Percy Grainger

Percy Grainger 1922

Percy Aldridge Grainger (born July 8, 1882 in Brighton , a suburb of Melbourne , † February 20, 1961 in White Plains , New York State ) was an Australian- born American pianist , composer and university teacher.

Life

Percy Grainger's father was an architect and immigrant from London , his mother, Rose, the daughter of a hotelier from Adelaide , also came from an English immigrant family. The father was an alcoholic and when Grainger was 11 years old, the parents separated after the mother became infected with syphilis by his father ; the father then returned to London. His mother, a domineering and possessive, but culturally educated personality who recognized his musical abilities, brought him - after studying with Louis Pabst - to Europe in 1895 to study at Dr. Hoch's Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main (as part of the so-called Frankfurt Group ). There he received piano lessons from James Kwast . Even Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was his teacher for a short time. By using irregular and uncommon meters, Grainger showed his ambitions as a musical experimenter there.

From 1900 Grainger toured Europe as a concert pianist. From 1901 to 1914 he lived in London and made friends with Edvard Grieg in 1906 , who also influenced him, so in the development of his interest in the recording of folk songs of rural England. The first compositions were created.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Grainger moved to the United States and applied for US citizenship. When the USA entered the war in 1917, he volunteered as a military musician and - initially as a saxophonist - joined a military band which he later conducted. He gave numerous concerts with her to promote war bonds and traveled with her through North America, Europe, South Africa and Australia.

In 1918 he became a citizen of the USA. His piano piece Country Gardens made him known and became a "hit" of his time, although Grainger himself increasingly loathed it. With increasing prosperity, Grainger moved with his mother to the wealthy New York suburb of White Plains after the war . However, Rose Grainger's health deteriorated, both physically and mentally, and she died of suicide in 1922. This "freed" Grainger from an extraordinarily intense relationship that had been mistakenly viewed as incestuous ; however, his mother's memory remained dear to him throughout his life.

In the same year he traveled to Denmark . This was his first trip to Scandinavia to collect folk music there; In 1906 he had already visited Grieg. The orchestral versions of the music of this region are among his creations. 1919 to 1931 he worked as a lecturer at the Music College in Chicago .

In November 1926 Grainger met the Swedish artist and poet Ella Ström and immediately fell in love with her. Their wedding took place two years later at the Hollywood Bowl during a concert in front of 20,000 listeners, with an orchestra of 126 musicians and a choir performing his latest composition, To a Nordic Princess , dedicated to his Ella.

In 1932 and 1933 Grainger was Dean of Music at New York University and underlined his reputation as an experimenter by including jazz in the curriculum and inviting Duke Ellington as a visiting professor ; however, he found the academic life difficult and soon gave up. In 1935 the foundation stone was laid for the Grainger Museum , which is affiliated with the University of Melbourne .

In 1940, the Graingers moved to Springfield, Missouri , from where Grainger traveled again to give a series of military concerts during World War II . After the war, he was burdened more and more by his poor health, decreasing pianistic skills and the generally increasing disinterest in classical music.

In the last years of his life, Grainger developed the "Free Music Machine", a forerunner of the synthesizer, in collaboration with Burnett Cross . In 1950 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters . In 1990 he was posthumously inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame in recognition of his work .

Notes on personality

Aside from his music, Grainger gives rise to controversy in two respects. First, he was a proven sado masochist . Second, he was an openly racist and anti-Semite . This xenophobia , however, was full of inconsistency and eccentricity : he admired folkloric musical forms and was friends with Duke Ellington and George Gershwin . On the other hand, he used in his letters and music manuscripts a style he called "blue-eyed English", similar to the so-called Anglish and the "Pure English" of the poet William Barnes from Dorset , which erased all the influences of Latin . Therefore “music” was replaced with “tone-art” and “article” with “writ-piece”.

Works

Grainger collected over 500 folk songs , which are the basis for his British Folk Music Settings such as Country Gardens , Molly on the Shore , Shepherd's Hey! and Irish Tune from County Derry . As a rule, he published several versions of his compositions, for example for wind band (wind band or military band), wind quintet (wind quintet) and one or two pianos.

Works for orchestra

• 1928: Colonial Song
• In a Nutshell, suite
• Molly on the Shore, Irish Reel
• The Warriors - Music to an Imaginary Ballet (1918), probably Grainger's most important work
• The Merry Wedding for choir and orchestra
• Danish Folksong Suite
• Arrival Platform Humlet for orchestra and piano
• Australian Marching Song
• Beaches of Lukannon for mixed choir, strings and harmonium
• Train Music (1901)
• Scotch Strathspey And Reel for choir and orchestra ("What shall we do with a drunken sailor?")

Works for wind orchestra

• 1901/1902: Hill Song no 1 (originally composed for 2 piccolo flutes, 6 oboes, 6 English horns, 6 bassoons and contrabassoon)
• 1905: Lads of Wamphray March
• 1905: Walking Tune
• 1907: Hill Song no 2 , dedicated to Balfour Gardiner ; Set up in 1929 for two flutes (one of which is also a piccolo), oboe, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, bassoon, two trumpets, horn, trombone, cymbals, two harmoniums (or one harmonium and one organ) and piano
• 1910: Mock Morris
• 1911: The Sussex Mummers' Christmas Carol
• 1911: I'm Seventeen Come Sunday
• 1911: Willow, Willow
• 1912: Sir Eglamore for mixed choir and wind orchestra
• 1914: The Bride's Tragedy for mixed choir and wind orchestra
• 1916: Arrival Platform Humlet
• 1916: The Warriors
• 1918: Children's March: Over the Hills and Far Away
• 1918: Irish Tune from County Derry; Shepherd's Hey
• 1919: Molly on the Shore
• 1923: The Widow's Party for male choir and wind orchestra
• 1928: Colonial Song
• 1937: La Serenade Toscane Opus 3 No. 6 by Gabriel Fauré , set for wind orchestra
• 1937: Lincolnshire Posy
  1. Lisbon (Dublin Bay)
  2. Horkstow Grange
  3. Rufford Park Poachers
  4. The Brisk Young Sailor
  5. Lord Melbourne
  6. The Lost Lady Found
• 1938: The Merrie King
• 1939: The Immovable Do
• 1939: The Duke of Marlborough Fanfare
• 1942: The "Gum-Sucker's" March
• 1942: Chorale No. II by César Franck , set for wind orchestra
• 1943: The Power of Rome and the Christian Heart
• 1948: Marching Song of Democracy for mixed choir and wind orchestra
• 1949: Ye Banks and Braes o 'Bonnie Doon
• 1953: Country Gardens
• 1953: Bell Piece ; Fantasy on a song by John Dowland : Now, O Now, I Needs Must Part
• 1954: Faeroe Island Dance (Let's Dance Gay In Green Meadow [Neath The Mold Shall Never Dancer's Tread Go])
• Angelus Ad Virginem
• Australian up-country song

Chamber music

• 1902: The Three Ravens for baritone solo, choir and five clarinets
• 1907: Died For Love for vocal soloist, flute, clarinet and bassoon
• 1912: Walking Tune for wind quintet; later reworked by the composer for symphonic winds at the request of Leopold Stokowski.
• 1938: The Merrie King for three clarinets, flute, bass clarinet, baritone saxophone, contrabassoon, trumpet, horn and piano
• Afterword for choir and brass
• As Sally Sat A'Weeping Brass Quintet
• Beautiful Fresh Flower for saxophone trio

Works for piano

• Always Merry and Bright for piano 4 hands

Vocal music

• Agincourt song for choir
• Anchor song for choir
• At Twilight for mixed choir with solo tenor

Movie

• 1999: Extreme Passion ( Passion ) - biography film directed by Peter Duncan

literature

• Penelope Thwaites (Ed.): The New Percy Grainger Companion. Boydell Press, Woodbridge 2010, ISBN 978-1-84383-601-8

Web links

Commons : Percy Grainger  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Percy Grainger in the catalog of the German National Library
• Percy Grainger Society
• Grainger website of the Australian Music Center
• The Grainger Wind Symphony, an Australian wind band
• Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne, Australia

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members: Percy Grainger. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed March 31, 2019 . 
2. ^ ARIA Hall of Fame. Australian Recording Industry Association , accessed August 6, 2017 .