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Grainger the Modernist
This page has been left blank intentionally
Grainger the Modernist
Edited by
Suzanne Robinson
University of Melbourne, Australia
and
Kay Dreyfus
Monash University, Australia
© Suzanne Robinson, Kay Dreyfus and the Contributors 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Grainger the modernist / edited by Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus.
pages cm
â•‡Includes bibliographical references and index.
â•‡ ISBN 978-1-4724-2022-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4724-2023-7 (ebook) –
ISBN 978-1-4724-2024-4 (epub) 1. Grainger, Percy, 1882–1961—Criticism and
interpretation. I. Robinson, Suzanne. II. Dreyfus, Kay.
â•‡ ML410.G75G74 2014
â•‡ 780.92–dc23
2014031158
ISBN 9781472420220 (hbk)

ISBN 9781472420237 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472420244 (ebk – ePUB)
Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita
Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents
List of Figures vii

List of Music Examples ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Acknowledgements xv
1 Introduction 1
2 ‘The Beauty of Bravery’: Alternative Modernisms,

De-Historicizing Grainger 17
Sarah Collins and Simon Perry
3 Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song 33

Graham Freeman
4 A ‘Treat Equal to Wagner’: Grainger’s Interactions with the Music

and Culture of Polynesia 55
Graham Barwell
5 ‘A Natural Innovationist’: Percy Grainger’s Early British Folk

Song Settings 77
Dorothy de Val
6 Giving Voice to ‘the Painfulness of Human Life’: Grainger’s Folk

Song Settings and Musical Irony 93
Peter Tregear
7 Grainger and the ‘New Iconoclasts’: Forays into Modernist

French Music 107
Emily Kilpatrick
8 The Hispanic Grainger: Encounters with the Modern Spanish

School 123
Michael Christoforidis and Ken Murray
9 Minstrelsy, Ragtime, ‘Improvisatory Music’ and Percy Grainger’s

‘Unwritten Music’ 139
John Whiteoak
vi Grainger the Modernist
10 When Grainger Was Ultra-Modernist: A Study of the American

Reception of In a Nutshell (1916) 163
Suzanne Robinson
11 ‘Serious Music’: The Brisbane Reception of Grainger’s Historical

Chamber Music Recitals (1934) 181
Samantha Owens
12 Percy Grainger, Henry Cowell and the Origins of the World Music
Survey Course 201
Peter Schimpf
13 Grainger as Educator: On the First Performance of The Immovable

Do for Wind Band 219
Phillip Allen Correll
14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music 231

Andrew Hugill
Index 255
List of Figures
4.1 The Rarotongan contingent at the 1906–07 Christchurch

Exhibition. Their leader, Makea Daniela, is far right. Originally
published in James Cowan, Official Record of the New Zealand
International Exhibition of Arts and Industries, Held at
Christchurch, 1906–7: A Descriptive and Historical Account
(Wellington: Government Printer, 1910), 354. 60
4.2 Peter Buck/Te Rangi Hiroa with some of the visiting Cook
Islanders at the 1906–07 Christchurch Exhibition. Photograph by
Samuel Heath Head, 1/1–007477-G, Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington, New Zealand. 61
4.3 Grainger wearing his ‘grass’ skirt, beadwork necklace, belt and
armbands, 12 August 1909. Photograph by Rose Grainger. Acc. no.
99.0500, Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 64
4.4 Grainger’s tip on noting: ‘use a tube not a trumpet’. Letter to
Roger Quilter, [August 1909], Grainger Museum. Reproduced by
kind permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 66
4.5 One of the boxes holding a Danish copy of the first of the five
1907 wax cylinder recordings of Rarotongan music given
to Grainger by Knocks in 1909. Acc. no. 04.1173, Grainger
Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Percy
Aldridge Grainger. 67
4.6 Grainger and Knocks at Otaki, 16 September 1924. Acc. no.
99.4700, Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 72
4.7 Grainger and Elmer O. Thompson, who invented the electric eye
device for copying wax cylinder recordings without damage, 25
September 1940. E & MP 93.015, National Museum of American
History, Science Service Historical Images Collection, courtesy of
Philco Corporation and the Library of Congress. 74
8.1 La Belle Otero dancing ‘Le tango de la table’, accompanied by

an estudiantina, in Une fête à Seville at the Théâtre de Marigny in
Paris in 1900. Le Théâtre no. 43 (October 1900 [I]): 20. 133
viii Grainger the Modernist
9.1 Cover of Chas. Sheard & Co’s Second Album of American

Cakewalks published in London while In Dahomey was
still running. Whiteoak Research Collection. 153
10.1 D. Cramer, The International Anthem (1918, detail). Acc. no.

01.2044, Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of
the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 172
13.1 Karl L. King at rehearsal, 22 February 1940. Band Library, East

Central University, Ada, Oklahoma. Reproduced by permission of
the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at East
Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, USA. 225
13.2 Grainger at rehearsal, 23 February 1940. Band Library, East
Central University, Ada, Oklahoma. Reproduced by permission of
the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at East
Central University in Ada, Oklahoma, USA. 226
14.1 Sliding Pipes Free Music Invention (1946), constructed from

masonite, wire, string and tape. Acc. no. 01.0002, Grainger
14.2 Cross-Grainger Free Music Experiment (February 1950):
Gliding tones on whistle and notes on recorders produced by
holes and slits cut in paper rolls. Acc. no. 99.5700, Grainger
14.3 Percy Grainger and Burnett Cross testing the Cross-Grainger Free
Music Experiment (February 1950). Acc. no. 99.5700, Grainger
14.4 Cross-Grainger Free Music Experiment: ‘“Sea-Song” sketch,
three solovoxes, played by pianola roll’ (1950). Acc. no. 99.5700,
Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of
Percy Aldridge Grainger. 248
14.5 Percy and Ella Grainger with the Free Music Tone-Tool
(August 1951). Acc. no. 99.5700, Grainger Museum. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 249
14.6 Ella Grainger, seated at her writing desk in the living room at home
in White Plains, contemplates the Kangaroo-Pouch Machine (mid-
1950s). Acc. no. 99.5700, Grainger Museum. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger. 250
14.7 Cross-Grainger Electric-Eye Tone-Tool. Acc. no. 01.0002,
List of Music Examples
3.1 Grainger’s transcription of ‘’Merican Frigate; or Paul Jones’ as

sung by George Wray on 28 July 1906, and published in Journal of
the Folk-Song Society 3, no. 12 (May 1908): 206–12. Reproduced
by courtesy of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, English
Folk Dance and Song Society. 38
3.2 Grainger’s transcription of Oksefaldet (‘Melodi 9’) from 23 August
1922. MG 13/2–2, Danish Folk Song Collection, Grainger
3.3 R.3109–12, Gacko (Hercegovina), as sung by Almasa Zvizdić,
23 April 1935, and published in Béla Bartók and Albert B. Lord,
Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1951), 117. 49
5.1 Grainger, ‘Barbara Allen’, bars 1–4, from ‘Early Settings of

Folksongs & Popular Tunes’ (1899). MG3/102–7-2, Grainger
5.2 Grainger, ‘Early One Morning’, bars 5–12, from ‘Early Settings
of Folksongs & Popular Tunes’ (1899). MG3/102–7-2, Grainger
5.3a Malcolm Lawson, ‘O’er the Moor’, bars 1–8, from Songs of the
North, 20th ed. (London: J. Cramer & Co., [1884]), 160. 88
5.3b Grainger, ‘O’er the Moor’, bars 1–6, from ‘Scottish
Folksongs from Songs of the North’, Grainger Museum,
MG3/77, 12. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of
5.4 Grainger’s setting of ‘Bonnie George Campbell’, bars 20–27 from
‘Scottish Folksongs from Songs of the North’, Grainger Museum,
MG3/77, 10. Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of
6.1 Grainger, opening of ‘Hard-Hearted Barb’ra (H)Ellen’, ed. Barry

Peter Ould (Aylesbury: Bardic Edition, 2012). Reproduced by kind
permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger and with the
assistance of Barry Peter Ould. 98
x Grainger the Modernist
6.2 Grainger, opening of verse 12, ‘Hard-Hearted Barb’ra (H)

Ellen’, ed. Barry Peter Ould (Aylesbury: Bardic Edition, 2012).
Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge
Grainger and with the assistance of Barry Peter Ould. 99
7.1 Grainger, annotations to Debussy’s ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, bars

58–69, from Images (Paris: Durand, 1905). MG C1/DEB-3,
8.1 Grainger’s annotations to the opening page of Albéniz’s ‘El puerto’

from Iberia (Paris: Edition Mutuelle, [c. 1906]). MG C1/ALB-2,
9.1 Grainger, In Dahomey: ‘Cakewalk Smasher’, bars 11–19. MG3/40,

Notes on Contributors
Graham Barwell works in the area of Media and Cultural Studies and English
Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. For some time he has been
interested in Grainger’s attraction to indigenous cultures in the Pacific, particularly
his connections with those involved in the early collection of Polynesian music
and his own activity as a collector in this area.
Michael Christoforidis lectures in Musicology at the University of Melbourne,

Australia, where he completed his PhD on Manuel de Falla’s neoclassical music
(1998). As a musicologist he spent several years in Spain, and has published
extensively on Manuel de Falla, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish music
and dance, and exoticism in Western music. Other research interests include the
music of Igor Stravinsky and Percy Grainger, and the history of the acoustic guitar.
Sarah Collins is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New South

Wales (Sydney, Australia), in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia.
She completed her doctoral study jointly through the University of Queensland
and King’s College London. She is the author of The Aesthetic Life of Cyril
Scott (Boydell, 2013) and has articles published and forthcoming in journals
such as the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Music & Letters and the
Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies. Her current book-length project focuses
on dispositions of autonomy in musical modernism.
Phillip Allen Correll is Associate Professor and Director of Bands at East Central
University in Ada, Oklahoma, USA. He completed his DMA in conducting at the
University of Oklahoma in 2009. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Bandmasters
Association Hall of Fame in 2005, awarded the International Sudler Order of Merit
Award in 1997 and named Oklahoma Band Director of the Year in 1993.
Dorothy de Val is an Associate Professor of Music at York University, Toronto,

Canada. The author of In Search of Song: The Life and Times of Lucy Broadwood
(Ashgate, 2011), which received an Honourable Mention for the Pauline
Alderman Award (2013) for outstanding scholarship on women in music. She has
published on the first English folk music revival plus aspects of musical life in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Another interest is Scots Gaelic
song and its early collectors. She is also a pianist and performs Grainger’s works
whenever possible.
xii Grainger the Modernist
Kay Dreyfus is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the History Program (SOPHIS) at

Monash University and Dean’s Research Fellow in the School of Graduate Studies,
RMIT University, both in Australia. Her recent publications include Silences and
Secrets: The Australian Experience of the Weintraubs Syncopators (Monash
University Press, 2013) and Bluebeard’s Bride: Alma Moodie, Violinist (Lyrebird
Press, 2013). As Curator of the Grainger Museum she edited The Farthest North
of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger 1901–14 (Macmillan, 1985). In 1988
she was awarded the International Percy Grainger Medal for her contribution to
Grainger scholarship.
Graham Freeman received his PhD in musicology from the University of

Toronto, Canada, in 2008 with a dissertation on modernist musical aesthetics in the
folk music collection of Percy Grainger. His articles and reviews have appeared
in Folk Music Journal, Grainger Studies and Music & Letters, and he is currently
completing a chapter on Grainger and his Nordic interests for a series of essays to
be published by Ashgate. His current research focuses upon oral transmission and
theories of creativity in music. He is currently an independent scholar in Toronto.
Andrew Hugill is a composer, writer and Director of Creative Computing at Bath

Spa University, UK. He is author of The Digital Musician (Routledge, 2007) and
‘The Origins of Electronic Music’ in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic
Music (Cambridge University Press, 2007). He is an Associate Researcher at the
Université de la Sorbonne, Paris, and a member of the European Research Council.
Emily Kilpatrick, a pianist and scholar, holds an Honours degree in Piano

Performance and a PhD in Musicology from the University of Adelaide, Australia.
She has published numerous articles and chapters on French music, and her
monograph on Maurice Ravel’s operas is shortly to be published by Cambridge
University Press. She is also co-editor, with Roy Howat, of the forthcoming Peters
critical edition of the songs and vocalises of Gabriel Fauré.
Ken Murray is a Melbourne-based guitarist, composer, teacher and musicologist.

He has championed and recorded Spanish music from the early twentieth century,
worked extensively with contemporary composers and has been active as a
performer of Brazilian music. He has recorded Grainger’s Random Round and
his research includes Grainger’s links to Spanish music and the guitar as part of a
larger interest in Spanish music and its representations in London (1878–1930).
He received his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, where he is
Lecturer in Guitar at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.
Samantha Owens is an Associate Professor in the School of Music at The

University of Queensland, Australia, where her research is focused on early
modern German court music and on the musical life of Australasia, 1870–1950.
Recent publications have included an edited book (with Barbara M. Reul and
Notes on Contributors xiii
Janice B. Stockigt), Music at German Courts, 1715–1760: Changing Artistic

Priorities (Boydell, 2011) and an article on Robert Dalley-Scarlett (Musicology
Australia 34, 2012).
Simon Perry obtained his PhD from the University of Queensland, Australia,
where he lectures in music theory and historical musicology. His research interests
include Russian music (history and criticism, and analysis) and analysis of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music. He has also worked extensively on
Grainger’s autobiographical writings.
Suzanne Robinson teaches Australian music history at the University of

Melbourne, Australia, and is Series Editor for Australasian Music Research at
Lyrebird Press. She is editor of Michael Tippett: Music and Literature (Ashgate,
2000) and co-editor of Marshall-Hall’s Melbourne: Music, Art and Controversy,
1891–1915 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012), and has published a number
of studies of modernist British and American composers in collections including
T.S. Eliot’s Orchestra (Garland, 2000) and The Cambridge Companion to Michael
Tippett (2013), and in journals such as American Music, Cambridge Opera
Journal, Journal of the Society for American Music, Musical Quarterly and
Musicology Australia.
Peter Schimpf is Associate Professor in and Chair of the Music Department at

Metropolitan State University, Denver, Colorado, USA. He teaches courses on
music history and world music, and he directs the Early Music Ensemble. He
completed his PhD from Indiana University with a dissertation on composer
Henry Cowell’s interest and activities with non-Western musical practices. He has
published articles on Cowell’s music and professional activities, and has presented
papers on the composer’s works at regional, national and international conferences.
Peter Tregear is a singer, academic and conductor; his interest in the music of
Percy Grainger arises from the convergence of these activities. A graduate of
King’s College, University of Cambridge, UK, his principal research interest is
the musical culture of the Weimar Republic. He was appointed Professor and Head
of the Australian National University School of Music in 2012. His second book,
Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style, was published in 2013.
John Whiteoak is an Adjunct Professor in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of

Music, Monash University, Australia. His doctoral dissertation in jazz studies
was published as Playing Ad Lib in 1999. He has been official archivist and
biographical researcher for the modernist composer, pianist, theorist and Grainger
admirer, Keith Humble, and co-edited the Currency Companion to Music and
Dance in Australia (Currency House, 2003). He has lectured in pre-jazz history
and publishes on a wide range of early popular music topics, including minstrelsy,
ragtime, jazz and Latin music.
Acknowledgements
The impetus for this collection of chapters on Grainger came from the symposium
held at the University of Melbourne in 2007 celebrating Grainger’s 125th
anniversary, which demonstrated the breadth of continuing interest in Grainger,
his incomparable museum and his legacy. The editors would like to thank Michael
Christoforidis and Elizabeth Kertesz, the organizers of the symposium, for their
encouragement in the early stages of the project. We would also like to thank our
team of authors for their enthusiasm for the theme of Grainger as a modernist and
for their patience in accommodating our editorial queries and concerns.
Our principal debt is to Stewart Manville (White Plains, New York), representing
the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger, and to Barry Peter Ould (Administrator
of the Estate), who personally provided advice and assistance to several authors.
Quotations from Grainger’s letters, essays and autobiographical writings, extracts
from his music manuscripts and personal photographs are reproduced by kind
permission of the Estate of Percy Aldridge Grainger.
We are immensely grateful to the staff of the Grainger Museum at the
University of Melbourne for many unsung kindnesses, particularly to the Curator,
Astrid Krautschneider. Monica Syrette and Jennifer Hill have also provided
invaluable assistance. We are especially indebted to the museum staff for the
digitization of images and for conducting extensive searches of the collection at
the authors’ behest.
Other permissions are acknowledged, where appropriate, in individual
chapters, or in captions to musical examples or images. Authors have also included
any personal thanks in their chapters.
On behalf of all the authors in this volume, we would like to acknowledge
our profound indebtedness to the several volumes of writings by and about Percy
Grainger assembled and edited by Malcolm Gillies and David Pear and their
associates, Mark Carroll, Bruce Clunies Ross and Simon Perry.
Finally, our thanks go to Heidi Bishop, Laura Macy and the team at Ashgate
Publishing for making this book a reality.
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
1
Grainger, ‘English-Speaking Leadership in Tone-Art’, 21 September 1944, in
Thomas C. Slattery, Percy Grainger: The Inveterate Innovator (Evanston, IL: The
Instrumentalist, 1974), 274–5.
2
Ivan Hewett, ‘Double Take on Down Under’, Daily Telegraph (London), 21
February 2011, 27.
3
T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921), quoted in Christopher Butler,
Modernism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
1. Daniel Albright alludes to Eliot’s comment, writing in his introduction that ‘Modernist
art is difficult’: Introduction, Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5.
4
Daily Telegraph, 22 October 1912, quoted in The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters
of Percy Grainger 1901–14, ed. Kay Dreyfus (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1985), 465.
5
Grainger, ‘Modern and Universal Impulses in Music’, Etude 34, no. (5 May 1916): 343.
2 Grainger the Modernist
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?
6
Cyril Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism (in Its Connection with Music) (London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1916), 129.
7
David Josephson, ‘The Case for Percy Grainger, Edwardian Musician, on His
Centenary’, in Music and Civilization: Essays in Honour of Paul Henry Lang, ed. Edmund
Strainchamps and Maria Rika Maniates (New York: Norton, 1984), 351.
8
Josephson, ‘The Case for Percy Grainger’, 352.
9
Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2005), 8. Taking the concept of ‘ambivalent modernism’ from Marion
Deshmukh, Frisch understands it as ‘a type of turn-of-the-century modernism echoed by many
cultural and intellectual figures. … It can be described as a generally positive outlook toward
the rapidly changing social, economic, and scientific German landscape, but tempered by an
occasional nostalgia for features of preindustrial community in which quality workmanship
and value were recognized’. Charles Edward McGuire discusses Elgar as an ambivalent
modernist in his ‘Edward Elgar: “Modern” or “Modernist”? Construction of an Aesthetic
Identity in the British Music Press, 1895–1934’, Musical Quarterly 91, nos. 1–2 (2008): 8–38.
10
Wilfrid Mellers, Percy Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 10.
11
Albright, Modernism and Music, 11. Albright also argues against the idea that
dissonance is the principal hallmark of modernism, writing that ‘Extremely simple music …
can be as radical as a continuous succession of discords’.
Introduction 3
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
12
Grainger, ‘English-Speaking Leadership in Tone-Art’, 21 September 1944, in
Slattery, Percy Grainger, 271.
13
Grainger, letter to Karen Holten, 1 June 1912, in Dreyfus, The Farthest North of
Humanness, 460.
14
Ernest Newman, ‘Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder’, Musical Times, 1 January
1914, 11. Here Newman was referring to the first London performance, in 1912. On the 1914
performance he wrote ‘A Propos of Schönberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces’, Musical Times,
1 February 1914, 87–9.
15
Grainger, letter to Karen Holten, 5 September 1912, in Dreyfus, The Farthest North
of Humanness, 465.
16
Grainger, letter to Rose Grainger, 4 November 1912, in Dreyfus, The Farthest
North of Humanness, 472.
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
17
Grainger, letter to Karen Holten, 1 June 1912, in Dreyfus, The Farthest North of
Humanness, 459.
18
Grainger, ‘Modern and Universal Impulses in Music’, 343.
19
The list appeared as an insertion on page 330.
20
Grainger, ‘Modern and Universal Impulses in Music’, 343.
21
Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 120.
Introduction 5
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
22
Introduction to the score of In a Nutshell (New York: Schirmer, 1916), 5.
23
See Grainger, ‘English-Speaking Leadership in Tone-Art’, in Slattery, Percy
Grainger, 271.
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 journalist D. C. Parker, he listed several
instances of his own role in boosting the reputation of others. He was, he alleged,
the first to conduct the large works of Delius in America, the first to play Debussy in
eight countries in 1902, the first to boost American composer Arthur Fickénscher’s
microtonal instrument, the Polytone, the first to present several of Grieg’s works
‘in many lands’, the first to popularize music by American composers Nathanial
Dett, David Guion and John Alden Carpenter and the first to perform works by
Albéniz in several countries.25 Grainger offered this information as evidence of
the catholicity of his interests, but the many acts of beneficence he recalled also
reinforced his self-image as a visionary pioneer. Equally, and although he had just
met Henry Cowell, recently returned from studying comparative musicology at
Hornbostel’s Berlin archive, Grainger described himself as ‘the only composer
known to me who loves every kind of music of whatever locality & period) that
he has ever heard – be it the music of China, Japan, Java, Siam, Africa, Australia,
Madagascar or the Red Indian; be it classical or jazz, art-music or folk-music, high-
brow or lowbrow, medieval, polyphonic, romantic, atonal, futuristic or what-not’.26
Returning to Australia a few months later in 1934 he named himself in interviews
as a prophet of music’s emancipation. Whereas, he conceded, ‘Arnold Schoenberg
liberated music from the restrictions of harmony’, he, Grainger, was the composer
24
Programme for concert in New York City on 26 April 1925, Scrapbook of piano
programmes in New York City 1914–32, Acc. no. 02.0577, Grainger Museum collection,
University of Melbourne (GM).
25
Grainger, letter to D. C. Parker, 26 April 1933, in The All-Round Man: Selected
Letters of Percy Grainger, 1914–1961, ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), 120.
26
Grainger, letter to D. C. Parker, 26 April 1933, in Gillies and Pear, The All-Round
Man, 117.
Introduction 7
responsible for advances in rhythm.27 As far back as 1899 (in the previous century,
no less), he informed Australian journalists, he had ‘made some experiments in
liberating music from the regularity of rhythm. That emancipation is seen in the
works of Cyril Scott, who took the idea from me at the time.’ Almost comically,
in the same interview Grainger dismissed most of nineteenth-century music as
‘frivolous’. Even Beethoven in his inspired moments was ‘sketchy’. Australians
could have been forgiven for concluding that the leading modernists were left
in Grainger’s wake. Yet such comments say less about his prejudices against a
rebarbative German tradition than they do about his need to set a premium on what
David Nicholls describes as the modernist’s need for ‘the assertion of primacy and
individual achievement’.28 Problematically, as Nicholls has found in the case of
Cage, the demands of primacy and individual achievement sometimes override
compliance with the facts. And when one claim seems questionable it casts a
shadow over all others.
In light of his comments it seems that to be modern meant for Grainger being
distinctive, provocative, ingenious. Having been brought up in that rarefied
atmosphere reserved for prodigies and geniuses, Grainger assumed his own
omniscience. This assured his oppositional stance to the irremediable masses. On
a subject such as folk song he contrasted his own perceptiveness with that of lesser
experts who:
though willing enough to applaud adaptations of folk-songs by popular

composers, show little or no appreciation of such art in its unembellished
original taste, when, indeed, it generally is far too complex (as regards rhythm,
dynamics, and scales) to appeal to listeners whose ears have not been subject to
the ultra-refining influence of close association with the subtle developments of
our latest Western art music.29
There is little doubt that few in England in 1916 could have appreciated such
remarks; certainly few folk song experts (or composers) had travelled as much
and as far as he had, personally observing ‘primitive’ culture and music-making
in Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia and South Africa.30 Few, if any, would have
foreshadowed, as Grainger did, how ‘primitive’ music would help reconceptualize
the most fundamental parameters of music composition.
27
‘Percy Grainger: Return to Melbourne’, Argus (Melbourne), 25 January 1934, 8.
28
David Nicholls, ‘Cage and the Ultramodernists’, American Music 28, no. 4 (Winter
2010): 493.
29
Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality in Unwritten Music’, Musical Quarterly 1,
no. 3 (July 1915): 417.
30
The term ‘primitive’ was used as late as Bruno Nettl’s Music in Primitive Cultures
(1956) to refer to preliterate cultures. Grainger uses the term in this sense, and without
prejudice.
Almost as soon as he arrived in the United States Grainger was anointed ‘a

musical genius from Australia’.31 Being a foreigner who spoke with a different
accent and contested a host of musical and social norms Grainger was seen to
be not just individual but bizarre – had he developed second sight or brandished
wings the press could have been no more incredulous. The designation of him
as ‘untamed’ and his music as ‘weird’ fed Grainger’s own perception of his
separateness from mainstream American life and culture. So much so that he wrote
to D. C. Parker in 1916:
Personally, I do not feel like a modern person at all. I feel quite at home in South
Sea Island music, in Maori legends, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the Anglosaxon
‘Battle of Brunnanburh’, feel very close to Negroes in various countries, but
hardly understand modern folk at all. I do not dislike modern people, but simply
can never learn to understand their reason for being, can never get a true insight
into their ways of feeling and acting, and feel among them as among kind but very
strange strangers with whom I will take a mightily long time to get acclimatized.
I do not tell you this in order to appear ‘funny’, but in order to throw light on the
well-springs in my music. Art with me arises out of the longing to escape out of
the (to me) meaningless present into the past, which to me is full of meaning, or
into some imaginary world full of keenness and exaggerated excitement.32
To be misunderstood was not an unusual condition among modern artists.

Christopher Butler in Early Modernism lists many modernists who saw
themselves divorced from or marginal to their society – whether by nationality,
sexuality or ideology – and notes that some of them developed profound forms of
psychological alienation. In 1915 Richard Aldington, for one, divided artists into
‘popular charlatans and men of talent, who, of necessity, write, think and paint
only for each other, since there is no one else to understand them’.33 Charles Ives
is the obvious correlative in music, a composer so isolated in his prime that his
works only began to be appreciated once he had long since lost the ability to write
any more. Grainger enjoyed more public appreciation than Ives for most of his
career but this did not mean he avoided ridicule for his many idiosyncrasies. ‘The
all-round genius’, Grainger divulged in 1937, the one who ‘struggles thoroly with
many things, one at a time (at least concentrating on one at a time, tho possibly
keeping the others going at the back of his brain – like a juggler keeping 5 balls in
the air)’ is ‘the hard one for outsiders to understand’.34
31
The title of a review of Grainger published in Nation, 18 February 1915.
32
Grainger, letter to D. C. Parker, 28 August 1916, in Gillies and Pear, The All-Round
Man, 26–7.
33
Aldington, quoted in John Xiros Cooper, Modernism and the Culture of Market
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2.
34
Grainger, letter to Storm Bull, 25 March 1937, in Gillies and Pear, The All-Round
Man, 135.
Introduction 9
One indelible source of Grainger’s sense of difference was his sexuality,

which tempted him to fantasize about committing acts (such as rape) that he knew
were frankly illegal. Frustration, both sexual and creative, was the result. As he
explained to his mother:
[A]fter unwittingly producing me & such as me at great cost, society goes to

great pains (usually unwittingly & therefor [sic] innocently) to tie my hands as
soon as I attempt to use my (unjustly-gotten) rare qualities for my own & its own
good or evil. It lets me hear orchestras & thus tempts my orchestral imagination,
but gives me no time or means to ever make the experiments needful to reach
more than a ½ advance. It feeds my sexual mind through erotic books of many
lands & the indecencies (specially fostered to encourage libertinism) of all
lands, but would imprison me if I applied to sexual things the experimentalism
it demands from my art, & would make life jolly uncomfortable for me (& thus
hedge the use of my gifts) if I, in my lifetime, spoke freely or published the
results of my specially gifted thoughts on sexual matters.35
The secret of Grainger’s sexual tastes – and, in the London years, the secret of
a Danish lover – matched the secrecy of musical experimentalism: neither was
palatable to the public. But even years after emigration and marriage Grainger
remained exasperated that society did not condone his exceptionalism. Vexation
spilled over in a letter written in 1937 in sympathy for Henry Cowell, who like
Grainger had a reputation as a ‘freak’ pianist and who had just been convicted and
jailed for sexual indiscretion. ‘[W]ho am I to judge the mass of mankind’, wrote
Grainger to Cowell’s step-mother:
I only say this: I would be happier if the normal people (selfstyled normal, by
the way) provided inspiration, amusement, progress, etc. for themselves from
themselves. As it is, they come to us abnormal ones (supernormal, excentric
[sic], freakish, fanatical, geniuses, talents) for their amusement, their mental
guidance, their practical invention, their emotional inspiration, etc. they fawn
upon us, they pay us ridiculous sums of money for our work, they compliment
us unreasonably, so that we (naturally) are inclined to believe that they (the
‘normal’ ones) realize that our superior powers (of invention, of creation, of
more sensitive & more tender feeling) like in our abnormal natures – as they do,
of course, so lie.36
Even if Grainger understood himself to be ‘abnormal’, he belonged to a higher

class of men, as the letter indicates, separated by their powers from the ‘lower’
35
Grainger, letter to Rose Grainger, 7 October 1911, in Dreyfus, The Farthest North
of Humanness, 428.
36
Grainger, letter to Olive Cowell, 15 August 1937, Henry Cowell Papers, The New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts (HCP).
orders. In an extraordinary conclusion to the same letter he refers to his sexual

practices as something intrinsic to genius and therefore unintelligible to the non-
genius. Because the genius is (like him) someone who lives ‘shiningly for human
betterment’ he refused to believe his sexual preferences were ‘sinful’. Sins of the
artist were, in his view:
only ‘sins of pleasure’, not sins of greed, hatred & false-hood. Artist-sins do
not lead to war or depression, as the sins of ‘patriots’ or business men do. But
I should not embark upon the ‘moral side’ of the question. My interest really
lies in the following problem: how can humanity achieve its progress: without
falling foul of the only men who can engineer it for them – their geniuses?37
Typically, although tempted at this stage in his career to emulate Gauguin and
escape to the South Seas to study native music, so enriching art (and therefore
humanity), Grainger was prevented from doing so by the onset of war and by
the ever-present need to pay his expenses and subsidize his Melbourne museum.
Instead of achieving his utopia in paradise Grainger retreated more and more into
realms of his own imagining, building a variety of apparatus in his White Plains
home in the hope of achieving his ideal of Free Music. Extraordinarily, at the
same time that he was coaxing oscillators to make music, not many miles away
the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was established. Neither seems
to have been aware of the other’s existence.
Styling Grainger as an eccentric, a maverick or simply an alien has all too
often ensured that he can be excluded from the predominant narrative of music’s
evolution. Grainger is marginal to the history of the English folk song movement,
just as he is marginal, or has been seen to be marginal, to the history of American
experimentalism. The consequence of this estrangement – orchestrated, it must be
said, both by Grainger and others – has been to ensure that he has been evaluated on
his own terms and in his own words. As Barbara Will finds in her study of the self-
proclaimed genius of Gertrude Stein, the conceptualization of genius has in practice
‘functioned in such a way as to occlude … social and historical contingencies’.38
Genius, it is assumed, manifests itself irrespective of time and place. Moreover,
without any self-evident attachment to a point of reference such as a school or
group or collective, connections that verify so much of canonical modernism,
Grainger has and continues to be characterized as a self-sufficient entity, a man
‘out of his time’ rather than a man either in his time or of his time.39 But to see
37
Grainger, letter to Olive Cowell, 15 August 1937, HCP.
38
Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of ‘Genius’ (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 2.
39
See the blurb for the New Percy Grainger Companion (2011), which reads ‘In the
thirty years since his Centenary in 1982 it has become even clearer that Percy Grainger
[1882–1961] – composer, pianist and revolutionary – was a man born out of his time.’
http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=13481
Introduction 11
Grainger in this way is to settle for only a partial view: to continue to portray him
as the autonomous subject he thought he was is, to quote Foucault, ‘to represent
him as the opposite of his historically real function’.40 Consequently the following
chapters ‘de-bunk’ the customary idea of Grainger as a lone individualist through a
reappraisal of his social and historical connectedness. Whereas so often Grainger’s
vast personal archive has been marshalled in support of the exposition of Grainger
himself, it holds the keys, first, to examination of Grainger’s interactions with
ideologies, philosophies and trends of his time, as well as with people and public,
and, second, to a more objective assessment of Grainger’s claims for himself. The
‘all-round’ man demands our ‘all-round’ attention.
Grainger’s sense of alienation from modern society manifested itself in
denunciations of social inequality, sexual mores, materialism, repressive political
regimes and war. In light of this, Sarah Collins and Simon Perry read Grainger’s
lifelong attraction to ‘heroic suffering’ and his masochistic rejection of success as
symptoms of dislocation. They point to his persistent autobiographical references
to heartbreak, tragedy, suffering and gloom as congruent with his self-perception
as an ‘over-soul’ or genius who is ‘more answerable for the sorrows & witless-
nesses of the world than most men’.41 Taking their cue from recent revisionist
writings on modernism, they posit that this self-conscious stance of cultural
critique was an expression of his modernism, and one that we can now perceive
to be conditioned by ideology as much as practice. If at times such a form of self-
fashioning was self-serving, it also drove a mission to save the modern world from
its own barbarity: deriding civilization as ‘filthy corruption’, Grainger depicted
‘primitive’ peoples, on the other hand, as ‘sweeter & more peaceable & artistic than
civilized people’.42 In this respect we can see Grainger not so much as a crusader
for stylistic innovation for its own sake but as an individualist and a radical whose
activities in some cases amounted to cultural and political subversion.
Grainger’s awakening to the unique musicality of ‘primitive’ peoples began in
childhood and was reinforced, later, by his folk song collecting in the Lincolnshire
countryside in 1905–06. Graham Freeman argues that, far from being a step into
the past, Grainger’s collection of English (and later Danish) folk songs reflects
a musical aesthetic that was fundamentally modern and iconoclastic. Unlike his
contemporaries in the English Folk-Song Society who sought what Freeman
describes as an ‘Ur-song’ unblemished by variations or corruptions, Grainger
relished the lack of conformity between performances of particular songs as
evidence of the individual genius of each singer. Unusually, Grainger treated each
40
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in Contemporary Literary Criticism:
Literary and Cultural Studies, 4th ed., ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (New
York: Longman, 1998), 375.
41
Grainger, ‘My Wretched Tone-Life’, in Slattery, Percy Grainger, 258.
42
‘“The Inuit” at La Crosse, Wis[consin] (1923)’, in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger,
ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006), 183–4.
song as a unique performative event and something that could never be wholly
rendered in the imperfect act of its musical notation. In a comparison of Grainger’s
method with that of Bartók, Freeman finds that Grainger’s transcriptions lacked
the clarity and systemization of Bartók. But whereas Bartók, in keeping with the
practice of his time, valued the documented song more than the event that brought
it into being, Grainger adopted an ethnomusicological approach in his interest in
the human subject and in the song’s performance practice and aesthetics.
It was on the back of these excursions, and only a few years later in 1909, that
Grainger left London on a tour of New Zealand with the singer Ada Crossley.
Graham Barwell discusses how, having long been fascinated with Maori music,
Grainger fostered connections with Maori leaders and ethnographers, engaging
with those actively seeking to record and preserve Maori heritage. Among them
were S. Percy Smith of the Polynesian Society, the collector Alfred Knocks and
Peter Buck (Te Rangi Hiroa), ultimately one of the leading scholars of Maori
culture. Aware, even in 1909 when comparative musicology was in its infancy,
of the requirements of a ‘scientific’ approach to the collection of ethnic musics,
Grainger obtained recordings from Knocks that became the most ‘much-meaning’
of the hundreds that he was to amass.43 Stimulated by the ‘antishness’44 he heard
on Knocks’s recordings of Rarotongan singers, he was to ensure that they were
preserved by means of the most advanced technology available and to embed the
freedoms that music exemplified in some of his most far-reaching compositions.
Evidence of Grainger’s unusual response to folk song can be seen in his very
earliest settings. Dorothy de Val examines two early collections of folk song
arrangements, the ‘Early Settings of Folksongs & Popular Tunes: 26 Settings of
Popular Old English Songs’ (1899), and Songs of the North, a collection of folk
songs composed as a memorial to a visit to Scotland in summer 1900. Using as
a measure parameters that Grainger himself argued were progressive in his Hill-
Song no. 1, she demonstrates how it was that Grainger repudiated the inheritance
described by Cyril Scott as ‘watered Mendelssohn’.45 Yet, Peter Tregear asks, why
is it that Grainger’s heterogenic, bitter and at times ironic settings of folk song
have not been recognized as intrinsically modern in the way that works invoking
the vernacular by, for example, Mahler and Ives are? While superficially Grainger
might seem in his folk song settings to inscribe a nostalgia for a past uncorrupted
by modernity, Tregear provides a close reading of ‘Hard-Hearted Barb’ra
(H)Ellen’ and points to Grainger’s contraventions of the genre’s traditions. He
notes Grainger’s self-conscious ‘musical interventions’ in the song, interventions
that expose rather than efface his own hand. Grainger lavishes such harmonic
excess on this setting that he seems to comment not just on the song but on the act
of harmonization itself. For Tregear, such an ‘ironic frame’ denotes a modern self
43
Grainger, letter to Henry Cowell, 26 September 1940, Box 8, HCP.
44
Grainger, letter to Rose Grainger, 4 November 1912, in Dreyfus, The Farthest
North of Humanness, 472.
45
Scott, The Philosophy of Modernism, 72.
Introduction 13
at odds with both its own socialization and with the singer from whom the song
was taken. Here, embodied in the music, is further evidence of an ideologically
eccentric stance.
If in music itself Grainger instinctively sought to breach the boundaries of
Western convention, as a performer he also appreciated and identified with those
who represented ‘the new’ in music composition. While he may have praised
Schoenberg as the harbinger of the future, in his concerts he drew attention to the
music of the modern French and Spanish schools. Emily Kilpatrick credits Grainger
with being the first to perform Debussy in Britain, at a concert in London on
19 February 1903, and lists works by Ravel and Fauré that he was also to champion.
Enchanted by these composers’ innovations in pianism as much as composition,
Grainger highlighted what he called the ‘torch-bearing works’ of these ‘new
iconoclasts’.46 Kilpatrick finds numerous eccentricities and liberties taken by
Grainger in his recordings of French repertoire and yet that he revelled in exposing
the multiple voices, rhythmic character and architecture of these works, delivering
them with unusual clarity and understanding. Another composer whose innovations
Grainger promoted was Albéniz, whose works he performed at least from 1909 and
in both London and America. Michael Christoforidis and Ken Murray discuss the
ramifications of Grainger’s friendship with the Hispanophile John Singer Sargent.
It was Sargent who sponsored a Spanish estudiantina on tour in London in 1908 and
1909 and, they surmise, it may have been Sargent’s interest in guitar and mandolin
bands that led Grainger to experiment with plucked string instrumentation in a
cluster of works including Father and Daughter (1908–09, scored for an ensemble
incorporating a mandolin and guitar band), Scotch Strathspey and Reel (1911) and
Random Round (1912–14, for guitars played ‘oar-wise’).
Another modern soundscape to which Grainger responded was that of minstrelsy,
ragtime and jazz. John Whiteoak argues that Grainger would have encountered
improvisatory practices in the blackface minstrelsy heard in his childhood and
that his setting of The Rag-Time Girl, dating from 1900, shows his fondness for
ragtime hits. Grainger was known to improvise in the style of ragtime on the piano
and the staging in London in 1903 of the musical In Dahomey prompted him
to play with its themes. Eventually, six years later, his improvisation was set or
‘frozen’ in the score of the virtuosic ‘ramble’ In Dahomey: ‘Cakewalk Smasher’, a
work noteworthy for its improvisatory effects and freedoms, with variable tempi,
ossias, flexible structure and numerous glissandos imitating what Whiteoak calls
the ‘ecstatic spontaneity’ of ragtime in performance. Although In Dahomey’s
innovations may have been unremarkable in the context of ragtime, the liberties
it allowed the performer – liberties that defied the accepted relationship between
composer and performer – anticipated the flexible forms and indeterminacies of
works composed more than 50 years later.
46
Grainger, ‘A Blossom Time in Pianoforte Literature’ (1915), in Grainger on Music,
ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73.
In the United States from 1914 Grainger had the opportunity to refashion
himself, and, even though he continued to be identified with folk music and folk-
inspired works such as Mock Morris, he now styled himself as a modernist of the
class of Stravinsky and Debussy. Suzanne Robinson demonstrates in a study of
the reception of In a Nutshell (1916) how Grainger’s promotion of percussion, his
ratification of dissonance and his brutal treatment of the piano shocked American
audiences and drew comparisons with the homegrown exploits of Leo Ornstein.
She challenges the assumption that Ornstein was the dominant representative
of American ultra-modernism, tracking performances of Grainger’s work in
major cities across the country, and how critics evaluated Grainger in terms of
European modernism. While some of the press taunted Grainger by likening the
sound he generated to that of ‘the barnyard at early morn’, others compared his
‘dissonantal audacities’ to the technological wonders of the modern era.47 But
if by 1917 Grainger had achieved a reputation as an ultra-modernist his war
service as a bandsman produced a hiatus and led him away from composition for
professional orchestra.
His incessant touring and concertizing continued through the 1920s, but
in 1932–33, fearing the effects of the Depression on his income, he became a
professor of music at New York University and there developed a remarkable
survey course in world music. Peter Schimpf compares Grainger’s course with
the one developed only a few blocks away at the New School for Social Research
by Henry Cowell, and shows that although they lacked a degree of scholarly
objectivity both had a personal mission to engage their students with music of ‘the
whole world’, Cowell through a curriculum that highlighted music of different
geographical regions, and Grainger through a more thematic approach. Both for the
first time treated ‘primitive’ music as worthy of academic investigation; both drew
on their extensive personal collections of recordings and years of studying points
of difference between Western and non-Western music-making. Unsurprisingly,
the two composers forged a friendship based on their mutual interest in expanding
music’s horizons. Grainger, for his part, proclaimed that:
when I say that the music of the South Seas, Africa & Asia are fully the equal
of the best that Europe has produced it is no ideal or thoughtless word. The
worthiness of all races & all cultures is proved by all the world’s music, & to
delay needlessly a drenching of ourselves in all this glorious ‘exotic’ music is
simply (in my opinion) to criminally postpone the dawn of inter-racial worldwide
understanding and brotherhood.48
47
Ernest J. Hopkins, ‘Grainger Puts the “Nut” in a “Nutshell”’, Bulletin (San
Francisco), 9 December 1916, scrapbook, ‘California Crits, 1916’, Acc. no. 02.0604, GM;
‘Music and Drama: Grainger’s “In a Nutshell”’, Evening Post (New York), 2 March 1917,
In a Nutshell scrapbook, Acc. no. 02.0606, GM.
48
Grainger, letter to Sir Bernard Heinze, 3 December 1947, in Gillies and Pear, The
All-Round Man, 217.
Introduction 15
Touring Australia in 1934–35 Grainger reprised his NYU lectures and

performed a repertoire that extended from Machaut to Hindemith. As admiring
as he was of an early music specialist such as Arnold Dolmetsch, he was never
one to insist on authenticity as it later came to be understood and accepted. He
was as likely to arrange transcriptions of Frescobaldi and Josquin for various
combinations of wind instruments as string fantasies by William Lawes and John
Jenkins for saxophone. ‘As a democratic Australian’, Grainger had written to
D. C. Parker in 1916, ‘I long to see everyone somewhat of a musician, not a world
divided between musically abnormally undeveloped amateurs and over-developed
professional musical prigs.’49 In pursuing this goal he not only increased the
accessibility of early music but sanctioned treatment of the monuments of the past
as a commodity whose usefulness was to inspire and sustain the creative life of
the present. Samantha Owens details Grainger’s visit to Brisbane in October 1934,
when he collaborated on performances of both early and modern music with a
local choir and conductor. Before his arrival Grainger had annoyed and provoked
local musicians with comments about the ‘pretentious’ and ‘platitudinous’
music composed between 1750 and 1900,50 causing some to pronounce him a
‘rabid ultra-modern’.51 Although he seems to have been ignorant (or dismissive)
of the quantity and breadth of early music already performed in Brisbane at
commemorations, concerts and eisteddfods, his irregular and unorthodox re-
instrumentation of works from this repertoire was a revelation to many. As one
critic afterwards confided to his readers, it was a ‘felicitious experience’ to see
those ‘who are ordinarily to be seen in public performance comporting themselves
as earnest musicians engrossed in conventional music, on this occasion cheerfully
devoted … to weird and wonderful effects’.52 Another of Grainger’s collaborations
with amateurs outside major concert centres, his visit to the East Central Music
Festival in Ada, Oklahoma, in 1940, is documented by Phillip Allen Correll, who
compares the philosophies and practices of Grainger and the other conductor
invited, the composer and bandmaster Karl L. King. Correll finds that whereas
King epitomized a fondness for simple and enjoyable band music, Grainger
promulgated a more adventurous type of band composition that elevated standards
of performing and listening. These two composers thus represented a crossroads
in American band music; such was the appeal of Grainger’s music that Richard
Franko Goldman, writing in his influential book The Band’s Music (1938), urged
anyone interested in band music to take heed of what Grainger envisaged.
49
Grainger, letter to D. C. Parker, 28 August 1916, in Gillies and Pear, The All-Round
Man, 32.
50
See Grainger, ‘Can Music Be De-Bunked?’ Australian Musical News, 1 February
1934, 14d and Robert Dalley-Scarlett’s letter to the editor, Courier-Mail (Brisbane),
29 January 1934, 2.
51
H. T. H., ‘Music and Drama’, Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 3 February 1934, 18.
52
‘Final Grainger Recital: Novelty and Amusement with Serious Music’, Courier-
Mail (Brisbane), 15 October 1934, 21.
Goldman remained one of Grainger’s closest allies in his retirement and it

was Goldman who wrote a prominent report of Grainger’s experiments in
electroacoustic music. Andrew Hugill explains the scope of Grainger’s quest to
realize a music free from limitations such as the tempered scale and, at the same
time, from the necessity of the performer as interpreter. He depicts Grainger as an
artisan, determined to build the necessary machinery by hand, and as an unrepentant
melodist, albeit one who prescribed a music of continuously gliding tones. As
modest as many of Grainger’s inventions were – and they varied in complexity
from a set of swanee whistles to a collection of sine wave oscillators – Hugill finds
that he anticipated such modern devices as multitrack recording, sequencing and
timbral synthesis. Although Grainger had little contact with likeminded composers
such as Varèse and seemed to prefer to work in isolation, a clear line can be drawn
from his experiments through the work of Xenakis to the hacker working at a
domestic computer today.
Connections between these multifarious aspects of Grainger’s life and work,
between the ideology of folk song collection and experimentalism, for instance,
and between his lectures at New York University and his presentation to the band
musicians of Ada, demonstrate that what are often treated as discrete compartments
of interest can be interpreted as facets of his implicitly radical politics as well
as aesthetics. Grainger’s interest in microtonal music was as evident in his folk
song transcriptions as in the music produced by his ‘Kangaroo-Pouch Machine’.
His innovative use of percussion was as much to be found in In a Nutshell, a
rambunctious homage to the Edwardian music hall, as in his transcriptions of
Balinese music; the ragtime-inspired In Dahomey, arguably belonging to a genre
perfected by Liszt, was as much a blueprint of indeterminacy as the far more
humble Random Round. Nor was Grainger’s creative life as hermetic as is often
assumed. As a composer more than usually stimulated by ‘the new’ he was also one
who sought to continually refresh and reform with transfusions from ‘primitive’
and exotic cultures, adaptations of what was up-to-date (no matter how distasteful
to convention), precedents offered by the distant past and sheer inventiveness. At
the end of his life Grainger’s sense of failure was acute – he grieved that he had
for too long forsaken the purity of composition for the gratification accorded the
performer – and he had, irrefutably, failed to impose himself on the history of
modern music. Yet every aspect of his astonishingly fertile creativity is instructive
of his vision of human advancement and in this he refines and challenges our
understanding of the nature of what it was to be modern.
Chapter 2
‘The Beauty of Bravery’: Alternative
Modernisms, De-Historicizing Grainger
Sarah Collins and Simon Perry
Grainger and Music Historiography
In 1953, in a set of ruminations on his projected autobiography, provisionally

titled ‘My Wretched Tone-Life’, Grainger wrote:
My art set out to celebrate the beauty of bravery. The lines of limbs on Greek
vases that I delighted in as a little boy, the javelin crashing thru the shield, Grettir
entering the ghost’s grave to get the sword, these are all hymns to bravery. In
fact, is there any beauty other than the beauty of bravery?1
For Grainger, ‘bravery’ was not associated with courage, but rather with an
irrational attraction towards danger, a delight in brutality and cruelty. It referred
to living with the utmost intensity and vividness, with ‘burning devotion’ and
endurance. The beautiful races, according to Grainger, were the brave races (‘the
Irish and Norwegians’); the beautiful bodies were the bodies of warriors and
‘savages’. While the music of Vaughan Williams and William Walton exhibited to
Grainger ‘exquisite meanderings’, he believed they lacked the ‘directness’ of his
own Hill-Songs and English Dance – a directness which he explicitly associated
with the ‘wildness’ of bravery, akin to the ‘stir that crams a whole rebirth into a
crowded all-within-a-fifth-y chord in Tchaikovsky, like a broken-bottle end into the
rounded cap of which the sun streams many-angled-ly until a bush fire is started’.2
Although there are clear indicators of Grainger’s attraction toward this
multifaceted notion of ‘bravery’, the kind of imagery described is perhaps not
customarily associated with his music. And even though Grainger’s childhood
absorption in Homeric tales and Icelandic sagas, his admiration for the works
of Kipling, then Whitman, and his championing of robust masculinity and
1
Percy Grainger, ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’ (1953), in Self-Portrait of Percy
Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 179.
2
Quotations in this paragraph are from ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies
et al., Self-Portrait, 179 and 167–8. Grainger termed his delight in cruelty his ‘cruel-joy’:
see ‘Notes on Whip-Lust’ (1948), in Self-Portrait, 167.
new-world resourcefulness formed part of his public identity,3 time and again he
later expressed exasperation with the misguidedly ‘positive’ reception of his art.
In his later autobiographical retrospections, and keeping in the mind the almost
inevitably revisionist nature of the memoirist mindset, Grainger recalled that even
close friends were wont to mistake the primary aesthetic that underpinned his music:
The wretchedness [of my tone-life] has always lain in lack of sympathy with the
emotional background of my compositions. In Frankfurt my English composer-
friends (Cyril Scott, Roger Quilter, Balfour Gardiner) always laughed when I
played them a new composition. They did not laugh unsympathetically. But
the originality & unexpectedness of my music struck them as funny. And the
impression of funniness was stronger than the impression of heart-throbs or
heart-break. Not Herman Sandby. When the others laughed, Sandby waited till
the others had gone & said, ‘I see nothing to laugh at in yr music’. He caught the
heart-throbs or heart-break in my music & saw nothing funning in it. To the cool,
conventional English nature my passionate & exaggerated nature seems comic.
But Sandby has a very intense & passionate nature himself & he recognized
similar qualities in me for what they were. Music-lovers are used to Italians &
others feeling passionately about sex & writing passionate music about it. But
they are not used to passionate & tragic music being written about hills, the sea,
animals, racial characteristics & the deaths of young men. And as long as this
basic lack of sympathy exists my tone-life will continue to be wretched – & the
shallow success of a few tuneful snippets like ‘Country Gardens’ & ‘Handel in
the Strand’ will not alter matters.4
Speaking on American Radio in 1952, Grainger rephrased these sentiments for the
benefit of a wider audience, much to the discomfiture of his interlocutor, Wayne
Howell, presenter of NBC Radio’s ‘Favorites of the Famous’:
WH: Mr. Grainger, you’ve been called the one cheerful, sunny composer living.
To what would you attribute the warmth and naturalness of your music?
3
See for instance David Pear, ‘Walt Whitman and the Synthesis of Grainger’s
Manliness’, Australasian Music Research 5 (2000): 61–81 in which the construction of
Grainger’s masculine public persona is explored. Amongst the evidence Pear cites are three
independent reviews of Grainger’s pianism from his early years in America (1914–17),
which refer to his dynamic and positive, masculine image. Harriette Brower wrote in 1917 of
Grainger’s ‘particular kind of mentality, one which is care-free, untrammeled’, while Pierre
Key, writing in 1915 in the World, was taken by the freshness of ‘a personality … that seemed
to exert so positive an influence upon those within its range’. Charles Buchanan similarly
described a ‘raw, uncouth physique glorified by some mysterious kind of inner radiance, a
delegated spokesman for young lands and new people’ (quoted in Pear, ‘Walt Whitman’ 72–3).
4
‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?” (1953)’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 181.
Alternative Modernisms, De-Historicizing Grainger 19
PG: Well, I don’t know that my music is consistently warm and natural, but I
think the impression that it’s … what was it, cheerful? … comes from people not
knowing most of my compositions, because I think I am very morose, musically.
WH: [laughs awkwardly … ] Well, you don’t actually feel morose.
PG: Yes I do, I enjoy it very much.
WH: You enjoy feeling sad?
PG: Yes very much … but it isn’t a question of whether I enjoy it – I think music
is the art of agony. Music is after all derived from screaming, it is not derived
from laughing.
WH: Right, from screaming, hmmm.
PG: Well, when you think that most music originated in trying to placate hostile
deities, like the Chinese banging a gong in a storm, screaming with fear and
screaming in supplication are not so very far removed, and music is of course
the child of all that. … I think music is a kind of ‘in-extremis’ sort of business.
WH: We’re learning an awful lot to day Mr. Grainger.5
That music written to express a screaming inner agony would be heard as ‘cheerful’,
or that the agonistic side of Grainger’s music remained neglected or unidentified
owing to a circumstantial preference for the ‘warm’ and the ‘natural’ is no matter
of idle misinterpretation. It speaks to a deep tension between accepted musical
indices of modernism and Grainger’s own divergent evocation of the beauty of
suffering and brutality. This tension may serve to construct a counterpoint to
themes associated with ‘Grainger as modernist’ that seek to make reconciliation
between ‘Grainger’ and ‘modernist’ based on stylistic criteria – themes which
are doubtless vindicated by some, although perhaps not all, of Grainger’s music;
themes which will play out in some of the chapters in this collection. The tension
we describe suggests that, in addition to highlighting the extent to which Grainger’s
more radical work embodied style elements or compositional approaches that have
historically been associated with Continental modernism, it may be in fact that his
radicalism is as much revealed by a reading of his work as a critique (rather than
an embodiment) of the predominant historiographical conception of modernism
itself. Reading Grainger in this way involves viewing modernism as a narrative
category rather than a historical event, and taking a critical view of the pervasive
and inherently valuative historiographical discourses on musical ‘progress’ and
5
Wayne Howell, interview with Percy Grainger, ‘Favorites of the Famous’, NBC
Radio, 1952. The recording is held by the Australian Music Centre.
‘evolution’ that until recently have tended to condition our understanding of this
period of history (or, the ‘history of modernism’, if it can be so termed).
There is a range of precedent for this type of reading, both within scholarship on
Grainger and in broader musicological literature. For example, Graham Freeman
has sought to redescribe Grainger’s famed conflict with the Folk Song Society
as an epistemological conflict about what types of knowledge (including sounds)
should be valued (and heard), rather than merely a rupture between ‘narrow-
minded Luddites’ and the polemical Grainger.6 Elsewhere Freeman uses this
redescription to critique the Marxist historiographical take on the Folk Song Society
forwarded by Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson and Dave Harker, by detailing
the difference between the Folk Song Society’s conception of ‘truth’ requiring
mediation (namely, the critical ear and judgement of the collector) and Grainger’s
alternative position on the ability of technology (in this case the phonograph) to
subvert the constraints of ideology.7 Rather than viewing the root of Grainger’s
contested historical position as having resulted from a conflict between tradition
and innovation, Freeman effectively de-historicizes Grainger’s work in order to
examine it as a critical contribution to current historiographical understanding.
In recent years, there has been a burgeoning historiographical shift in
broader conceptions of early twentieth-century European musical modernism.
Once dominated by canonical Austro-German, French and Russian mavericks,
there has been an increasing number of studies that have sought to stake out a
claim for an expanded view of musical modernism encompassing other Western
musical cultures that have traditionally been cast as reactionary, or mired in
conventionalism. British music studies have played a significant role in leading
this charge since the late 1990s, such as through the work of Nicholas Temperley,
Matthew Riley, Eric Saylor, Charles McGuire, J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Alain Frogley,
Deborah Heckert and Jenny Doctor, among others, who have collectively
chipped away at the grand narrative of ‘The English Musical Renaissance’ and
its insinuations of insularity, xenophobia, nepotism and conservatism.8 Instead,
6
Graham Freeman, ‘“That Chief Undercurrent of My Mind”: Percy Grainger and the
Aesthetics of English Folk Song’, Folk Music Journal 9, no. 4 (2009): 581.
7
Graham Freeman, ‘“It wants all the creases ironing out”: Percy Grainger, the
Folk Song Society, and the Ideology of the Archive’, Music and Letters 92, no. 3 (2011):
410–36; referring to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the
English Working Class (London: Gollancz, 1963) and Dave Harker, Fakesong: The
Manufacture of British ‘Folksong’ 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes; Philadelphia:
Open University Press, 1985).
8
See: Nicholas Temperley, ‘Xenophilia in British Musical History’, in Nineteenth-
Century British Music Studies, vol. 1, ed. Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 3–22;
Matthew Riley, ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post-Victorian Age’, in British
Music and Modernism, ed. Matthew Riley (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 13–30; Eric Saylor,
‘“It’s Not Lambkins Frisking at All”: English Pastoral Music and the Great War’, Musical
Quarterly 91 (2009): 39–59; Charles Edward McGuire, ‘Edward Elgar: “Modern” or
they have argued for a more nuanced conception through new methods and
subjects of investigation. For example, these have included ethnographies of
cultural institutions, such as the BBC, the Proms, and the profession of music
criticism; sociological studies of music practices of the time; and the tracing of
intellectual and artistic networks across the spheres of music, art and literature.
These studies have also included investigations into musical pastoralism in the
years after the First World War and the modernist inversion of traditional pastoral
tropes by British composers,9 studies into broadcast programming policies to
trace the British reception of Continental modernism at an institutional level,10
studies into notions of internationalization (or what today might be called ‘rooted
cosmopolitanism’) that encouraged cultural exchange between European nations,11
examinations of vocabulary and concepts borrowed from literary and art criticism
used in music criticism to attempt an adequate evaluation of modern music,12 and
re-visited musical interpretations based on examinations of how British composers
engaged with modernist literature.13
One of the results of this scholarly activity is an emerging understanding of
a range of idiosyncratic modernisms, and an acknowledgement of the variety of
alternative responses to the conditions of the historical moment, or alternative
manifestations of the modernist ethos in music. Embedded within this type of
understanding is a latent critique of predominant historiographical approaches to
this period of history – approaches that view modernism in music as being indicated
by a certain collection of stylistic features related to tonality (or transgressions
thereof), rhythm and form, and which exclude from the modernist canon music
which by this definition seems retroactive. In opposition to this approach, the
revisionist historiographical agenda that has been played out in recent studies in
musical modernism, such as some of those outlined above, attempts to recapture
a conception of modernism as an attitude of ideology critique, as a disposition
“Modernist”?: Construction of an Aesthetic Identity in the British Music Press, 1895–1934’,

Musical Quarterly 91 (2009): 8–38; J. P. E. Harper-Scott, The Quilting Points of Musical
Modernism: Revolution, Reaction, and William Walton (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012); Alain Frogley, ‘Rewriting the Renaissance: History, Imperialism, and British
Music since 1840’, Music and Letters 84 (2003): 241–57; Deborah Heckert, ‘Schoenberg,
Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language for the Reception of Musical
Modernism in Britain, 1912–14’, in Riley, British Music and Modernism, 49–66; Jenny
Doctor, ‘The Parataxis of “British Musical Modernism”’, Musical Quarterly 91 (2009):
89–115, and The BBC and Ultra Modern Music, 1922–1936: Shaping a Nation’s Tastes
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
9
Saylor, ‘“It’s Not Lambkins Frisking at All”’.
10
Doctor, The BBC and Ultra Modern Music.
11
Grace Brockington, ed., Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the
Fin de Siècle (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009).
12
Heckert, ‘Schoenberg, Roger Fry and the Emergence of a Critical Language’.
13
Michael Allis, British Music and Literary Context: Artistic Connections in the
Long Nineteenth Century (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012).
of antipathy toward accepted or conventional cultural narratives. It is worth

remembering, also, that such notions have been reasonably well accepted outside
exclusively musicological historiographical discourse for some time. For instance,
Christopher Butler observed almost three decades ago, the ‘pressures towards
withdrawal from social consensus (and the morality it implied) had long been
identified as symptoms of modernity’.14
This revisionist historiographical agenda reached fever-pitch in the recent work
of J. P. E. Harper-Scott. In his book The Quilting Points of Musical Modernism,
Harper-Scott embarks upon a sustained criticism of what he views as Richard
Taruskin’s ‘Cold-War outlook’ on the history of twentieth-century music, whereby
the Expressionist works of the Second Viennese School and subsequent works of
European modernist composers associated with communism are viewed as anti-
democratic and dangerously elitist, in opposition to the neo-liberalism of post-
Second World War American compositions. Disputing this ‘xenophobic-capitalist
quilting point’, the author proposes a conception of the ‘reactive modernist
subject’ – a notion that revives the view of modernist music as that music which
serves to reveal the manner in which knowledge is conditioned by ideology,
and which allows for the analysis of a range of different musics as embodying
tropes that can be understood as genuine subjective responses not only to the
emancipation of dissonance, but a range of other attitudes and beliefs.
The paradox of the ‘cheerful’ musical manifestation of Grainger’s expression
of ‘brutality’ can perhaps be better understood in light of this type of view of
modernism as ideology critique. In this sense, Grainger does not need defending
against insinuations that his music was somehow reactionary as a result of being
tonal and melodious. His conceptualization as an active participant within the
modernist orbit need not be limited to, or by, those of his works that conform
to a greater extent to commonly held indices of modernism. Rather, proceeding
from the historiographical reinterpretation that has been occurring in recent
British music studies, Grainger’s manifold musical expressions can be set against
his broader aesthetic schema in order to comprehend how his work may have
constituted an alternative expression of modernism – one that can reveal to us the
extent to which our own understanding of the period is conditioned by ideology
(be that a Cold War capitalist ideology, or indeed any other).
In order to examine how this function of critique underpinned Grainger’s
conception of the activity of composition, the following will explore the
interrelation between subjectivity and an aesthetics of music by drawing from
Grainger’s life-writings. This type of approach is by no means intended to signal
a step back to composer-centred musicology, but rather seeks to extrapolate an
interpretive schema for Grainger’s music via an understanding of a particular type
of aesthetic subjectivity.
14
Christopher Butler, Early Modernism: Literature, Music and Painting in Europe
1900–16 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 2.
Life and Art: The Aesthetics of Grainger’s Life-Writing
Grainger’s understanding of the relationship between life and art has received
some attention in recent years. Once again we can turn here to Freeman’s work
on Grainger’s contentious interactions with the Folk Song Society. The rationale
underpinning Grainger’s revolutionary use of the phonograph to record (rather
than merely transcribe) the work of folk singers and his conception of music as a
process or event of performance rather than merely an object or text, is exemplified
here: ‘it was the superabundance of art in these men’s lives, rather than any
superabundance of life in their art, that made me so anxious to preserve their old
saws and notate their littlest habits’.15 Despite such clear indications of the degree
to which Grainger conceived of an intermingling of life and art, and the fact that
a portion of Grainger’s life-writings have been widely available for a number for
years in the form of Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger,16 there has been little if any
significant study of the interaction between his ethical and aesthetic personae as
evidenced in this material, or indeed any recognition of how a study of this type
can inform our understanding of alternative manifestations of the modernist ethos.
There seems little doubt that the central catalyst for Grainger’s activities in
‘past-hoardery’ was the death of his mother in 1922, although some scholars
have observed in Grainger a ‘retrospective mind-set that had been lurking …
since his decision to join the U.S Army in 1917’.17 Cyril Scott, moreover, had
noted Grainger’s ‘pronounced love of detail’ and wrote that ‘unless this love of
detail in his character be fully recognized and comprehended, Grainger may go
down to posterity as one of the most egotistical composers of the present epoch’.18
Crucially, in the same recollections, Scott remembered being struck by Grainger’s
‘exaggerated patriotism’ upon their first meeting at the Hoch Conservatory in
Frankfurt in 1895, Grainger aged 13, Scott 16.
In the 1930s it was this patriotism that determined the location of Grainger’s
museum – the most significant emotional and financial investment of his life. It was
also this aspect of his temperament that undoubtedly furnished his broader archival
project of preserving and promoting not only his own work and life, but also the
15
Grainger, ‘The Impress of Personality in Unwritten Music’, Musical Quarterly 1, no. 3
(July 1915), in Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 48, quoted in Freeman, ‘“It wants all the creases ironing out”’,
418. H. G. Wells is reported by Grainger to have commented, while accompanying Grainger
on a folk song collecting expedition in 1908: ‘You are trying to do a more difficult thing
than record folk-songs; you are trying to record life.’ Quoted in Portrait of Percy Grainger,
ed. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 53.
16
Gillies et al., Self-Portrait. This volume provides a highly useful, but necessarily
incomplete collection of Grainger’s incredibly voluminous autobiographical writings, in
manuscript and, later, typescript form, housed chiefly in the Grainger Museum, Melbourne.
17
Malcolm Gillies, ‘Introduction’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, xxi.
18
Cyril Scott, ‘Grainger and Frankfurt’, in The Percy Grainger Companion,
ed. Lewis Foreman (London: Thames, 1981), 51.
work of his British colleagues, including Scott. That Grainger’s patriotism acted
as a driving force behind his autobiographical impulse is important for our view of
bravery and the paradox of its musical expression in Grainger’s compositions. It
suggests that Grainger’s propensity for conservation arose in fact from an attitude
of combat – an attitude that is animated only by its continuous failure to overcome
adversity – and that this attitude in turn was characterized in aesthetic, racial and
geographical terms. While for Grainger the music of some of his more noted
contemporaries was ‘pompous & celebrate[d] power & success’, he believed that
his own music would ultimately be seen as embodying more ‘intense inspiration’,
‘greater purity’ and ‘more passionate & tender qualities’. The combination of the
purity and tenderness of melancholic failure and the intensity of bravery in battle
revealed to Grainger the characteristics of ‘superior genius’. Indeed, he gave a
lucid self-diagnosis of these competing tendencies when referring to the irony
of his defection from Britain at the beginning of the First World War, describing
himself as ‘a coward, a turn-coat, whose lifework was to celebrate in music
beauty-born-of-bravery! No wonder no piece of mine (except ‘Country Gardens’)
caught on since 1914.’19
Of importance here is not merely the misdirected reception of Grainger’s
work, but how the ironic struggle that he identifies here offers an insight into
how ideas about race, and British ‘imperial self-consciousness’20 can be located
within a broadly conceived musical modernism. These connections will be further
explored below, but it is vital here to note that Grainger’s notion of the ‘beauty’
of bravery gave an aesthetic force to his patriotic and racial ideas and largely
conditioned his manner of being and creating. ‘You all suffer most horribly from
humbleness’, Grainger wrote to Cyril Scott in 1939:
None of you (my English fellow composers) seem to realize that our group
could have licked the whole world of music and put Germany (musically) in
its place. I have done my best. Never (at any moment) have I lessened my hate
of Germany and things German, never have I ceased to wage war on German
music and German authority-mongery in the aesthetic world. But what could I
do alone, unsupported? I have made a success, myself. But that’s not enough. I
wanted to make a success of English speaking music – not caring whether it was
yours, or mine, or Howard Brockway’s. But you don’t see the world in terms of
fighting. Very well, the world will overlook you in favour of the men who do see
life in terms of fighting.21
19
et al., Self-Portrait, 180 and 179.
20
John Kucich, Imperial Masochism: British Fiction, Fantasy and Social Class
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 2. See also his ‘Sadomasochism and the
Magical Group’, Victorian Studies 46, no. 1 (2003): 33–68.
21
Percy Grainger, letter to Cyril Scott, 20 December 1939, Grainger Museum
collection, University of Melbourne.
Crucially, in Grainger’s conception of genius, the intermingling of notions of

bravery, combat and patriotism on the one hand, and of melancholy and failure
on the other can be seen as an articulation of the function of art as critique – the
type of function that has been ascribed in recent studies to certain works formerly
cast as reactionary. Grainger’s idea of genius was of a figure who must continue
to see life and work ‘in terms of fighting’ for the very purpose of serving the
critical function of genius – to reveal how supervening cultural norms condition
how the world appears to us at any given historical moment. Of logical necessity
this critical activity can have no end – no ultimate success by which everything
is illuminated – and thus the importance of sorrow in generating continuous
critical transformation.
Amongst Grainger’s collection of life-writing, his ‘Why “My Wretched
Tone-Life?”’ presents some of the richest material by which to consider his
various aesthetic self-conceptions. Several themes emerge from this document in
particular, and resurface or are anticipated in others. Drawing on Grainger’s own
terminology we have chosen to classify certain of them as follows: ‘Geography of
Inspiration’, ‘Grumble-shout against Town-skill-th’ (Protest against Civilization)
and ‘Pilgrimage to Sorrow’. These three interrelated concepts hint at a nexus of
aesthetic self-conception which seemed to embody in Grainger’s mind, at least
so far as it is reflected in these personal writings, coterminous notions of place,
race and heroic failure that run very deep throughout. The condition of the writing,
highly personal, anecdotal, often unordered and seemingly spontaneous as it is,
means that these are seldom set out as discrete categories by Grainger. Indeed, their
very interrelatedness makes categorization by the critical reader difficult at times.
‘Geography of Inspiration’
Grainger’s identification with the notion of heroic failure as a central transformative

characteristic of genius is mapped onto racial and geographical categories
(categories that are often conflated in Grainger’s writings) through an idea that
Grainger describes as ‘the geography of … inspiration’. According to Grainger,
a composer’s ‘genius, & his recognition’, was conditioned by the geographical
and racial ethos to which he subscribed, with Grainger’s own attitude of struggle
being undoubtedly associated with his aesthetic attraction towards Scandinavian
narrative and imagery.
Grainger quite pointedly includes Kipling, along with Swinburne, as exemplars
of the Scandinavian, and hence superior, impulse inside the mixed English-
speaking ambit. Viewing his own aesthetic mandate to convey the perpetual
struggle of the genius through the lens of ‘a small area in the North Sea’, Grainger
determines that one of the superiorities of the Scandinavian races lies in their
‘willingness to face the greatest possible sadness’.22
22
Quotations in this and the preceding paragraph are from ‘Why “My Wretched
Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 175 and 177.
I only know that great poets such as those I have mentioned [Kipling and
Swinburne] have been able to squeeze the sorrows of life into their poems,
& that such poems … inspired me to write some of my best music. And the
worth of my music will never be guessed, or its value to mankind felt, until the
approach to my music is consciously undertaken as a ‘pilgrimage to sorrow’.23
In further elaborations of this theme, it emerges that the ‘pilgrimage to sorrow’ is

connected with quite specific problems that Grainger identified at various points in
his personal writings: particularly pacifism – ‘to make mankind think of the agony
of young men forced to kill each other against their will & all the other thwartments
& torturings of the young’ (178); and animal cruelty – ‘I doubt whether any non-
Australian has written a long musical work devoted to feelings about animals, as I
have in my “Kipling Jungle Book Cycle”’ (171). ‘Perhaps these assaults upon the
tenderness of man’s hearts’, he wrote, ‘will play their part in weaning men from
massed murder of mankind in war, & mass murder of animals for food.’24
A related aspect of Grainger’s conception of ‘geography of inspiration’ is his
identification with and construction of outsider status and the adoption of a desired
dislocation and misapprehension through the facts of the colonial experience.
This connection emerges in a gripe against Thomas Beecham, who had quipped
to Grainger, regarding the latter’s Colonial Song: ‘My dear Grainger, you have
achieved the impossible. You have written the worst modern orchestral piece!’25
Grainger, while admitting the work’s shortcomings, writes not only of feeling
betrayed by Beecham’s lack of generosity in ‘feeling no kindly stir towards the
first big-frame voicing of a Colonial self-awareness in tonery by a Colonial’, but
also identified Beecham’s failure to understand his muse in Beecham’s own ‘dark-
eyed’ background.26 Anti-colonial snobbery emerges here as a fault placed at the
doorstep of ‘dark’ races within the English racial mix.
Grainger’s ‘Colonial self-awareness’ provides an additional frame through
which to view his deference to bravery and agony as aesthetic (and ethical) ideals.
Recent scholarship on the subject of British empire has sought to shift the field away
from its ubiquitous emphasis on racial and gender hierarchies to a consideration
of social class,27 and representations of masochism in British colonial fiction have
figured in this shift. For example, John Kucich has written of the ‘glorification of
suffering’ and ‘cherished pain in British imperial iconography’.28 He notes ‘The
arrogance of the British abroad was legendary … and often a source of perverse
national pride. But British imperialism also generated a remarkable preoccupation
23
‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 177.
24
Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 178.
25
Grainger, ‘Beecham’s Cheek about “Colonial Song”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait,
188.
26
‘Beecham’s Cheek about “Colonial Song”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 188.
27
See Kucich, ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group’, 33–4.
28
This and the following quotation are from Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 4.
with suffering, sacrifice, defeat, and melancholia.’ Kucich points to the figure of
Gulliver as one of the archetypal visions of this ‘cherished suffering’ in colonial
literature, as:
a figure whose ordeals of enslavement and humiliation culminate in his subjection

to an unquestionably superior race. This subjection compels Gulliver to disavow
the sense of legitimacy he had once vested in his nation and in himself, making
melancholic abjection, in his case, a vehicle for self-transformation.29
Kucich also extends his analysis to Kipling, tracing the ‘logic of sadomasochistic
megalomania … in Kipling’s writings about collective forms of social authority
in India’.30 Although such glorifications of suffering cannot be automatically
equated with masochism, the theme of ‘cherished suffering’ in British colonial
literature clearly provided a striking vehicle for the intersection of a number
of discourses – including on place, race, class, sex and imperialism – in which
Grainger vigorously partook, and which explicitly informed his self-conception
and his conception of his art.
Grainger’s detailed identification of his own ‘geography of inspiration’, and,
indeed, that of others, makes for tortuous reading and betrays a highly selective
and racially determined account.31 Despite the self-serving and at times bemusing
incoherence of his locational accounting, Grainger is at least internally consistent
in noting a tragic flaw in the ‘mixing’ of races within the heroic project of the
British empire, drawing on Kipling’s various characterizations of the ‘British
world’ both as exemplification of genius (for his identification of the heroic) and
failure, because Kipling himself did not sufficiently distinguish, as Grainger saw
it, between ‘superior’ and ‘inferior elements in British life’: ‘The only hope for
the English-speaking world is to realize the tragedy of their own mixed blood &
to cleanse [!] their own races by studying the inferiority of the dark-eyed, dark-
haired elements & the superiority of the fair types.’32 Through these types of
formulations, Grainger constructed a very broad canvas by which to rationalize
his own personal identification with this tragic flaw. The racialization of what
had been cast elsewhere as a purely aesthetic preference for heroic failure
that was enabled by Grainger’s notion of ‘geography of inspiration’ was again
an extension of his own self-conception as a figure of struggle. In this sense
Grainger’s aesthetic identification with heroic failure as the necessary hermatia
of the genius, or the ‘cherished suffering’ of the colonial, could be understood as
being racially determined. Thus, Grainger could view the ‘tragedy’ of the entire
‘English-speaking world’ as a narcissistic reflection of the tragedy of his own
mixed blood:
29
Kucich, Imperial Masochism, 4.
30
Kucich, ‘Sadomasochism and the Magical Group’, 37.
31
See ‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 175–7.
32
I love my father so much more since I have lost mother. Only since then do I
realize that he, too, is dead, had had his waxing & waning like all living things,
that his poor blood runs within me as well as my darling mother’s. … Since I
have realized how weak & sinful a poor creature I am myself I seem closer to
his fate & person, & pity plays keenly within me – pity for him, & for us all.33
Elsewhere Grainger explicitly demarcates the musical manifestations of this

aspect of his biological nature:
The buoyant optimism of ‘Marching Song of Democracy’ is like [Grainger’s

mother’s] brave energetic mankind-loving nature & wholly unlike my timid,
menschenschen, naturally gloomy type. The setting of ‘Irish Tune from Co. Derry’
is typically Aldridge, & shows not the taint of Grainger that is upon me as a man. …
The works that express me rather than her are those that are savage rather than gay,
desolate rather than poetic. Thus the Hillsongs are me rather than her (expressing
the unabridged wildness & non-humanness of nature) & so is ‘The Warriors’ (in
which the type of excitement is mainly sinister & sadistic) & perhaps ‘Father &
Daughter’ also. These non-Aldridge-like works will not be found dedicated to her.34
Embedded in what Grainger perceives as the problem of his and the English-
speaking world’s mixed blood is the need to overcome it – to embark on some
sort of salvific mission born of an enlightened, superior, ‘Scandinavian’ all-
knowingness – but never to succeed:
I have always mourned the deaths of young men. If it is true, what Cyril Scott
asserts, that the genius is stirred by forebodings of events to come, there is
ample justification for my ‘Knights mouldering in a ditch’ … mood. The wars
were coming, with their heavy toll. But none of this in me awoke an echo in
any part of the public. … [O]n the whole I think the entire musical world is
entirely oblivious of the whole world of bitterness, resentment, iconoclasm &
denunciation that lies behind my music.35
Such depth of feeling helps the reader to reach some level of understanding,
though not empathy, for the situation Grainger attributed to the ‘British world’ as
a whole, and certainly provides insight into Grainger’s self-determined project,
33
‘Sketches for “The Life of My Mother & Her Son”’, quoted in Simon Perry,
‘Grainger’s Autobiographical Writings: New Light on Old Questions’, Australasian Music
Research 5 (2000): 133.
34
‘Sketches for “The Life of My Mother & Her Son”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 166.
35
‘Why “My Wretched Tone-Life?”’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 174. ‘“Knights
mouldering in a ditch” mood’ refers to those of Grainger’s works concerned with tragedy
(‘death, hanging, burning & other forms of disaster’), often inspired by Scottish balladry
and other related literary sources of similar kind or latter pastiche.
through his music, to ‘concentrate English-speaking thought & feeling upon those
elements in the North Sea & the British isles that are likely to prove useful to our
theeds ((nations)) in the future’.36
‘Grumble-shout against Town-skill-th’
Grainger made frequent references in his writing to the means by which the beauty
of agony and bravery would be forthcoming in his music. While noting that ‘other
composers’ relied on ‘broad formal effects & on orchestrational brilliance’, he
claims that his own approach was ‘to make the voice-leading of my tone strands
touching & the effect of my harmonies agonized’. It seems that in this we approach
the core of the idea of Grainger in the context of modernism as a stance of cultural
critique rather than stylistic radicalism, and the matter of, as he later put it, music
being an ‘in-extremis sort of business’. He noted that the idea of ‘wrenching at
the heart’ is ‘a subtle matter, & is not achieved by mere discordance’. Instead,
‘everything in my art is based on violently sentimental emotionalism & must be
received on that basis to get anything out of it’.37
Grainger repeatedly and explicitly decried ‘civilization’, and this attitude forms
a constant in several aspects of his life-writing, notably thoughts on his relationship
with Ella Ström, as he described their blossoming relationship in 1926:
Do not all folk envy us as we stand or walk; 2 perfect Nordics, 2 fellow artists,
2 fellow outlaws, 2 sex-lawless ones, equally strong, equally gay, equally wild,
equally finely bred, something about us apart & aloof from the careful world of
public-opinion-fearing, money-hungry, respectability mongering, middle-class,
lower-race bastards that ring us around?38
Here are a number of important interconnections – in particular the association

between wildness (akin to bravery) and being ‘outlaws’ (his mistrust of public
success), ‘Nordics’ (his racial ideals), strength (masculinity and endurance), and
his antipathy toward ‘middleclassness’ (read ‘civilization’). These intersections
have been highlighted in recent Grainger scholarship, particularly the contrast
between the individualistic rural Nordics and the urban Southern folk, whose
tendencies of collectivism restricted ‘unfettered “pure melody”’.39
Grainger’s ‘grumble-shout against town-skill-th’ (protest against civilization)
was bolstered by his obsession with the work of Kipling, and then Whitman,
36
37
et al., Self-Portrait, 177 and 178.
38
‘My Joy in Forming a Two-Some with Her’ (1927), quoted in Gillies et al., Self-
Portrait, 112.
39
Malcolm Gillies, ‘Grainger, Early Music, Democracy and Freedom’, Grainger
Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (2011): 23–4.
allowing him to develop a vision of an ideal masculinity – rugged, muscular, rural –

synonymous with both ‘Imperial Britain, and subsequently pioneering America’.40
His idealization of Whitman, who has been described as a ‘rural aesthete’,41 and
Swinburne, who together with Walter Pater and William Morris (the ‘socialist
aesthetes’42), re-figured and challenged middle-class notions of manliness in the
‘all-male sexual politics of Victorian Aestheticism’,43 is particularly important to
understanding Grainger’s position among other ‘moderns’ of his time.
These central themes develop in several ways throughout Grainger’s life-
writing, often connected to the misinterpretation and faulty performance of his
music. One example is his exasperation at the failure of his early a capella chorus
‘The Inuit’ (set to untitled verses from Kipling’s Second Jungle Book), a work that
Grainger explicitly associated with his ‘love of savagery’:
Noone seems to have sensed the depth of feeling out of which this little
composition arose, & into which, thinking of it & playing it throws me afresh
each time. It is sung too English-wise, too detached – whereas I intend it with
Italian Caruso-like clinging legatissimo. The urge behind this poem is the very
strongest & most pronounced root emotion of my life: the love of savagery,
the belief that savages are sweeter & more peaceable & artistic than civilized
people, the belief that primitiveness is purity & civilisation filthy corruption, the
agony of seeing civilisation advance & pass its blighting hand over the wild. Not
‘the survival of the fittest’ but ‘the survival of the fetidest’.44
This work seems, in fact, to be something of a locus classicus in relation to an

understanding of Grainger’s music with respect to the tensions described at the
beginning of this chapter between modernism conceived as stylistically determined
and modernism conceived as cultural critique. It was this that led Grainger in later
years to so constantly complain of misunderstanding at large. The text,45 speaks
clearly to his ‘love of savagery’, but the music itself wends through a harmonious,
40
David Pear, ‘Walt Whitman’, 61; see also Derek B. Scott, ‘The Sexual Politics of
Victorian Musical Aesthetics’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 119 (1994): 91–114.
41
Pear, ‘Walt Whitman’, 77.
42
See Regenia Gagnier, ‘Literary Alternatives to Rational Choice: Historical
Psychology and Semi-Detached Marriages’, English Literature in Transition 51, no. 1
(2008): 23–44.
43
Thaïs E. Morgan, ‘Reimagining Masculinity in Victorian Criticism: Swinburne and
Pater’, Victorian Studies 36, no. 3 (1993): 315.
44
‘“The Inuit” at La Crosse, Wis[consin] (1923)’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 183–4.
45
‘The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow – / They beg for coffee
and sugar; they go where the white men go. / The People of the Western Ice, they learn to
steal and fight: / They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their soul to the white. / The
People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler’s crew; / Their women have many
ribbons, but their tents are torn and few. / But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white
man’s ken – / Their spears are made of the narwhal horn, and they are the last of Men!’
often close-voiced texture, with various chromatic strands of counter-melody

beneath the principal theme. In this it is quite typical of Grainger’s style of
composition and also folk song setting; to the ear accustomed to the more outré
experiments of the time, it has an obvious melodiousness that does not immediately
suggest the deep-seated and ‘wrenching’ emotions and extra-musical critique that
Grainger places on it. As he claimed, ‘it is a subtle business’.
Together with its association with race and masculinity, Grainger’s association
between ‘civilization and “filthy corruption”’ is explicitly cast as an issue of socio-
racial class, again suggesting the kinds of conceptual interconnection indicated
by Kucich. His hatred of ‘darkeyed middleclassness’ is ubiquitous throughout his
writings, and this conditioned his feelings about ‘success’ more generally. Writing
in the mid-1940s he characterized the arrangements (‘dish-ups’) for piano that he
made of his own works for the Schott publishing house as the result of misguided
influence on Roger Quilter’s part and his own ‘silliness (nay … sinfulness) in
yielding to popular, financially motivated actions’, which ‘wrecked my whole
job-path ((career)) as a tone-wright … as THE FIRST AUSTRALIAN TONE-
WRIGHT whose art-path should have been pure, money-blind & folk-host-
((audience))-hating’.46
The piano lay, as Grainger saw it, at the heart of these typically modernist
anti-bourgeois apprehensions. He noted wryly, if not bitterly, that a widespread
misconception abounded that his music was first written for piano and subsequently
arranged, when the opposite was, in fact, the case. ‘It is hard that this should
happen just to me, the re-birther of Bach-like “large chamber music” & a hater of
the piano.’47
Grainger notes, correctly no doubt, that his unusual scorings contributed to the
popular failure of much of his music. But this practice was, at the same time, not
wilful experimentalism, but connected to the entire aesthetic premise of his work
as described above:
The symphony orchestra (with its voluptuous strings, its harsh brass & very
unequal tone-strengths of the various tone-families – more built for contrasts
than for blends) is seldom poignant enough for my purposes. The wind-band is
better. But the ideal (for my grief-stricken music) is large chamber music, where
a harmonium can give background sounds & single strings can moan & single
winds can wail with a greater edginess (sharpness of tonal line) than in more
massed combinations.48
It remains to further tease out the various strands of aesthetic self-awareness from
the abundant material of Grainger’s life-writing. However, as the discussion above
46
Grainger, ‘Ere-I-Forget’, quoted in Perry, ‘Grainger’s Autobiographical Writings’, 130.
47
Grainger, ‘The Strange Idea That I Compose for Piano & Then “Arrange” for
Strings, Orchestra, Etc.’, in Gillies et al., Self-Portrait, 183.
48
has indicated, there are generally consistent themes which can serve to support a
coherent (even if not always attractive) set of artistic premises and which can help
us to understand better Grainger’s music as a unique and individual response to
the conditions of the times.
‘Pilgrimage to Sorrow’
The trope of self-transformation through suffering, which was earlier noted in

Kucich’s reference to the figure of Gulliver, for example, is vital to understanding
how the themes discussed in the pages above underpinned Grainger’s thinking
about himself and his music. Grainger’s well-known progressiveness was driven
by his contempt for middle-class contentedness and comfort, and an almost
vicious desire to improve and strengthen – to ‘see life in terms of fighting’. Like
other British moderns, Grainger sought improvement through heroic suffering,
an uncompromising askesis or rupture that was meant to generate radical
transformation. By construing how this aesthetic premise came to underwrite
both Grainger’s self-conception and his mode of artistic expression and the self-
conception he sought to construct through his autobiographical recollections of this
time, we may approach a better understanding of the broad variety of possible (and
equally legitimate) manifestations of the common historical impulse associated
with the conditions of early-twentieth-century Europe. In particular, if we accept
a definition of modernism that embraces within it the crucial element of socio-
cultural critique – one which maybe even enshrines this element as the primary
characteristic – then it is clear that the narrative thread of Grainger’s personal
writings and self-conception shed a light on his creative work in a manner that
renders him of significant interest to studies in modernism.
Chapter 3
Grainger and the Performativity
of Folk Song1
Graham Freeman
Percy Grainger’s folk music collections from England and Denmark are justifiably
well known among Grainger scholars, and are recognized for their descriptive
notations of incredible complexity, attention to the details of the lives of the
performers, and, in the case of the English collection, the infamous criticism
afforded them by the folk music establishment. However, beyond Grainger
scholarship, little attention is paid to these visionary and iconoclastic collections.
Discussions of early folk music collecting in the ethnomusicological literature
rarely mention Grainger or attempt to measure any impact he might have had
on the subsequent development of ethnographic methods. This is an unfortunate
oversight, for Grainger’s philosophy of folk music was nothing short of astonishing
for its far-reaching implications and anticipation of many ideas that are now
considered commonplace.
The following examination has four sections. In the first section, I examine
the origin and status of the manuscript and print collections in which Grainger’s
English and Danish folk music materials can be found. The second section
contains the contextual details concerning Grainger’s collecting expeditions in
both England and Denmark, examples of the types of transcriptions Grainger made
from each collection and the background of Grainger’s ideological clash with the
Folk Song Society in England. The third section is an exploration of the method of
ethnomusicological transcription both prior to and contemporary with Grainger’s
work in England and Denmark. It is here that I mark most strongly the contrast
between Grainger’s still undervalued work and that of his more famous fellow
collector, Béla Bartók, in order to demonstrate the extent to which Grainger’s
methods differed from those of Bartók. The fourth and final section examines
the way in which Grainger’s folk music studies and his methods of transcription
1
I am very grateful to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of
Canada for their generous support of my research for this article. I would also like to
acknowledge the expert advice and guidance provided by Kay Dreyfus, Suzanne Robinson
and James Kippen. Finally, I, like all Grainger scholars, am beholden to the staff at the
Grainger Museum in Melbourne: Monica Syrette, Jennifer Hill and Astrid Krautschneider.
Kind permission for the musical examples was provided by Stewart Manville, Barry Peter
Ould and David Atkinson.
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Title: The Colored Man in the Methodist Episcopal Church
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE COLORED

MAN IN THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH ***
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public
domain.
Rev. L. M. HAGOOD, M.D.
THE COLORED MAN
IN THE
Methodist Episcopal Church.
BY
THE REV. L. M. HAGOOD, M.D.,

OF THE LEXINGTON CONFERENCE.
CINCINNATI:
CRANSTON & STOWE.
NEW YORK:
HUNT & EATON.
1890.
Copyright by
L. M. HAGOOD,
1890.
PREFACE.
The history of the relations existing between the Methodist Episcopal

Church and the colored man—or rather, the status of the colored
man within the Church—so far as known, has never been written.
There are many cogent reasons why such a history should be
written. From the time of the landing of a cargo of twenty African
slaves at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1620, until this hour, the colored
man has been the subject of much discussion. Touching his status as
a man, there have always been two sides: one in favor of enslaving
him, and the other objecting to enslaving him. Both sides of this
vexed question have always been represented within the Church.
The fact that there has always been a majority in the Church
opposed to enslaving him; that therefore the Church early enlisted in
the cause of his emancipation,—has kept up a continuous though
bloodless warfare within the Church.
Thus the colored man early learned to love Methodism, and soon
large numbers were brought into its communion. The emancipation
and enfranchisement of the race did not put a quietus upon the
agitation of the question. Many white and colored members are not
conversant with the history of our Church touching this subject. It
has always been a question to many, why men of the race within the
Church have not been as ready to write the actual facts in the case,
as some of the race in other Churches have been to record many
half truths relating thereto. It is true that while the public eye and
ear appear always open and attentive to anything written or spoken
by those who can claim kin with Jefferson, Clay, Sumner, Lincoln, or
Grant, there is an apparent unwillingness to give audience to those
who have always been subjected to ostracism.
These lines are written because it is believed that our Church has
had to suffer because only one side of the story has been told by
any person of the race, and in nearly, if not every instance, by those
unfriendly to the relation the colored man has sustained to the
Church; because some wrong impressions may be righted by the
collation of facts that lay bare the glaring inaccuracies hitherto
related concerning the imposition of the white members of the
Church upon the colored; to show that, so far as the question goes,
the heart of the Methodist Episcopal Church has always been right;
and that, though errors may have been committed, they have been,
in most instances, from the head and not from the heart of the
Church; that it has come as near reaching the proper solution of the
question, “What shall be done with the colored man?” as any other
organization that has had to do with the question.
There has been no intentional reflection or false or prejudicial
statement made herein. Many “stubborn facts” have been left out,
that might have been properly included. Though the story has not
been told with the polished language of a Chesterfield, nor the
logical acuteness of Aristotle, nor with the erudite diction of one
born in the college, it is hoped that some good, and no harm, may
be accomplished thereby; those of the race who have not had the
opportunity to know some facts herein related may be enabled to
teach their children that there is no need of blushing when the past
history of the Church touching this question is being recited; but that
it is a benefit to the race, as well as an honor, to be numbered with
the million and a half members of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I
PAGE.
Before the War, 17
CHAPTER II
The Color-line Secessions, 35
CHAPTER III
The Crisis—Its Cause, 64
CHAPTER IV
The Colored Pastorate, 83
CHAPTER V
The Retrospect, 104
CHAPTER VI
During the War, 116
CHAPTER VII
The General Conference of 1864, 130
CHAPTER VIII
The Beginning of a Great Work, 148
CHAPTER IX
The Colored Bishop Question, 167
CHAPTER X
Why ask for a Bishop of African Descent? 192
CHAPTER XI
The General Conference of 1884, 207
CHAPTER XII
The Problem, 230
CHAPTER XIII
Theory and Practice—a General Discussion, 259
CHAPTER XIV
What will the Harvest be? 292
CHAPTER XV
Union of Colored Methodists, 309
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Rev. L. M. Hagood, M.D., Frontispiece.

Morgan College, for Colored 48
Students,
New Orleans University, Main 96
Building,
Bennett Seminary, Greensboro, N.C., 144
Rev. A. E. P. Albert, D.D., 192
Meharry Medical College, Nashville, 240
Tenn.,
Art Department of Claflin University, 288
Gammon Theological Seminary, Library 312
Building,
INTRODUCTION.
It is a difficult matter to write of a battle while it is still raging. The

combatants are not usually the best judges of the merits of their
cases. Prejudice, education, preconceived notions of the right or
wrong in the case, prevent the mind from weighing the arguments
with equity. There are principles lying at the foundation of ethics
which will not be denied by Christians. They come with the authority
of a “Thus saith the Lord.” However distasteful these truths may be
to the natural man, the obligation to receive them still remains. The
Lord quoted certain proverbs which were authorities among the
Jews, which they had observed as rules for their action towards
others. One was “Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine
enemy.” Christ gives another, and with divine authority: “But I say
unto you, Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and
pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.” Such
teachings were not palatable in that day, any more than in the
present. Human nature was no more ready to receive and practice
such truths then than now. But the obligation existed then, and still
survives. Then, too, the Savior taught another lesson equally
unpalatable to the Jew. The man who fell among thieves was left by
priest and Levite to suffer, but was delivered by the Samaritan, who
was considered an enemy. “Who is my neighbor?” was the question
that brought out this answer from Jesus with its illustration; viz., that
every one needing help is a neighbor. The two great precepts of the
same Teacher embrace all that is necessary in the practical
treatment of the question of our relation to others: “Thou shalt love
thy neighbor as thyself;” and, “Whatsoever ye would that men
should do to you, do ye even so to them.” Whatever apology there
may have been for slavery in the past, in the days of ignorance,
when God winked at it, as he did at polygamy, it is certain that the
treatment of the slave as the New Testament requires would have
destroyed slavery. To have educated the slave to read and write, and
otherwise giving him the privilege to develop his mental faculties; to
have secured him his wife—a God-given right; to have given these
parents their rights, in obedience to the Divine command, to train up
their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; to secure to
them their right of a fair compensation for their labor, and to use it
as they chose for their own benefit; to have granted them the
privilege of worshiping their Maker as heaven required,—would have
destroyed the whole system of involuntary servitude as it existed in
these United States. More than two centuries slavery continued,
while the enlightened conscience of the nation protested against the
system, against the traffic in human beings, against its demoralizing
influences on the white, and its degrading influence on the black
man.
Methodism came into the country, and found slavery intrenched in
its laws and civilization. Its preachers proclaimed a gospel of
regeneration, of love to God, of a personal knowledge of forgiveness
of sins, the witness of the Holy Ghost, of love to neighbors. The
converts declared the religion of Christ: the “love that suffereth long
and is kind.” It turned out the old man and let in the new. White and
black shared alike in the new life. Down in the cabin, up in the
“great house,” alike were heard the shouts of joy over this new-
found pearl of great price. Tears of joy coursed down the ivory and
the ebony cheek, as each spoke of redeeming love. Melted by this
divine fire, fused into one spirit, there came to heart, to conscience,
to understanding, as the white clasped the black hand with loving
grip, the whispered voice of an inner consciousness, “Surely we be
brethren.” White Bishop Asbury declared the truth as it is in Christ
Jesus, black Harry by his side preached the same gospel of the Son
of God. The black messenger was honored by the divine presence
attending his Word, as well as the white, and souls were saved when
black Harry pointed sinners to the cross, as well as when the first
bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church called them to repentance.
Peter was astonished when he was sent to the Gentiles. He was
more so when he saw them receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, and
heard them declare the wonderful things of God. But he recognized
them as brethren; and when his people at Jerusalem call him to
account for his conduct in going among the Gentiles, he gives the
history of the event, and sums it all up in these words: “Forasmuch
then as God gave them the like gift as he did unto us, who believed
on the Lord Jesus Christ, what was I that I could withstand God?”
This settled the question for Peter, that the Gentiles were entitled to
all the rights and blessings of the Jew, as followers of Christ. If God
honored the blacks with his Spirit’s presence, filling them with joy
and peace, enabling them to show forth the power of a Christian life
in the fruits of holy living; if he anointed more than one black Harry
“to preach good tidings unto the meek, to proclaim the acceptable
year of the Lord,” and honored their ministry in awakening and
saving souls, is it a matter of wonder that there should be the
conviction in the minds of Methodists that these slaves are men like
ourselves? If men, then they are our neighbors; if our neighbors,
then we must love them as ourselves. If we love them as men—as
ourselves—then slavery, as it exists here, is wrong. The enlightened
conscience of the Methodists said, “Slavery is wrong;” and this
conviction was soon embodied in the question, which found its way
into the Church law, and held its place there till it received its formal,
practical answer in emancipation, “What shall be done for the
extirpation of the evil of slavery?”
The author of this book has treated of the relation of the
Methodist Episcopal Church to the colored people from this stand-
point of a clear perception of the evil of slavery, and the
unrighteousness of one Christian holding his fellow-Christian, his
brother in Christ, as a chattel. The writer traces the action of the
law-making power of the Methodist Episcopal Church for nearly a
hundred years, in her treatment of the colored man as a member of
this Church, as an office-holder, and as a preacher under the system
of slavery.
The author shows that the Methodist Episcopal Church has never
swerved from the recognition of the rights of her colored members,
in all her general and annual conferences. She denounced slavery as
an evil to be extirpated, and at one time required her members to
emancipate their slaves. (Had she adhered to her requirement, what
a sea of wasted treasure, what a world of agony of the slave, what
an ocean of bitter strife, and what a host of precious lives might
have been saved!) She forbade the buying and selling slaves; she
tried to enforce rules for the merciful treatment of the bondmen; she
made provision to have all of the gospel preached to them that the
masters would allow or the preacher thought safe. She did what she
could to have the relation of husband and wife duly recognized. He
also tells us that, as soon as the sounds of battle had ceased, this
Church began her work again among the colored people. She
organized them into Churches, took their own men and made them
pastors; although poorly qualified for this work, received them into
conferences with their white brethren, and gave them all the rights
and privileges of members and ministers of the Methodist Episcopal
Church.
The reluctance of some to accept the situation of Negro equality in
the Church led to the discussion of the question, What shall we do
with the Negro? The author gives the outline of this discussion and
the action of the Church authorities in reference to it. The
unwillingness to recognize the manhood and brotherhood of the
Negro on the part of some members and ministers of the Church,
gave rise to such treatment of the colored brethren that they were
easily persuaded that the white brethren did not want to be
associated with them in Church or conference relation. Hence, when
the white brethren asked the colored to go out of the conferences
and set up for themselves, the colored brethren did so, not always
because they thought it absolutely best, but best under the
circumstances; not because they thought it right, but because they
were disposed to yield to the desires of the white brethren. The
reasons for the treatment of the Negro are very much the same as
the grounds for neglect of the poor, ignorant, and degraded of any
community. People do not like to come in contact with the
uncultivated in intellect and morals. Hence the fine church, where it
is written in the dress and bearing of the worshipers, “No poor are
desired here.” Hence the mission Churches, where the action of both
the poor and the wealthy members of the Church says: “No rich are
expected here.” There is a disposition to separate the Christian
Church into classes corresponding to classes in social life. The
distinctions, so marked in society, are carried into the Church. In the
case of the Negro, this feeling against the ignorance, uncouthness,
which is found in the lowest strata of whites, is intensified by two
circumstances, which belong exclusively to the Negro. The first is the
color. There exists more or less color repugnance in most persons
not accustomed to seeing colored people. There is less objection to
having colored persons about them among the Southern people than
the Northern. The Southern women largely let the slaves nurse their
children, and many of the prominent Southern men and women
speak very kindly of their Negro mammies—color repugnance is not
instinctive. The second great cause of the unwillingness to treat the
Negro as an equal, in State and Church is, no doubt, his former
condition of servitude. That it is not altogether his color is evident
from the treatment that the Indian, the Hindoo, or the Japanese
receives, many of whom are as dark as the great mass of the
Negroes. He was a slave, kept a slave, and wronged by the white
man. One of the hardest things for poor human nature to do is to
confess a wrong and make restitution. That slavery is wrong, is
recognized by all the action of the Methodist Episcopal Church on
that subject; and the question should be, How can we best atone for
the wrong, and remove from the Negro, as speedily as possible, all
the effects of this wrong?
That the Negro is an inferior part of the human family is stoutly
asserted by some people, though it has never been proved.
Suppose, for the moment, we admit it; granted that the Negro is
inferior in some respects, no matter what; then we ask, Does this
misfortune entitle the more gifted part of God’s family to the right of
treating the unfortunate ones unjustly, of depriving them of liberty,
of the pursuit of happiness? Does the misfortune of the hunchback
entitle the straight ones to the privilege of abusing him? Does the
cripple, on his crutches, entitle the strong to the right of elbowing
him out of the way? Do not these very misfortunes demand our
sympathy and kindly offices? Why not? If the Negro is unfortunate,
let him have our kindness instead of our kicks? The caricatures of
the Negro, seen in the public prints, have their influence in
confirming this low estimate of the colored people.
The history of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in her ecclesiastical
action, is generally worthy of commendation. There are, however,
cases of individual action that are not creditable to these persons or
societies, either as patriots, philanthropists, or Christians. The
Protestant Churches should be as open to the Negro as to any other
division of the human family. The public places should be as easy of
access to them as to others. They should receive just as much for
their money as the white, red, or brown man. This is not in the
power of the Methodist Episcopal Church to bestow; but the
membership should bear in mind that with God there is no respect of
persons. The utterances which the Methodist Episcopal Church has
made are all demanded by the enlightenment of the nineteenth
century. What is needed is for the practice to correspond with these
utterances. Why should the Negro be ostracized any more than any
other member of the human family? Why should our Churches and
schools be closed to him? Why should he be compelled to ride in the
smoking-car, when he pays for first-class accommodations? Why
driven from our hotels, and forced to seek shelter in private families?
Why are the colored ministers and members of the Methodist
Episcopal Church compelled to endure these wrongs? The author
might have called attention to the fact that this Church, with its
millions of members and adherents, with its press and its pulpits,
has never raised her mighty voice in a grand protest against these
wrongs perpetrated against a quarter of a million of her
membership. What is needed, perhaps, most of all, is to regard the
Negro as belonging to the human family, and treat him as such. The
social question, which is protruded upon all occasions, must not be a
matter of legislation; each individual must settle that for himself. An
intelligent Negro lady, when asked by a white man, “Shall we admit
the Negro to our parlors?” replied, “If you white gentlemen will stay
out of our parlors, we will stay out of yours.” The social bugbear,
that is constantly bandied about in this discussion, has no more to
do with the recognition of the rights of the Negro than has the
question of the annexation of Canada. The author has given facts of
history which all the Church should know; and, knowing, they will
have no reason to be ashamed of the record of the Methodist
Episcopal Church. This subject demands the honest, earnest
consideration of the membership of the entire Christian Church, and
specially of the membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church. The
fact that there are nearly a quarter of a million of her members who
have as much right to recognition in her sanctuaries as any other
class of men, who are invited and urged to go off by themselves,
and be ignorant teachers of ignorant scholars, because the Heavenly
Father has given them a little darker dress, and because they have
been more abused and wronged than any other part of the human
family, is not creditable to those who profess to be governed by the
Golden Rule. The Church should see to it that the colored members
of her communion may feel at home in her churches, whether they
be stone-front palaces in the metropolis of the nation or cabins in
the swamps or mountains of the South. To bring this about, the
Methodist Episcopal Church has not done all she can. Theoretically,
the utterances are all right, but the practice must be brought up to
the theory. The press and the pulpit should give no uncertain sound.
The conferences, annual as well as General, should be
exemplifications of the brotherhood of man and the Fatherhood of
God. This book will wake up thought on a subject on which the
membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church need to think and to
act. The millions of colored people in this country need to be held
close to the heart of Protestant Christianity, so they will be found on
the side of the Church of God in the struggle for the conquest of this
world for Christ. The book well merits a careful reading, as the
author speaks from the stand-point of an intelligent appreciation of
the treatment of the Negro, as he has had some personal
experiences which entitle him to be heard. He writes clearly, and
presents his case forcibly, yet without bitterness, and recognizes
gratefully what the Methodist Episcopal Church has done for the
colored man. The spirit of the writer is commendable, although the
conflict is not ended, and he is one of the combatants.
JOHN BRADEN.
Central Tennessee College,
Nashville, Tenn., 1889.
THE COLORED MAN
IN THE
Methodist Episcopal Church.

CHAPTER I
BEFORE THE WAR.
From time immemorial men have differed upon nearly every phase
of human existence; and, for that matter, every other kind of
existence. So far as we know, no organization has ever existed,
formed by man, or formed by Deity for man (it makes no difference
for what purpose it was formed), in which there was not manifested
individuality to the point of wide divergence on most important
questions. Unconverted human nature is the same the world over,
and different propensities and dispositions, coupled with jealousy,
have manifested themselves in nearly every family since that of the
first pair driven in shame from Eden.
As strange as it may sound, the Church of God has been no
exception to this rule in general, nor the Methodist Episcopal Church
in particular. The Methodist Episcopal Church was born of necessity,
and has perpetuated itself and prospered in proportion as it has
obeyed the mandates of Almighty God. When, for any reason, the
Church has turned to the right hand or to the left hand out of “the
king’s highway,” God has gently reproved her. It was but a short time
after its organization when it became a recognized, potent factor in
God’s hands of ameliorating the condition of those with whom it had
influence. No other Church, since its organization in this country, has
figured more conspicuously than the Methodist Episcopal Church in
all the living, burning questions touching the salvation of men’s
bodies and souls. It may be true that in many instances the Church
has not come up to the ideal of some of its devotees, or
accomplished all it was considered able to do. Probably instances
would have occurred, if it had succeeded in the former, when it
would have displeased God; if the latter, it might have bound error
with a rope of sand, and thus frustrated all effective plans.
From the beginning the Church has gone after “the lost sheep of
the house of Israel.” A Church needs no higher encomium than that
the “common people” hear her ministers gladly. This has been, and
we hope now is, the glory of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Should
a time ever come when this can not be truthfully said of the Church,
her pristine glory will have departed. Worldly popularity has not
hitherto been the acme of her ambition. May it never be! Where
duty called, popular or unpopular, the Church has given the
command, “Go forward,” with the understanding that “it is better to
obey God than man.” The wholesome doctrine of “the Fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man,” as taught by the apostle when he
exclaimed, “God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to
dwell on all the face of the earth,” has been taught by the Methodist
Episcopal Church ever since John Wesley declared slavery “the sum
of all villainies.”
It may be, as you scrutinize the last sentence, a fear may arise
that it will not remain intact under the electric light of investigation.
The redeeming feature is, that the Methodist Episcopal Church has
come as near preaching and practicing that doctrine as any other
American ecclesiastical organization. This may not be much in its
favor, when taken in reference to the colored man, but it is
something. There has never been an hour since Bishop Asbury
preached Jesus and him crucified to a poor slave on the bank of a
river in South Carolina, in the which the great heart of the Methodist
Episcopal Church did not throb with sympathy for the poor colored
man in this country. As evidence, it is only necessary to look up or
remember the Herculean efforts it made on his behalf as early as
1796, to save him from the cruelty and barbarism of his subjection.

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The Cities of Pamphylia John D. Grainger

The Modernist World Allana C. Lindgren

AI Powered Search MEAP Trey Grainger

Church in the Wild Evangelicals In Antebellum America

Chinese Capitalism and the Modernist Vision 1st Edition

Religious Experience and the Modernist Novel 1st Edition

Backbone of the Americas Suzanne Mahlburg Kay

Modernist Bread 2 Ingredients 1st Edition Nathan Myhrvold

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

ISBN 9781472420220 (hbk)

Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

List of Figures vii

2 ‘The Beauty of Bravery’: Alternative Modernisms,

3 Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song  33

4 A ‘Treat Equal to Wagner’: Grainger’s Interactions with the Music

5 ‘A Natural Innovationist’: Percy Grainger’s Early British Folk

6 Giving Voice to ‘the Painfulness of Human Life’: Grainger’s Folk

7 Grainger and the ‘New Iconoclasts’: Forays into Modernist

8 The Hispanic Grainger: Encounters with the Modern Spanish

9 Minstrelsy, Ragtime, ‘Improvisatory Music’ and Percy Grainger’s

10 When Grainger Was Ultra-Modernist: A Study of the American

11 ‘Serious Music’: The Brisbane Reception of Grainger’s Historical

13 Grainger as Educator: On the First Performance of The Immovable

14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music  231

4.1 The Rarotongan contingent at the 1906–07 Christchurch

8.1 La Belle Otero dancing ‘Le tango de la table’, accompanied by

9.1 Cover of Chas. Sheard & Co’s Second Album of American

10.1 D. Cramer, The International Anthem (1918, detail). Acc. no.

13.1 Karl L. King at rehearsal, 22 February 1940. Band Library, East

14.1 Sliding Pipes Free Music Invention (1946), constructed from

3.1 Grainger’s transcription of ‘’Merican Frigate; or Paul Jones’ as

5.1 Grainger, ‘Barbara Allen’, bars 1–4, from ‘Early Settings of

6.1 Grainger, opening of ‘Hard-Hearted Barb’ra (H)Ellen’, ed. Barry

6.2 Grainger, opening of verse 12, ‘Hard-Hearted Barb’ra (H)

7.1 Grainger, annotations to Debussy’s ‘Reflets dans l’eau’, bars

8.1 Grainger’s annotations to the opening page of Albéniz’s ‘El puerto’

9.1 Grainger, In Dahomey: ‘Cakewalk Smasher’, bars 11–19. MG3/40,

Michael Christoforidis lectures in Musicology at the University of Melbourne,

Sarah Collins is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of New South

Dorothy de Val is an Associate Professor of Music at York University, Toronto,

Kay Dreyfus is an Adjunct Research Fellow in the History Program (SOPHIS) at

Graham Freeman received his PhD in musicology from the University of

Andrew Hugill is a composer, writer and Director of Creative Computing at Bath

Emily Kilpatrick, a pianist and scholar, holds an Honours degree in Piano

Ken Murray is a Melbourne-based guitarist, composer, teacher and musicologist.

Samantha Owens is an Associate Professor in the School of Music at The

Janice B. Stockigt), Music at German Courts, 1715–1760: Changing Artistic

Suzanne Robinson teaches Australian music history at the University of

Peter Schimpf is Associate Professor in and Chair of the Music Department at

John Whiteoak is an Adjunct Professor in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of

easily understandable works: … Grainger has certainly become a victim to this

Incontestably, Grainger understood himself as a modernist and should be

I took it for granted that I, as an Australian, would be ahead of my European

of Grainger’s inventiveness was Tribute to Foster, premiered in New York in

My experiments with large chamber combinations and the blending of voices,

List of Figures vii

3 Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song 33

14 Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music 231