainger's death, recordings of his works have been undertaken by many artists and issued under many different labels. In 1995, Chandos Records began to compile a complete recorded edition of Grainger's original compositions and folk settings. Of 25 anticipated volumes, 19 had been completed as of 2010;[149] these were issued as a CD boxed set in 2011, to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer's death. A reissue of this along with two extra CDs was released in January 2021 to mark the 60th anniversary of the composer's death.[150]