![]() ![]() I will not say that I am sure I really share these dreams myself. I do not know why nature should give birth to dreams like peace, kindliness, impersonality. I do not pretend to understand nature, or even to sympathize with her aims. My horror arises out of a wish to see nature realise her dreams – horror at needless destruction of nature’s dreams. No, my horror at the helping hand held out to the Jews has nothing to do with dislike of Jews or due to any feeling on my part that Jews behave badly. “It stands to reason,” Grainger wrote, “that such a very loving, tender & warm nature as yrs (so fully forth-shown in yr music as to leave no doubt of it in any music lover) would answer as you do to Jewish suffering & act as you do.” Grainger then begins to list everything he finds admirable in the Jews, and to mention his kindnesses to his Jewish secretary – a miscellany that practically telegraphs the approaching objection to Quilter’s compassion: The rampant cruelty of the Nazis had distressed the sensitive Quilter to his core, compelling him to offer financial assistance and shelter to Jews trying to flee the Reich. In early 1939, as the world careened into war, into its reckoning with nationalism and militarism and racism, Grainger wrote a long letter to his longtime friend, composer Roger Quilter. (More than once, Grainger arrived for a concert only to be mistakenly arrested by the local police as a vagrant.) And he was volubly opinionated, in both interviews and correspondence. ![]() He had a passion for physical activity, sometimes hiking from town to town on his tours. (This included replacing the Italian lingua franca of music notation – molto rallentando, for instance, became “slow up lots.”) He home-made clothes out of bath towels in wild geometric patterns. He invented his own version of English, eliminating words with Greek or Latin roots in favor of made-up Saxon or Scandinavian-derived synonyms. Grainger was what journalists today call “great copy.” He was tall and striking, with a shock of golden hair and a clutch of irresistible eccentricities. He toured almost constantly, performing recitals, appearing with leading orchestras and attracting publicity wherever he went. ![]() One of his compositions, an arrangement of an English folk song called “Country Gardens,” became a bona fide hit. (Grainger ended up hating it.) He became a sensation in London and, later, the United States, where he moved in 1914. Fellow Australians collected funds to send the young piano prodigy to Germany for that classical music necessity, a European education. Grainger was born in Melbourne in 1882, and he made his mark quickly. The contrast with “Colonial Song” is strikingly wide – or so it would seem, to anybody but Percy Grainger. The insistent nasal howl undulates and slides, familiar triads transformed into an unearthly whistle of sound through constant fluctuation. The reed box tone tool was a long sheet of brown paper tracking past a matrix of harmonium reeds, tuned in eighth tones, 48 to the octave, while a trio of repurposed vacuum cleaners pumped air through holes punched in the paper. Grainger had first conceived of such music in his early days as a touring virtuoso, riding the train across the richly bleak, beautifully monotonous Australian landscape. By then, stardom had, in many ways, passed him by, and while he continued to perform, he increasingly holed himself up in his house in White Plains, New York, building complicated electro-mechanical contraptions, trying to realize what he called “free music”: eschewing what he heard as the tyranny of regular rhythms, of discrete pitches, of conventional harmony. ![]() Gliding chords on a “reed box tone tool” is Percy Grainger in 1951. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |