Grainger the Modernist

Suzanne Robinson, Kay Dreyfus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317125013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Unaccountably, Percy Grainger has remained on the margins of both American music history and twentieth-century modernism. This volume reveals the well-known composer of popular gems to be a self-described 'hyper-modernist' who composed works of uncompromising dissonance, challenged the conventions of folk song collection and adaptation, re-visioned the modern orchestra, experimented with 'ego-less' composition and designed electronic machines intended to supersede human application. Grainger was far from being a self-sufficient maverick working in isolation. Through contact with innovators such as Ferrucio Busoni, Léon Theremin and Henry Cowell; promotion of the music of modern French and Spanish schools; appreciation of vernacular, jazz and folk musics; as well as with the study and transcription of non-Western music; he contested received ideas and proposed many radical new approaches. By reappraising Grainger's social and historical connectedness and exploring the variety of aspects of modernity seen in his activities in the British, American and Australian contexts, the authors create a profile of a composer, propagandist and visionary whose modernist aesthetic paralleled that of the most advanced composers of his day, and, in some cases, anticipated their practical experiments.

Chapter 1
Introduction

And then there is myself – way ahead (tho I have to say it myself) of all my time-mates, in any land, in experimentalism & go-aheadness. … Yet my name is never mentioned in any book dealing with modern music.

Grainger, ‘English-Speaking Leadership in Tone-Art’ (1944)¹

Can Percy Grainger, the composer renowned for ‘naïve little folk ditties’, be considered modern, or even modernist?² Grainger has long been consigned to the domain of the populist, and populism is usually considered antithetical to modernism. T. S. Eliot, for one, argued that modern art ‘must be difficult’.³ There is no question of Grainger’s popular success: in 1912 the London Daily Telegraph described his Mock Morris (a ‘paltry piece’ in the composer’s view) as ‘by far the most popular piece of British music for a long time’.⁴ In the following year the work received more than 500 performances in addition to sundry outings of other folk song adaptations such as Shepherd’s Hey and Irish Tune from County Derry. By the composer’s own admission, Mock Morris provided no challenge to the compositional status quo: its chords ‘are at least as diatonic and unmodulating as Handel’s, if not more so’.⁵ The same could be said for many of his folk song or folklike settings and arrangements. In fact, so much do these outweigh Grainger’s other works that, by Penelope Thwaites’s count, they amount to three quarters of his output. It is unsurprising then that the potent combination of pretty pastoralism and a ready assortment of versions has ensured that the folk-inspired works have come to define Grainger. As early as 1916 Cyril Scott lamented that ‘a man nearly always becomes celebrated by his lightest, most frivolous, and most easily understandable works: … Grainger has certainly become a victim to this trait in the public’s mentality’.⁶ Almost 70 years later David Josephson agreed, writing that ‘our narrow concentration on [Grainger’s folk song collections and settings] has yielded a distorted and partial view of his debt and contribution to English music’.⁷ But this did not prevent him apostrophizing Grainger’s art music as something ‘rooted in the popular expression of prewar England: the drawing-room ballad of his mother, the folk-song of old men in rural workhouses, the music-hall fare of their working-class descendants; and the musical comedy of the Edwardian London bourgeoisie’.⁸ Dismissive of the fruits of the American years, Josephson relegated Grainger to unambiguous Edwardianism and so, if anything, to a catchpool of what Walter Frisch terms ‘ambivalent modernism’.⁹ Grainger is thus consigned to the company of folk-influenced composers such as Granville Bantock and Joseph Holbrooke whose stars waned after 1914. But this is to ignore what he had in common with Charles Ives and Henry Cowell and the American tradition of experimentalism. Seeing this latter connection, Wilfrid Mellers, by contrast, has no compunction in describing Grainger as a modernist, even if he sees him as ‘at once an avant-garde experimentalist ahead of his time, and a pop composer dedicated to the continuity of tradition and of the common touch’.¹⁰ That Grainger could be both avant-garde and popular renders him paradoxical in Mellers’s sight: whatever modernism he demonstrated was unfortunately contradicted by the very existence of the popular works. Can we not appreciate Grainger, though, as someone who according to Daniel Albright’s definition of modernism was ‘testing the limits of aesthetic construction’?¹¹ Can we therefore incorporate Grainger into the history of musical modernism?

Incontestably, Grainger understood himself as a modernist and should be evaluated as much for his self-naming as for his exemplification, however apparently compromised, of compositional radicalism. ‘In my early years as a modernist’, Grainger explained many years later:

I took it for granted that I, as an Australian, would be ahead of my European tone-fellows in original inventivity & experimentalism. When Jacques Blanche met me in Dieppe, the summer of 1902, & showed me Debussy’s music for the 1st time, I said to him, of it: ‘That is only one of the trees – in my forest’ (so he recorded, years later) – so much bigger than any European did I feel myself to be.¹²

The year of Grainger’s ‘coming out’ as a popular composer, 1912, was a landmark year for the infiltration of Continental modernism into London concert life.¹³ On the evening before the first Proms performance of Mock Morris Grainger attended the London premiere of Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces, conducted by Henry Wood. No more unambiguously modernist music had so far been heard in London, and apart from the Ballets Russes performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring this was the most advanced work to be heard before the war. Infamously, the orchestra was assailed by hisses and laughter as well as general incomprehension – even a well-disposed critic such as Ernest Newman reported that he was ‘not merely left with the impression that some of it was bad music, but with the doubt as to whether it was music at all’.¹⁴ But for Grainger the evening was a watershed. Writing to a Danish correspondent he confided that Schoenberg was ‘the greatest revolution I have witnessed’, adding: ‘He opens great and rich freedoms for all of us composers.’¹⁵ The freedom that Grainger spoke of was not simply the freedom to compose in any idiom he chose, whether intelligible or unintelligible, tonal or atonal – Grainger had already achieved that for himself – but a licence to position himself among the avant-garde. Having heard Schoenberg’s music Grainger more than ever regretted composing for the market, which brought with it ‘that particular taste in the mouth that prostitution brings’.¹⁶ The ‘deeper voices’ had been silent too long.¹⁷ Only two years later, having abruptly abandoned a country he associated with personal and artistic repression, Grainger openly identified himself as someone ‘steeped … in chromatic, whole-tonic, discordant and every other to me available form of “harmonic” decadence (so-called)’.¹⁸ In the May 1916 issue of Etude he appeared in the magazine’s shortlist of ‘“Futurist” and “Modernist” Composers’.¹⁹ Recognized there were clusters of French, Spanish, Russian and German composers (including Debussy, Satie, Strauss, Schoenberg and Stravinsky) and a combined group of English and American ones: Grainger’s ‘compatriots’ were Bantock, John Alden Carpenter, Frederick Delius, Holbrooke, Leo Ornstein and Scott. In an accompanying article, essentially a manifesto in favour of ‘the new’, Grainger affirmed the advances made by Schoenberg. Speaking rhetorically, but clearly referring to himself, he stated that:

the style of almost any composer cannot fail to gain something in the direction of greater freedom and naturalness through contact with the work of the much discussed Austrian, and independently of whether the composer happens to like or dislike Schönberg’s actual compositions. Such contact can hardly fail to infect us all with a beneficial impulse towards greater self-indulgence, greater unrestraint. Emboldened by Schönberg’s plucky example, we unconsciously feel ourselves freer than before to indulge in part-writing that ‘makes harmony’ or in part-writing that neglects to ‘make harmony’ at will; and surely this is an incalculable advantage to certain phases of European emotionalism – if, indeed, in the deeper sense, any influence outside of himself can be rightly termed an advantage or disadvantage to a creative artist.²⁰

Grainger followed these comments with a proposal for liberation from rhythmic regularity, smaller intervallic divisions of the scale and the revivification of modern music through understanding of the ‘primitive’. While these remarks synchronized him, to a degree, with the most advanced composers of his day he placed far less emphasis than them on formal or harmonic innovation; this is not to say, however, that he was not imagining what was ‘difficult’ in other departments.

Few Americans in May 1916 could have known the extent of his compositional radicalism. All of his most advanced works existed only in manuscript; many of them were merely sketches. Cyril Scott emphasized this point in The Philosophy of Modernism (1916), revealing that he estimated Grainger’s value not ‘from the works he has composed and published, but from the works he has composed but not published’.²¹ The only so far publicly performed work to hint of the extent of Grainger’s inventiveness was Tribute to Foster, premiered in New York in December 1915, when Grainger demonstrated how to obtain microtones from the massed sound of fingers running around the rims of wine glasses. Inevitably, though, the work received more attention for its commonplace text and familiar tune. Yet by this date Grainger had experimented in works such as Hill-Song no. 1 (1901–02), Train Music (1901–07) and Sea Song Sketch (1907) with irregular metres so complex they were unplayable. Also explored here were pentatonic and whole-tone scales, ‘democratic’ polyphony and an unorthodox treatment of dissonance. Furthermore, in Random Round (1912–14) Grainger devised a work built of independent modules that could be reordered and superimposed at will during a performance in the manner of free improvisation. This incipient indeterminacy is reflected in other works of a similar date that allowed sections to be included or omitted at the performer’s whim. The major works just or about to be completed – In a Nutshell (1916) and The Warriors (1916) – are compendiums of Grainger’s experimentalism. Both require far more percussion than had ever been seen before on stage in an orchestral concert, and performances of each included the spectacle of Grainger hitting the piano strings with a mallet. Both offer percussionists the option of selecting pitches where it is specified that ‘any note will do’ and both suggest an instrumentation that can be expanded or contracted according to resources available. With a vast orchestra and three conductors, and frequent instances of what Grainger called ‘free harmonic habits’, inevitably there are passages in The Warriors that are bombastically dissonant.²² Not yet, however, did these works approach Grainger’s ultimate goal, a music completely free of pulse and tempered pitch.

If by 1916 Grainger had achieved a reputation as a ‘modernist’ or ‘futurist’ composer as well as an exceptional pianist, he also saw himself as an innovator whose ideas were constantly being poached by others. Rather than allow those others to take the prize for ingenuity he was constantly asserting his place in the history of the avant-garde. According to his own record, after he wrote an English Dance so did Roger Quilter and Balfour Gardiner. When he wrote an English Waltz, Cyril Scott wrote one too. Soon after he began using ‘wordless syllables’ in a choral work, Vaughan Williams and Delius did the same.²³ Through the 1920s Grainger continued to praise Schoenberg while protesting that, in effect, he had got there first. Writing in a programme in 1925, for example, he declared that:

My experiments with large chamber combinations and the blending of voices, reeds, guitars, strings, concertina or harmonium, percussion, etc., in proportions and choice of performers varying with each composition, began around 1899 and thus antedated by several years the European Continental renaissance of large chamber groupings that came to a head with Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘Kammersymphonie’ (1906).²⁴

Oddly, Grainger did not think to boast of some of his greatest insights, especially his ventures in composed improvisation and the use of percussion. Some of his more remarkable ventures of the 1920s were, for example, transcriptions of music from Indonesia, India and Africa, as well as a transcription of Debussy’s Pagodes (1928) for harmonium, glockenspiel, metal marimba, celesta, dulcitone or harp, staff bells, tubular chimes, gong, xylophone, wooden marimba and three or four pianos, an ensemble designed to imitate the sound of the gamelan. His rescoring of Eastern Intermezzo (1933) requires a percussion ensemble plus a double bass: at that point only the most revolutionary American experimentalists had envisaged composition for percussion alone. Yet Grainger may not have been aware of what he had in common with them. His record of his own achievements, when he had the opportunity to publicize them, was a remarkable mixture of distortion and bombast. In 1933, for the benefit of the journalis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘The Beauty of Bravery’: Alternative Modernisms, De-Historicizing Grainger
• 3 Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song
• 4 A ‘Treat Equal to Wagner’: Grainger’s Interactions with the Music and Culture of Polynesia
• 5 ‘A Natural Innovationist’: Percy Grainger’s Early British Folk Song Settings
• 6 Giving Voice to ‘the Painfulness of Human Life’: Grainger’s Folk Song Settings and Musical Irony
• 7 Grainger and the ‘New Iconoclasts’: Forays into Modernist French Music
• 8 The Hispanic Grainger: Encounters with the Modern Spanish School
• 9 Minstrelsy, Ragtime, ‘Improvisatory Music’ and Percy Grainger’s ‘Unwritten Music’
• 10 When Grainger Was Ultra-Modernist: A Study of the American Reception of In a Nutshell (1916)
• 11 ‘Serious Music’: The Brisbane Reception of Grainger’s Historical Chamber Music Recitals (1934)
• 12 Percy Grainger, Henry Cowell and the Origins of the World Music Survey Course
• 13 Grainger as Educator: On the First Performance of The Immovable Do for Wind Band
• 14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music
• Index