Percy Grainger

Who was Percy Grainger

George Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961) was a renowned pianist and composer, commanding sold-out performances during his tours through North America, Europe and Australia. His popular works, such as “Country Gardens” and “Molly on the Shore,” were best sellers of the early twentieth-century.

Born in Australia, Grainger studied in Germany starting at age 13 and later established his career in England. At the outbreak of WWI, he moved to the United States, settling in White Plains in 1921.

Innovative and multitalented, Grainger was additionally a music arranger, a pioneer in the collection and transcription of folk songs, a watercolorist, essayist, and inventor. In the later years of his life, Grainger focused on creating what he termed “free music”, a music unconstrained by a fixed pitch, regular metre and human performance. He worked to develop mechanical music machines, anticipating many of the artistic developments of the later 20^th century.

I was always fond of the sound of whistling. It makes me think of the wind: The wind in a ship’s rigging; the wind in trees or below the eaves of houses. When whistlers are added to a mixed chorus (as in my original setting of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’) we get a tonal range of 5½ octaves – almost the range of a symphony orchestra – and without the use of any instruments at all. This makes this medium very convenient for performances out of doors, at picnics, etc. Before the turn of the century a beloved Swedish friend, Sigurd Fornander, charmed me by his lovely whistling. So my settings of ‘Ye Banks and Braes’ are dedicated to him. Percy Aldridge Grainger, December, 1953

Always I have doted on sudden wrenching of trains, carts and ships; always I have thrilled at the sound of haulage crashing around in a storm at sea, at the sound of cracking, creaking, smashing wood and at all sights and sounds of roughness, force-play [violence], wreckment and breakage. Always I have joy-squaffed the moving from house to another, with its upset rooms and the banging about of boxes. Percy Aldridge Grainger, The Aldridge Grainger Ström Saga, 1934

Interest in Sounds

From an early age, Percy Grainger was captivated and curious about sounds, and many stories exist that confirm this interest. In a 1953 letter to Burnett Cross, with whom he was collaborating on free music machines, Percy writes of the good rhythmic effects, never yet heard in music, achieved when holding the ping pong paddle close to the bouncing ball.^[1] As Daniel N. Leeson, a clarinetist who became acquainted with Ella and Percy Grainger in 1958, recalled, “Even at more than 70 years of age, new, strange and different sounds were of interest to him. (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.)”^[2] This interest in all sounds, from musical instruments to whistling winds to the squeaky hinges of a door, was a driving force in Grainger’s work in experimental music.

^[1] Teresa Balough and Kay Dreyfus, ed., Distant Dreams: The Correspondence of Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross, 1946-60 (Melbourne: Lyrebird Press, 2020), 89.

^[2] Malcolm Gillies and David Pear, Portrait of Percy Grainger, (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 190.

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