75 Facts About Percy Grainger

Percy Grainger 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 Percy Grainger moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life, though he travelled widely in Europe and Australia.

Percy Grainger experimented with music machines, which he hoped would supersede human interpretation.

Percy Grainger gave his last concert in 1960, less than a year before his death.

Percy Grainger was born on 8 July 1882 in Brighton, south-east of Melbourne.

Percy Grainger's father, John Grainger, an English-born architect who had emigrated to Australia in 1877, won recognition for his design of the Princes Bridge across the Yarra River in Melbourne; Percy Grainger's mother Rose Annie Aldridge was the daughter of Adelaide hotelier George Aldridge.

John Percy Grainger was an accomplished artist, with broad cultural interests and a wide circle of friends.

Percy Grainger had some private work, designing Nellie Melba's home, Coombe Cottage, at Coldstream.

Except for three months' formal schooling as a 12-year-old, during which he was bullied and ridiculed by his classmates, Percy Grainger was educated at home.

From his earliest lessons, Percy Grainger developed a lifelong fascination with Nordic culture; writing late in life, he said that the Icelandic Saga of Grettir the Strong was "the strongest single artistic influence on my life".

Percy Grainger's first known composition, "A Birthday Gift to Mother", is dated 1893.

In Frankfurt, Rose established herself as a teacher of English; her earnings were supplemented by contributions from John Percy Grainger, who had settled in Perth.

Percy Grainger had difficult relations with his original composition teacher, Iwan Knorr; he withdrew from Knorr's classes to study composition privately with Karl Klimsch, an amateur composer and folk-music enthusiast, whom he would later honour as "my only composition teacher".

Percy Grainger was performing in concerts in private homes.

The Times critic reported after one such appearance that Percy Grainger's playing "revealed rare intelligence and a good deal of artistic insight".

In February 1902 Percy Grainger made his first appearance as a piano soloist with an orchestra, playing Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto with the Bath Pump Room Orchestra.

However, the visit was not a success; as Bird notes, Busoni had expected "a willing slave and adoring disciple", a role Percy Grainger was not willing to fulfil.

Percy Grainger returned to London in July 1903; almost immediately he departed with Rose on a 10-month tour of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, as a member of a party organised by the Australian contralto Ada Crossley.

In 1905, inspired by a lecture given by the pioneer folk-song historian Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger began to collect original folk songs.

From 1906 Percy Grainger used a phonograph, one of the first collectors to do so, and by this means he assembled more than 200 Edison cylinder recordings of native folk singers.

Percy Grainger first met Edvard Grieg at the home of the London financier Sir Edgar Speyer, in May 1906.

Percy Grainger had resolved to establish himself as a top-ranking pianist before promoting himself as a composer, though he continued to compose both original works and folk-song settings.

In 1911 Percy Grainger finally felt confident enough of his standing as a pianist to begin large-scale publishing of his compositions.

On 21 May 1912 Percy Grainger presented the first concert devoted entirely to his own compositions, at the Aeolian Hall, London; the concert was, he reported, "a sensational success".

In 1905 Percy Grainger began a close friendship with Karen Holten, a Danish music student who had been recommended to him as a piano pupil.

Percy Grainger became an important confidante; the relationship persisted for eight years, largely through correspondence.

Percy Grainger was briefly engaged in 1913 to another pupil, Margot Harrison, but the relationship foundered through a mixture of Rose's over-possessiveness and Percy Grainger's indecision.

Thomas Beecham, who was one of the festival's guest conductors, reported to Delius that "Percy Grainger was good in the forte passages, but made far too much noise in the quieter bits".

Percy Grainger was receiving increasing recognition as a composer; leading musicians and orchestras were adding his works to their repertoires.

However, according to Bird, Percy Grainger often explained that his reason for leaving London was that "he wanted to emerge as Australia's first composer of worth, and to have laid himself open to the possibility of being killed would have rendered his goal unattainable".

Percy Grainger played works by Bach, Brahms, Handel and Chopin alongside two of his own compositions: "Colonial Song" and "Mock Morris".

In July 1915 Percy Grainger formally registered his intention to apply for US citizenship.

Percy Grainger had joined as a saxophonist, though he records learning the oboe: "I long for the time when I can blow my oboe well enough to play in the band".

Percy Grainger was performing around 120 concerts a year, generally to great critical acclaim, and in April 1921 reached a wider audience by performing in a cinema, New York's Capitol Theatre.

Percy Grainger commented that the huge audiences at these cinema concerts often showed greater appreciation for his playing than those at established concert venues such as Carnegie Hall and the Aeolian.

Percy Grainger began to develop the technique of elastic scoring, a form of flexible orchestration which enabled works to be performed by different numbers of players and instrument types, from small chamber groups up to full orchestral strength.

Delius was by now almost blind; Percy Grainger helped fulfill his friend's wish to see a Norwegian sunset by carrying him to the top of a nearby mountain peak.

In 1924, Percy Grainger became a vegetarian, although he hated vegetables; his diet comprised primarily dairy, pastry, fruit, and nuts.

Percy Grainger visited Australia and New Zealand, in 1924 and again in 1926.

Percy Grainger always acknowledged her as a family member, and developed a warm personal relationship with her.

On 25 October 1932 his lecture was illustrated by Duke Ellington and his band, who appeared in person; Percy Grainger admired Ellington's music, seeing harmonic similarities with Delius.

In 1937 Percy Grainger began an association with the Interlochen National Music Camp, and taught regularly at its summer schools until 1944.

Percy Grainger began collecting and recovering from friends letters and artefacts, even those demonstrating the most private aspects of his life, such as whips, bloodstained shirts and revealing photographs.

Percy Grainger believed that conformity with the traditional rules of set scales, rhythms and harmonic procedures amounted to "absurd goose-stepping", from which music should be set free.

Percy Grainger demonstrated two experimental compositions of free music, performed initially by a string quartet and later by the use of electronic theremins.

Percy Grainger believed that ideally, free music required non-human performance, and spent much of his later life developing machines to realise this vision.

Percy Grainger wrote Lincolnshire Posy for the March 1937 convention of the American Band Masters' Association in Milwaukee, and in 1939, on his last visit to England before the Second World War, he composed "The Duke of Marlborough's Fanfare", giving it the subtitle "British War Mood Grows".

From 1940 Percy 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 Percy Grainger made a total of 274 charity appearances during the war years, many of them at Army and Air Force camps.

Percy Grainger 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".

On 10 August 1948, Percy Grainger appeared at the London Proms, playing the piano part in his Suite on Danish Folksongs with the London Symphony Orchestra under Basil Cameron.

In October 1953 Percy Grainger was operated on for abdominal cancer; his fight against this disease would last for the rest of his life.

Percy Grainger has appeared at concerts, often performed in church halls and educational establishments rather than major concert venues.

In September 1955 Percy Grainger made his final visit to Australia, where he spent nine months organising and arranging exhibits for the Percy Grainger Museum.

Percy Grainger refused to consider a "Grainger Festival", as suggested by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, because he felt that his homeland had rejected him and his music.

Percy Grainger agreed to visit Britten's Aldeburgh Festival in 1959, but was prevented by illness.

Percy Grainger died in the White Plains hospital on 20 February 1961, at the age of 78.

Percy Grainger's remains were buried in the Aldridge family vault in the West Terrace Cemetery, alongside Rose's ashes.

Percy Grainger died at White Plains on 17 July 1979.

Percy Grainger was a musical democrat; he believed that in a performance each player's role should be of equal importance.

Percy Grainger's elastic scoring technique was developed to enable groups of all sizes and combinations of instruments to give effective performances of his music.

In search of specific sounds Percy Grainger employed unconventional instruments and techniques: solovoxes, theremins, marimbas, musical glasses, harmoniums, banjos, and ukuleles.

In "Random Round", inspired by the communal music-making he had heard in the Pacific Islands on his second Australasian tour, Percy Grainger introduced an element of chance into performances; individual vocalists and instrumentalists could make random choices from a menu of variations.

The brief "Sea Song" of 1907 was an early attempt by Percy Grainger to write "beatless" music.

Percy Grainger reflected on whether it would have been better, from the point of view of his development as a composer, had he never met the Griegs, "sweet and dear though they were to me".

Percy Grainger was known for his musical experimentation and did not hesitate to exploit the capabilities of the orchestra.

Percy Grainger considered himself an Australian composer who, he said, wrote music "in the hopes of bringing honor and fame to my native land".

However, much of Percy Grainger's working life was spent elsewhere, and the extent to which he influenced Australian music, within his lifetime and thereafter, is debatable.

In 1956, the suggestion by the composer Keith Humble that Percy Grainger be invited to write music for the opening of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne was rejected by the organisers of the Games.

Percy Grainger was a life-long atheist and believed he would only endure in the body of work he left behind.

The Grainger home at 7 Cromwell Place, White Plains, New York, is the Percy Grainger Library and is a further repository of memorabilia and historic performance material, open to researchers and visitors.

Percy Grainger's pioneering work in the recording and setting of folk songs greatly influenced the following generation of English composers; Benjamin Britten acknowledged the Australian as his master in this respect.

In 1945, Percy Grainger devised an informal ratings system for composers and musical styles, based on criteria that included originality, complexity and beauty.

Percy Grainger's failure to be recognised as a composer for anything beyond his popular folk-song arrangements was a source of frustration and disappointment; for years after his death the bulk of his output remained largely unperformed.

An unsigned tribute published on the Gramophone website in February 2011 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Percy Grainger's death opined that "though he would never be put on a pedestal to join the pantheon of immortals, he is unorthodox, original and deserves better than to be dismissed by the more snooty arbiters of musical taste".

Between 1908 and 1957 Percy Grainger made numerous recordings, usually as pianist or conductor, of his own and other composers' music.